Cy Young Award Winner in 1958 Bullet Bob Turley looks back on his big league career - pitcher - Interview

Baseball Digest, August, 2002 by Norman L Macht

That winter the Yankees sold him to the two-year-old Los Angeles Angels. At 32, Turley still didn't like to come out of a game. Manager Bill Rigney was known as Captain Hook.

"It seemed like every time he took me out of a game, everybody on base scored. One day I had the bases loaded, nobody out. Here he comes. I said to him, `Every time you bring somebody in, everybody on base scores. I can't do any worse than that. Pitching is simple with nobody on base. I'm good with men on base if you'd just let me get `em out.' I mean I'm standing there on the mound telling him all this.

"He left me out there. I struck out the next three guys."

That year, his last, he pitched three complete games and two shutouts, one of them the only game of his career in which he walked nobody, a one-hitter against the White Sox on June 12.

His playing days over, Turley settled in Atlanta, where he was a pitching coach for Paul Richards for one year. Then he got into mutual fund and insurance sales, which led to him and several partners forming a company called Primerica. Over the years there were mergers and acquisitions involving such companies as Beneficial Finance, Travelers, Solomon Smith Barney, and Citicorp.

Retired in 2002, Turley now has more time for golf tournaments, card shows, and reunions with teammates. "I had a good career, not a Hall of Fame career, but a good one," he sums up. His World Series rings seem small and plain compared to today's diamond-encrusted finger trophies. But he wears his proudly.

Turley had an opportunity to buy into a major league club, but decided against it. "I wouldn't be happy unless I could be part of the decision-making, and I knew that wasn't going to happen."

He didn't say it, but his memory of the players' early dealings with club owners could have been a factor in his not choosing to join theft ranks.

"I remember the players proposing that the club owners allocate 20 percent of revenues for player salaries. When we put that on the table, I've never seen grown men react to anything the way they did, like we'd threatened to kill them. Buzzie Bavasi said, `You mean to tell me, we finished in last place, and just because we drew four million people and made a lot of money, we should pay you guys 20 percent of it?'

"Tom Yawkey said, `Look at my books. I'm already paying that now.'

"There was no way the rest of them would go for it. Today, they'd be the happiest people in the world if they'd agreed to that."

The money, the memories, and the stats in the record books are not the only rewards that Bob Turley treasures from his pitching days.

"When I was at Mickey Mantle's funeral, Billy Crystal came up to me and said, `I've been waiting a long time to meet you. When I was a little boy in the Bronx, my mother used to take me to the Yankees games. I'd try to get autographs and never got any. One day you came out of the stadium and my mother asked you if you'd mind signing my book. You said you'd be happy to. Then my mother asked you to pose for a picture with me.'