Rudy May, a crafty and well-traveled left-handed pitcher whose 16-year major league career included two stretches with the Yankees — one in the mid-1970s, when he found success despite a strained relationship with the volcanic manager Billy Martin, and the other starting in 1980, the year he led the American League in earned run average — died on Oct. 19. He was 80.
The Yankees announced his death on social media but did not specify the cause or say where he died. A death notice was posted online from the coastal town of Hertford, N.C.
When May made his major league debut with the Los Angeles Angels (who would change their name to the California Angels during his tenure with the team) in 1965, he had an impressive fastball. But after tearing ligaments in his left shoulder early in his career, he refined his approach and eventually learned to dominate with pinpoint control and a nasty curveball, which he honed with help from the Yankee Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford.
“I learned that it’s better to throw an 85-mile-an-hour fastball on the outside corner than it is to throw a 95-mile-an-hour fastball down the middle,” he said in a 1981 interview with Phil Pepe of The Daily News of New York. That happened, he added, “when I couldn’t throw a 95-mile-an-hour fastball anymore.”
Over a career that also included stretches with the pitching-rich Baltimore Orioles and Montreal Expos of the 1970s, May notched 152 wins with a 3.46 E.R.A. and 1,760 strikeouts.
He came into his own in New York, going 8-4 with a 2.28 E.R.A. after the Yankees acquired him during the 1974 season. The next year he compiled a 14-12 record with a 3.06 E.R.A. while serving up a paltry nine home runs in 212 innings, the lowest rate in the American League.
His promising career in pinstripes hit a rough patch after Martin, known as much for his angry outbursts as for his strategic brilliance, replaced Bill Virdon as the Yankees’ manager in August 1975.
Although May pitched well to start the 1976 season, Martin berated him for failing to pitch complete games in any of his first eight starts. After he pitched well in a loss to the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians), May told the sportswriter Jeff Pearlman in a 2014 interview published on Pearlman’s website: “I went into Billy Martin’s office because I wanted to talk to him about the game — and he lit me up. He let me know that I would never pitch for him again.”
Despite the threat, Martin was soon forced to start May against the Detroit Tigers because of an illness to the scheduled Yankee starter. “Billy said, ‘I will tell you when you come out of the game!’” May told Pearlman, adding: “After our talk, he threw a ball at me, and it hit me. That night, I went out and I threw a 1-0 shutout.”
Rudolph May Jr. was born on July 18, 1944, in Coffeyville, Kan., the eldest of three sons of Rudolph and Oletha (Rowe) May. When World War II ended, his father, a chief boatswain’s mate in the Navy (he played catcher for a Navy baseball team), moved the family to Oakland, Calif., where he took a job as a lift operator in the naval port.
Rudy Jr. received all-city honors at Castlemont High School in Oakland, where he played on the same team as his neighborhood friend Joe Morgan, the future Hall of Fame second baseman. He enrolled at the University of San Francisco on a sports scholarship but left to sign with the Minnesota Twins in 1962.
Having experienced little overt racism as a Black youth growing up on the West Coast, May said, he was startled when he arrived at the Twins’ spring training camp in Fernandina Beach, Fla., and learned that Black players were required to bunk with local families instead of staying at the team hotel, and to drink from a bucket in the clubhouse instead of the water fountain.
After a circuitous route through the minors with multiple organizations, May landed with the Angels, where he went 4-9 in his rookie season before sustaining his career-threatening shoulder injury the next year. After battling back through the minor leagues, he returned to the Angels in 1969.
Once he was in New York, his tumultuous run under Martin ended in June 1976, when he was included in a 10-player trade with the Orioles. A cornerstone of a staff that included the 20-game winners Jim Palmer and Wayne Garland, May went 11-7 for Baltimore that year, beating the Yankees three times.
A scuba diver since his teens, May supplemented his income in the off-season by working on an underwater pipeline off Long Island. “I wasn’t making any money in baseball,” he told Pearlman, “but I was making $400 per hour diving.”
Traded to the Expos in 1978, May remained in Montreal for two seasons before returning to the Yankees as a free agent.
Under the more placid manager Dick Howser, May recorded a 15-5 record in 1980 along with a league-leading E.R.A. of 2.46. The Yankees were swept by the Royals in the American League Championship Series that season, with May pitching a complete game in a 3-2 loss in Game 2. He pitched in three games in the World Series the next year, although the Yankees lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games.
May is survived by his wife, Marion May; his children, Flashay Velez, Monique Hunter, Sara May Lewis, Audra Matson, Billy Counts and Marshall Young; and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Long after his playing days were over, May could look back on his rocky time under Martin without bitterness.
“He was a different personality than any other manager that I played for,” he said in an interview on the podcast “Sully Baseball” in 2014. “I mean, the passion to win and do well was there, but there were some things that were extremely unorthodox that we as players had to deal with.”
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