General
Joey Jay, First Little Leaguer to Get to the Majors, Dies at 89
A pitcher who won 99 games in 13 seasons, he played for the Braves and the Reds. But when he retired, he never looked back.
Joey Jay, who in 1953 became the first former Little Leaguer to reach the major leagues and went on to win 99 games in 13 seasons pitching for the Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves and the Cincinnati Reds, died on Sept. 27 in Lutz, Fla. He was 89 and had lived in the Tampa Bay area in his later years.
The Serenity Funeral Home in Largo, Fla., posted his obituary.
Jay was an imposing presence on the mound at 6 feet 4 inches and 230 pounds and he had an overpowering fastball, slider and sinker.
He was signed by the Braves’ organization in June 1953, two months before his 18th birthday, and received a $20,000 contract and a $50,000 bonus, becoming a “bonus baby” in the baseball parlance of the time. Under rules designed to discourage teams from high spending on unproven prospects, the Braves were required to keep him on their roster for at least two seasons.
Jay made his first major league start on Sept. 20, 1953, and pitched seven shutout innings in a game shortened by rain. He pitched sporadically during the 1954 and 1955 seasons, when the Braves’ pitching staff featured the future Hall of Fame left-hander Warren Spahn and the talented right-handers Bob Buhl and Lew Burdette.
“It was pretty dreadful,” Jay told the Society for American Baseball Research many years later. “I fitted in nowhere. No one was deliberately unkind to me. I was just ignored and felt like the batboy.”
He was sent tothe Braves’ Wichita farm team to gain experience; he later returned to Milwaukee and posted a 7-5 record with a 2.14 earned run average for the Braves’ 1958 pennant-winning team. But the Braves lost to the Yankees of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in a six-game World Series.
