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 with Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the Los Angeles Dodgers. 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 6½-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.
''Mentally, I've never gotten over it," he said in 2009. "It was as close as I ever got [to a World Series]."
