Sullivan | Jim Bunning one of a kind lately out of production

Ted Williams ripped off his shirt without bothering with the buttons. The great Boston slugger was so steamed at striking out three times in a single game that he began plotting his revenge before leaving the locker room.

“He walked over to the schedule on the wall, ran his finger down until he came to the next Detroit series,” recalled Gene Mauch, then a Red Sox infielder.

Finding the date, Williams made a vow.

“Bunning,” he said, “I’m going to get you then.”

Sixty years since that Thursday afternoon at Fenway Park – May 16, 1957 – Jim Bunning is now a vivid memory, too. The Hall of Fame pitcher and U.S. Senator, accomplishments that appear here in order of their relative rarity, has died at age 85 as the only ballplayer to earn both induction in Cooperstown and a seat in Congress.

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Before he represented Kentucky in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Bunning was a baseball type lately out of production – a fiercely competitive, workhorse pitcher Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred remembered Saturday as being “proud of always taking the ball.” He started three major-league All-Star Games, won strikeout titles and threw no-hitters in both leagues (including a Father’s Day perfect game for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1964) and established his dominion over home plate by leading the National League in hit batsmen four years in a row.

His career record of 224-184 included 151 compete games and 40 shutouts. Last season, both major leagues produced a total of just 83 compete games. 

Befitting his cold-blooded approach to pitching, Bunning was known as “Lizard.” With a long, sweeping delivery and an arm slot somewhere between sidearm and three-quarters, he could be as hard to square up as a pinata.

Though Ted Williams eventually extracted payback – homering twice in a July 1957 rematch in Detroit – Bunning won that game and would dominate many of the top hitters of his time. According to retrosheet.org, he struck out Mickey Mantle 23 times in 58 at bats, held Willie Mays to a .213 batting average, allowed Hank Aaron only one home run and laid waste to such luminaries as Harmon Killebrew (.191), Eddie Mathews (.122) Brooks Robinson (.190) and Willie Stargell (.190).

Bill James, the father of baseball statistical analysis, says Bunning was the best pitcher of both 1957 and 1967. That he never won a Cy Young Award and languished on the Hall of Fame ballot until the Veterans Committee voted him in in 1996 probably owes in part to a career that produced no pennants and in part to a personality that multiple obituaries called “cantankerous.”

Twice, Bunning asked that his name be removed from the Hall of Fame ballot after years of disappointment. For an accomplished politician, he sometimes behaved as if wooing voters was beneath him.

“Anything but a glad-hander, Bunning wants you to respect him, but much like Kevin Brown ... he doesn’t seem to care whether you like him or don’t,” James wrote in a 2001 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract. “He comes off as very cold, very arrogant.”

If these are curious qualities for a politician, Jim Bunning was a man capable of contradictions. Known as one of the most conservative men in Congress, he had earlier helped transform the Major League Baseball Players Association into one of America’s most successful labor unions.

As a member of the screening committee that vetted Marvin Miller, Bunning contributed to the change in baseball’s balance of power much as Ronald Reagan impacted Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was, for better or worse, his own man.

“I have been booed by 60,000 fans at Yankee Stadium standing alone at the pitcher’s mound, so I have never really cared if I stood alone here in Congress as long as I stood by my beliefs and my values,” Bunning said in his farewell address on Dec. 9, 2010. “I have also thought that being able to throw a curveball never was a bad skill for a politician to have.”

For the record, it was Bunning's slider that bedeviled Ted Williams.

Tim Sullivan can be reached at (502) 582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com or @TimSullivan714 on Twitter.