Jay Johnstone, Major-League Baseball Player
Jay Johnstone, a Rotarian and Paul Harris Fellow and ex-Marine, played major-league baseball as an outfielder for 20 seasons, starting in 1966 for the California Angels. He also played for the Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers. He has 4 World Series Rings with a World Series batting average of .435. After his playing career, he was a radio commentator for the Yankees and Phillies. He is married to a former actress.
Jay was born in Connecticut and moved with his family to California, where he grew up in West Covina. He started playing baseball in Little League, and in high school he played football and basketball as well as baseball. He received a number of college football scholarship offers, but accepted an offer to play baseball for the Angels. During his first 3 years he was placed in the minors. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve after receiving a draft notice, coordinating his times and places of service with his baseball schedule. In 1966 he was called up to play with the Angels.
Jay soon developed a reputation as a prankster and practical joker. Among his many pranks was dressing as manager Tommy Lasorda (including padding) and running out to the pitcher’'s mound to talk to the pitcher while carrying Lasorda’s book and a can of Slim-Fast. Another time he locked Lasorda in his office during spring training, by tying the doorknob to a palm tree. Most of his colleagues accepted these pranks in good humor. Later he co-authored 3 books about these adventures with sports columnist Rick Talley — Temporary Insanity (“The uncensored adventures of baseball’s craziest player”), Over the Edge, and Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy.
After retirement, he became a sportscaster, and also began visiting US troops overseas. He started doing a combination of sports auctions and charity fundraising, children’s baseball clinics, fantasy camps and celebrity golf tournaments. In 2010 he became the annual spokesperson for Hope4Heroes, a non-profit organization to benefit military veterans (“They defended us, now it’s our turn”). Hope4Heroes develops programs dedicated to supporting wounded veterans, including career counseling, PTSD counseling, and emergency funds for families (see www.hope4heroes.org).
In answer to a question about drugs in professional sports, he said there is so much money for professional athletes today, creating strong incentives to cheat. Managers tend to look the other way as long as their players and teams are winning, although it hurts morale among other players who see some getting an unfair advantage in competition. He said drugs were a much smaller problem when he was in sports. However, he described injections of human growth hormone (HGH) as helping to heal injuries sooner, and did not feel that this kind is a problem.
Jay Johnstone had several of his books available for autographing at our meeting, along with some enlarged photos from his baseball career.