Remembering Bud Daley, Yankees World Series Champ Who Called Wyoming Home For 49 Years

In an Orange County, California, hospital on Oct. 7, 1932, a young mother struggled to bear her first and only son.

It wasn’t going well. The doctor grabbed the baby with forceps. The instrument slipped and snagged the baby’s shoulder, permanently damaging the nerves of his right arm.

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

“Oh yes he will,” she answered.

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

Even so, it never worked right. He could only catch a ball backhanded, and did nearly everything with his dominant left arm.

But Bud Daley was naturally athletic, and when he was 15, he lined up to try out for his baseball team at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California.

Daley had never played any sport before then and figured he’d give first base a shot, 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 out for 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 experienced the first of his two greatest baseball thrills: He made the game-winning hit in the 1950 championship game of his high school league, the California Interscholastic Federation.

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

Daley married Olson in 1952, and she bore three of their four children while he was still in the minors: Ed, Debbie and Laurie.

He played stints with the Major League Cleveland Indians as well. 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 in despair 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’s an unbeatable record since the team no longer exists.

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

By 1960, Kansas City had a hard-luck record, ending 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 lefty treasured even more than his 1961 World Series win.

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

Daley chose to pitch at home.

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

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

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

The National League won 5-3, but it was the city’s ovation, not the score, that stayed with the knuckleball pitcher.

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 went into game five on Oct. 9, 1961, up 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 only two runs, none earned, clinching a 13-5 win.

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

Bone chips are a condition doctors can mend today, but at that time, they were a career ender, said Ed Daley.

But Bud was not bitter about it.

“Baseball players all know that eventually it’s going to happen,” his son said. “They’d like to stay there forever, but you know, you get older. Your abilities kind of fade out. They know it’s inevitable.”

The Family Man

By the time Bud Daley became a World Series champ, he and Dorothy had four children ranging from 2-8 years old.

Ed Daley always thought his dad had an ordinary job. He brought home a decent, though not resplendent, wage. Ed Daley didn’t realize how special his dad’s career was until years after Bud Daley retired, he said.   

“I met a lot of the players and everything, because he used to take me into the clubhouse. But it was just his job,” said Ed, who is now a baseball fan and history buff. “I kick myself now, because of what I missed.”

It wouldn’t click until years later when Ed joined his dad at Major League old-timer games.

Bud Daley’s life as a father and provider was never splashy. He’d talk baseball with anyone who asked, but he didn’t tout his legacy, said Ed.

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

What A Home

Daley and his wife lived in California after his retirement from baseball, but it didn’t last. Bud held a job as a salesman and was laid off in 1975.

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

Bud Daley’s uncle, world-famous mountain climber Paul Petzoldt, had also founded National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in the crisp mountainside town a decade prior.   

Bud Daley and his wife moved to Lander in mid-autumn of 1975. Alternating between living in Lander and nearby Riverton, Daley would work in sales, run an irrigation company and have other ventures. But first he worked at the NOLS retail store.  

An advertising salesman and jack-of-all trades from the local paper, the Lander Journal, strode into the shop the following spring and noticed a unique ring on Daley’s finger.

“Is that a World Series ring?” asked Steve Woody, who would go on to become the publisher of the Sheridan Press and, now retired, lives in Montrose, Colorado, and writes a column for the Montrose Daily Press.   

Daley said it was.

The pair became friends. Woody loved to get Daley talking about baseball. Daley often remarked how classy the Yankees were — how the players were expected to wear coats and stay clean-shaven.

And when Woody coached Daley’s youngest son Jeff in Babe Ruth (early teen level) baseball, Daley never pushed his own way on the coach. He simply watched the game with pleasure and bought everyone shakes and burgers afterward, said Woody.

Daley got into golfing and remained a “very good golfer” throughout his life, Woody said.  

Ed Daley said his dad’s passion for golf helped make up, a little, the tough loss of baseball.

A Farewell

Bud Daley died Oct. 15 at the Help for Health Hospice in Riverton after his health had taken a downward about three months prior.

He was 92.

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

He’s survived by his wife Dorothy, his four children, eight grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren, says his obituary.

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

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.