Jim Bunning, the only person elected both to baseball's Hall of Fame and the U.S. Senate and a central figure in the best and worst moments of the Phillies' historic 1964 season, died late Friday night. Bunning, who had suffered a stroke in October, was 85.
The first pitcher to throw no-hitters in both the American and National Leagues, the wiry sidearmer won 224 games in 17 big-league seasons. Eighty-nine of those victories came during six years with the Phillies, and Bunning's "14" is one of just five numbers retired by the club.
Ambitious beyond baseball, Bunning also was an outspoken players union leader, a minor league manager and a players agent before abandoning the game for his insurance business and eventually a long political career in his native Kentucky and Washington, D.C.
A conservative Republican despite his union past, he won the first of six consecutive terms as a Congressman from Kentucky's Fourth District in 1986. Elected twice to the U.S. Senate, he served there from 1998 to 2010.
For all of his varied achievements, Bunning always will be best remembered in Philadelphia for that star-crossed 1964 season.
On Father's Day, June 21, with his wife and oldest child in the Shea Stadium grandstands, he threw a perfect game against the New York Mets, the first in the National League since 1880, the first in regular-season baseball since 1922.
He won 19 games for Gene Mauch's surprising club, which built a 6{-game lead with just 12 to play. But when the manager twice started Bunning and Chris Short on two-days' rest in those final weeks, the Phillies lost 10 straight. Even though Bunning shut out Cincinnati on the star-crossed season's final day, Philadelphia lost the pennant to the St. Louis Cardinals by a single game.
More than a half-century later, Philadelphians _ and many others _ still blame that historic collapse on Mauch's decision start his two best pitchers on short rest. Bunning was not one of them.
"I don't blame Gene for that," he told The Inquirer in 1989. "The rest of his pitching staff was either hurt or didn't want the ball. What else could he have done?"
Stern and intensely focused, his will as strong as his arm, Bunning was a leader on those Phillies teams, both on and off the field. As their player representative, he lobbied for simple benefits his teammates had long been denied, like free parking. And on the mound, with an exaggerated sidearm motion that literally brought him to his knees on each pitch, he was one of baseball's best right-handers.
After retiring at age 40 in 1971, Bunning managed at Reading, Eugene, Toledo, and Oklahoma City in Philadelphia's minor league system. He was blunt and outspoken, and those traits might have cost him a shot at managing the big-league Phillies, who didn't renew his contract in 1976.
The father of nine children, he returned to his northern Kentucky home, where he ran an insurance business and dabbled as a sports agent before entering politics. Capitalizing on his name and reputation, he was elected to the Fort Thomas City Council and the state senate before entering Congress in 1987.
A member of the Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, he became more stridently conservative with time. He once told reporters he didn't read the papers and got "all my information from Fox News." In 2002, he was the committee's only member to oppose the confirmation of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
His final Senate years were marked by bouts of bizarre behavior. In his 2004 reelection campaign, he accused members of his Democratic opponent's staff of assaulting his wife. He eventually lost the support of Mitch McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator, and did not seek a third term in 2010.
In addition to his nine children, Bunning had 35 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. One of his grandsons, Patrick Towles, is a quarterback at Boston College.
Bunning, who is wearing a Phillies cap on his Hall of Fame plaque despite spending his first nine big-league seasons in Detroit, returned to Philadelphia regularly through the years for team events. Invariably, the conversations always turned to the enormous civic and personal disappointment that was 1964.
"Mentally, I've never gotten over it," he said in 2009. "It was as close as I ever got (to a World Series)."
