In memory of Bud Daley, Yankees World Series champion who called Wyoming home for 49 years

In a hospital in Orange County, California, on October 7, 1932, a young mother struggled to give birth to her first and only son.

It didn’t go well. The doctor grabbed the baby with tweezers. The instrument slipped and got caught on the baby’s shoulder, permanently damaging the nerves in his right arm.

The boy’s arm was paralyzed for about six months. Doctors told his mother, Helen, that her son would never be able to use it.

“Oh yes, he will,” she replied.

She massaged his withered arm with oil every day for two years until he could move it again.

Yet it never worked well. He could only catch a ball with his backhand and did almost everything with his dominant left arm.

But Bud Daley was naturally athletic, and when he was fifteen, he lined up to try out for his baseball team at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California.

Daley had never played a sport before and thought he would give first base a try, his son Ed Daley told Cowboy State Daily.

On the diamond, Bud Daley saw a long line of other boys eager to try out for first base. So on a whim, he tried to become a pitcher instead. He made the team and spent his high school years playing pitcher and outfielder.

That was also around the time he met his high school sweetheart Dorothy Olson and had the first of his two greatest baseball thrills: hitting the game-winning hit in the 1950 championship game of his high school league, the California Interscholastic Federation.

Daley graduated that year and began bouncing around on minor league teams affiliated with the Cleveland Indians, the major league team for which his boyhood idol, Bob Lemon, had pitched since the late 1930s. Lemon was a fellow Wilson High alumnus and would later become an inductee of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Daley married Olson in 1952 and she had three of their four children while he was still a minor: Ed, Debbie and Laurie.

He also played stints with the Major League Cleveland Indians. In 1958, after a brief fling with the Orioles, he got his break pitching for the Kansas City Athletics, a team Sports Illustrated writer Roy Terrell called “an organization conceived out of desperation and dedicated to the proposition that it is illegal to beat the Yankees.”

Daley still holds the Kansas City Athletics record for most wins by a left-handed pitcher, winning 16 games in both 1959 and 1960, his son Ed said, adding that it is an unbeatable record since the team has been defunct.

During that run, Bud Daley’s youngest son Jeff was born in 1959.

In 1960, Kansas City had a record of bad luck, finishing the season 58-96-1. But Daley got to play for the American League in the first of the year’s two all-star games – in what was then his hometown of Kansas City.

That led to a moment the southpaw cherished even more than his 1961 World Series victory.

The league manager asked him if he wanted to pitch in relief in the ninth inning or start the second game at Yankee Stadium two days later.

Daley chose to throw on his own field.

“When the gates opened and he walked to the mound, he got a standing ovation,” Ed Daley said.

That was the second of the baseball star’s two biggest career sensations.

“He was a hometown hero,” Ed Daley added.

The National League won 5-3, but it was the city’s ovation, not the score, that stuck with the knuckle thrower.

A New York Yankee

Daley joined the New York Yankees in 1961, the same year they won the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

The Yankees entered game five on October 9, 1961, leading 3-1. Pitcher Ralph Terry started and allowed three runs and six hits in just over two innings. Daley took over and finished the game. In 6.2 innings, he allowed just two runs, none earned, earning a 13-5 win.

In 1963, Daley developed bone splints in his left elbow. Over the next two seasons, he barely pitched, retiring after the 1964 season, which ended in another Yankees World Series Championship. He was 31.

Bone chips are now a condition that doctors can fix, but at the time they were career-ending, says Ed Daley.

But Bud wasn’t bitter about it.

“Baseball players all know it’s going to happen eventually,” his son said. “They would love to stay there forever, but you know, you get older. Your skills are fading a bit. They know it’s inevitable.”

The family man

By the time Bud Daley became a World Series champion, he and Dorothy had four children, ages 2 to 8.

Ed Daley always thought his father had a regular job. He brought home a decent, but not stellar, wage. Ed Daley didn’t realize how special his father’s career was until years after Bud Daley retired, he said.

“I met a lot of players and stuff because he always took me to the clubhouse. But it was just his job,” says Ed, who is now a baseball fan and history buff. “I’m kicking myself now because of what I missed.”

It didn’t click until years later when Ed went to the Major League classic car races with his father.

Bud Daley’s life as a father and breadwinner was never a glittering one. He talked baseball to anyone who asked, but he didn’t promote his legacy, Ed said.

“A reporter told him, ‘I can’t write articles about you because you’re too boring,’” Ed recalled with a laugh. “No scandals or anything, you know – it was just him.”

What a home

Daley and his wife lived in California after he retired from baseball, but that didn’t last long. Bud had a job as a salesman and was fired in 1975.

By this time, Ed was working in Casper, Wyoming. Bud’s mother and stepfather lived in Lander.

Bud Daley’s uncle, world-famous mountaineer Paul Petzoldt, had also founded the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in the breezy mountain town ten years earlier.

Bud Daley and his wife moved to Lander in mid-fall 1975. Daley lived alternately in Lander and nearby Riverton and worked in sales, ran an irrigation company and had other businesses. But first he worked at the NOLS store.

An advertising salesman and all-rounder from the local newspaper, the Lander Journal, came into the store the following spring and noticed a unique ring on Daley’s finger.

“Is that a World Series ring?” asked Steve Woody, who would later become publisher of the Sheridan Press and is now retired, living in Montrose, Colorado, and writing a column for the Montrose Daily Press.

Daley said yes.

The pair became friends. Woody enjoyed getting Daley to talk baseball. Daley often noted how stylish the Yankees were – that the players were expected to wear jackets and stay clean-shaven.

And when Woody coached Daley’s youngest son Jeff in Babe Ruth baseball (early teen level), Daley never forced his own way into coaching. He just enjoyed watching the game and then bought everyone shakes and burgers, Woody said.

Daley took up golf and remained a “very good golfer” throughout his life, Woody said.

Ed Daley said his father’s passion for golf has gone some way to making up for the tough loss of baseball.

A farewell

Bud Daley died Oct. 15 at Help for Health Hospice in Riverton after his health deteriorated about three months earlier.

He was 92.

His daughter Laurie Van Fleet had cared for him in the months before he died.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, his four children, eight grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, his obituary said.

“I loved him dearly,” Dave Van Fleet, Daley’s son-in-law, told Cowboy State Daily this week. “He was a wonderful father-in-law and he treated my wife and me wonderfully. Just a great man.”

Clair McFarland can be reached at [email protected].