Blue Jays team doctor Ron Taylor won two World Series as pitcher
Ron Taylor's major-league debut as a pitcher was so spectacular as to make the record books, even though he lost the game.
The right-hander went on to win World Series championships with two different teams, the only Canadian ever to have done so.
After 11 seasons in the majors, he returned to the University of Toronto as a mature student to complete a medical degree. After graduation, he spent more than three decades as the club physician for the Toronto Blue Jays, earning the nickname Dr. Baseball.
Dr. Taylor, who has died at 87, was known for a quick-witted sense of humour offered with a deadpan delivery and a downcast expression that eased the sting of even the sharpest barb. In the minor leagues as a university student, he was granted permission to report late after completing his semester's exams. When he finally arrived in the clubhouse with the season well under way, he would announce, 'Okay, guys, I'm taking one of your jobs away.'
Ronald Wesley Taylor was born in Toronto on Dec. 13, 1937, to the former Maude Elizabeth Evans, a Welsh immigrant, and Wesley Walter Taylor, a salesman for the Dunlop Tire and Rubber Goods Co.
The skinny boy began playing organized baseball at the age of 8 in the Leaside Baseball Association, where a coach converted the budding first baseman into a pitcher. A natural left-hander, his mother forced him to use his right hand. 'Insist? She tied my left hand behind my back,' Dr. Taylor once told biographer Maxwell Kates.
He worked on his pitching with his father serving as catcher in the driveway of the family home, a semi-detached, two-storey brick house at 75 Banff Rd. The house was a short walk to Howard Talbot Park, the home to Leaside baseball and a training ground for Toronto's best baseball players, though he later recalled his earliest games were played on a swampy diamond.
He was dominating batters several years older even while he was earning academic honours as a high-school student at North Toronto Collegiate. His pitching caught the attention of Chester Dies, a baseball scout and retired sheet-metal worker whose own ball career ended when he lost an eye in an industrial accident. On Labour Day weekend in 1955, the scout bought the 17-year-old prospect a train ticket to Cleveland, where he was an unannounced walk-up at a tryout camp.
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After watching his pitching for three days at an empty Municipal Stadium, Cleveland signed him to a US$4,000 bonus. His father had to wire approval on behalf of the underaged athlete.
Of 250 players invited to Cleveland's spring training in 1956, the pitcher was assigned uniform No. 247. 'I knew that T was low in the alphabet,' he later told Mr. Kates, 'but not that low.'
He was assigned to Florida's Daytona Beach Islanders, a Class-D team at the bottom of baseball's ladder, the beginning of a six-season odyssey through Cleveland's system including stints with Minnesota's Fargo-Moorhead Twins; North Dakota's Minot Mallards; Pennsylvania's Reading Indians; and Utah's Salt Lake City Bees.
With management's reluctant permission to attend school, the pitcher managed to complete a science degree in engineering at the University of Toronto.
'When I graduated among the top five in my class I had job offers from 17 companies,' he told the sportswriter Earl McRae in 1972. 'They were good jobs, too, I could have made good money. But baseball was in my blood, so I listened to the offers and then chose baseball.'
On April 11, 1962, the 6-foot-2, 195-pound (1.88-metres, 88-kilogram) pitcher made his debut with Cleveland in Boston. Only 2,466 fans were at Fenway Park for the day game. They saw a pitching duel for the ages.
Through nine innings, Mr. Taylor (who had not yet considered a future in medicine) scattered five hits and kept the Red Sox scoreless. Alas, Boston pitcher Bill Monbouquette was even better, allowing only one hit through nine innings, an inconsequential single by his pitching counterpart in the sixth inning.
The game was still scoreless in the bottom of the 12th inning when Boston's Carl Yastrzemski led off with a triple on a drive deep in the outfield that glanced off the glove of Ty Cline. The next two batters were intentionally walked before Carroll Hardy knocked the first pitch from Mr. Taylor over the wall in left field for a game-winning grand slam.
'The rookie pitched yesterday as though he's been at it 20 years,' wrote Bob Dolgan of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
'I made two bad pitches in the 12th inning,' said the rookie. As a batter, his two singles accounted for half of Cleveland's hits.
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His lengthy outing remains the longest by a pitcher making a debut in the American League, according to research by sportswriter Kevin Glew, who writes the Canadian baseball history blog, 'Cooperstowners in Canada.' It is a standard unlikely to be bettered in an era when throwing arms are treated more carefully.
The eager pitcher had to wait 13 days before his next assignment, during which he picked up his first win in a 3-2 victory over the Angels in Los Angeles. He appeared in eight games, going 2-2, before being sent to Florida to pitch for the minor-league Jacksonville Suns. He was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in the off-season.
Converted to a full-time relief pitcher, he was runner-up to Ray Culp of the Philadelphia Phillies in National League rookie pitcher of the year voting in 1963.
The following season, he had eight wins and four losses for the Cardinals, who faced the New York Yankees in the World Series. In Game 4 at Yankee Stadium, with the Cards trailing 2-1 in the series, the Yankees jumped to an early 3-0 lead. In the sixth inning, Clete Boyer hit a grand slam to put the Cards up one.
Cardinals manager Johnny Keane then called on Mr. Taylor to preserve the narrow lead. He retired the first eight batters he faced before walking Mickey Mantle. He then retired the next four batters to preserve the victory, earning a save. The Cards went on to win the Series in seven games.
He appeared again in the 1969 World Series with the New York Mets, perennial cellar-dwellers who were considered underdogs against a powerhouse Baltimore Orioles team. The Mets lost the first game, though Mr. Taylor threw two scoreless innings.
In Game 2, New York's Jerry Koosman was nursing a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the ninth in Baltimore when he walked Frank Robinson and Boog Powell with two outs. Manager Gil Hodges called on Mr. Taylor to face the dangerous Brooks Robinson. With fans at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore hanging on every pitch, the pitcher worked the count to 3-2 before the batter grounded out to third baseman Ed Charles who threw to first to end the game. Mr. Taylor earned his second career World Series save, and the Miracle Mets, as they were known, went on to win the next three games and the championship.
Former teammate Art Shamsky attributed the title to the pitcher's 'winning mentality' and previous World Series experience.
'We don't win the title without Ron Taylor,' he said in a statement released by the Mets.
Earlier, he saved Game 1 of the National League Championship Series and won Game 2 against the Atlanta Braves to help the Mets advance to the World Series.
He also pitched for the Houston Astros and the San Diego Padres. In his final game, he gave up home runs to Mike Jorgensen and Ron Fairly at Jarry Park in Montreal as the Expos prevailed 9-3 over the Padres on May 14, 1972.
In 11 seasons, Mr. Taylor went 45-43 with a 3.93 earned-run average. He recorded 74 saves, most of those coming in five workhorse campaigns with the Mets. In 10⅓ postseason innings, he gave up just three hits, walked two, struck out nine, and surrendered no earned runs in going 1-0 and earning three saves.
At the age of 34, he decided to return to the classroom. In his playing days, he took part in two United Service Organization (USO) tours of military hospitals in Guam, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, handing out souvenir baseballs and chatting with servicemen injured fighting in Vietnam. The patients inspired him to become a doctor.
The University of Toronto told him he would have to score top marks in several undergraduate science courses before he could be considered for medical school, which was a long shot for someone of his age. He managed straight As and then was accepted. He moved into his childhood home with his widowed father.
'Here I was with all these exceptionally bright kids right out of school,' he told Mr. McRae in 1981. 'I wasn't only older than them. I was older than the darn professors. At first they thought I was the janitor. That first day, the professor gave us all an anatomy chart and asked us to memorize all the terms. Hell, I couldn't even pronounce them.'
He graduated in 1977 and became the Blue Jays' team physician two years later, a position he held when the club won the World Series in 1992 and 1993.
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Dr. Taylor also operated a private practice and established the S.C. Cooper Sports Medicine Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. He hung up his stethoscope in 2014.
Dr. Taylor was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ont., in 1985 and Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1993. He has also been named to the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame (2010), the Leaside Sports Hall of Fame (2013) and the Baseball Ontario Hall of Fame (2020). In 2005, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario, the province's highest civilian honour.
He was given keys to New York by mayor Bill de Blasio as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Mets' 1969 World Series championship.
The Blue Jays held a moment of silence for Dr. Taylor before their game at the Rogers Centre on Tuesday. Two Blue Jays wound up leaving the game with injuries (one hit by a pitch, the other from running into the outfield wall), a reminder of the value of medical care for pro athletes.
Dr. Taylor died in Toronto on Monday. He leaves his wife of 44 years, the former Rona Douglas, an emergency room nurse he met at Mount Sinai; their sons, Drew, a former left-handed professional pitcher in the minors, and Matthew; and their grandsons, Tripp and Elliott. He also leaves an older sister, Carole Mitchell. He had two earlier marriages.
In 2015, the sons released a 20-minute documentary about their father titled, Ron Taylor: Dr. Baseball. In the film, Dr. Taylor tells an anecdote about a young reliever picking up his first save for the Blue Jays. The rookie came into the dressing room, spotted Dr. Taylor and said, 'Doc, you have no idea what that feels like!'
'No, I couldn't imagine,' Dr. Taylor replied.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.
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