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

It wasn’t going well. The doctor grabbed the baby with tweezers. The instrument slipped and 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 her mother, Helen, that her baby would never be able to wear it.

“Oh, yes it will,” she replied.

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

Still, it never worked well. He could only catch a backhand ball and did almost 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 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 kids eager to try out for first base. Then, on a whim, he tried to be a pitcher. He made the team and spent his high school years playing as a pitcher and outfielder.

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

Daley graduated that year and began playing on minor league teams affiliated with the Cleveland Indians, the major league team for which his childhood idol, Bob Lemon, had pitched in the late 1930s. Lemon was alumnus of Wilson High and would later become a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

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

He also played seasons with the Cleveland Indians of the Major Leagues. In 1958, after a brief fling with the Orioles, he got his break by pitching for the Kansas City Athletics, a team that Sports Illustrated writer Roy Terrell called “an organization conceived in desperation and dedicated to the proposition that it is “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 no longer exists.

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

In 1960, Kansas City had an unlucky record and finished the season 58-96-1. But Daley played for the American League in the first of the year’s two All-Star games, in what was then his hometown, Kansas City.

That led to a moment the left-hander treasured 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 decided to pitch at home.

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

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

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

The National League won 5-3, but it was the city’s cheer, not the score, that stuck 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 reached game five on October 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, earning a 13-5 victory.

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

Bone chips are a condition that doctors can cure today, but at the time it was career-ending, Ed Daley said.

But Bud wasn’t bitter about it.

“Every baseball player knows this will happen eventually,” his son said. “They would like to stay there forever, but you know, you get old. Your skills fade. “They know it’s inevitable.”

The family man

When 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 normal job. He brought home a decent, if not glittering, salary. 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 everything, because he used to take me to the clubhouse. But it was just his job,” said Ed, who is now a baseball fan and history buff. “Now I kick myself for what I missed.”

It wouldn’t fit until years later, when Ed joined his father at Major League Baseball veterans’ games.

Bud Daley’s life as a father and provider was never flashy. He would talk baseball to anyone who asked, but he didn’t promote his legacy, Ed said.

“A journalist told him, ‘I can’t write any articles about you because you’re too boring,’” Ed recalls, laughing. “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 worked 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 mountaineer Paul Petzoldt, had also founded the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in the cool mountainside town a decade earlier.

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

An advertising salesman and jack-of-all-trades for the local newspaper, the Lander Journal, walked 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 become the editor of the Sheridan Press and, now retired, lives in Montrose, Colorado, and writes a column for the Montrose Daily Press.

Daley said yes.

The couple became friends. Woody loved it when Daley talked about baseball. Daley often commented on how posh the Yankees were: how players were expected to wear coats and be clean shaven.

And when Woody coached Daley’s youngest son, Jeff, in Babe Ruth baseball (teen level), Daley never made his way into coaching. He just watched the game with pleasure and then bought milkshakes and hamburgers for everyone, 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 helped offset, a little, the tough loss of baseball.

A farewell

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

He was 92 years old.

His daughter Laurie Van Fleet had cared for him in the months before his death.

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

“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 me wonderfully. “Just an incredible man.”

Clara McFarland can be reached [email protected].