Jim Bunning, Hall of Fame pitcher and ex-U.S. senator, dies

Former U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, a major league pitching star who took his aggressive, no-nonsense brand of competitiveness into the game of politics as a congressman and senator from Kentucky, has died at the age of 85.

A strong right-hander with more than 100 wins and a no-hitter in each of the two major leagues, Bunning enjoyed national fame as an athlete before capturing Kentucky’s 4th congressional district in 1986.

The staunchly conservative Republican from Northern Kentucky’s Campbell County easily won four successive two-year terms before giving up his House seat to run for the U.S. Senate in 1998. He served in the Senate from 1999 to 2010.  

At 6 foot-3, Bunning was physically imposing, and on both the baseball diamond and Capitol Hill he was known for a toughness that could be intimidating.

“He was a hard man, but you’d want him on your side because you knew he would be ready to play and he would give you everything at his command,” a Detroit News sportswriter, Joe Falls, wrote years ago.

He was referring to Jim Bunning the pitcher but he could just as well have been talking about the politician.

In his 15-year career in the big leagues, Bunning developed a reputation for throwing the ball close to batters, trying to back them off the plate. “If he had to brush back his mother, I think he’d do it to win,” former Detroit Tigers second baseman Frank Bolling said of his one-time teammate.

In his second career, instead of baseballs, Bunning went after opponents and issues with strong rhetoric and an intense certainty in the correctness of his own views.

That was especially true with abortion. A Roman Catholic with nine children, Bunning voted consistently to limit abortion as an option for women and had contempt for colleagues who softened their position on the highly emotional issue.

“My training, from the very first day that I was trained as a kid, was that anything like that was wrong,” the Jesuit-schooled Bunning once said in a Courier-Journal interview. “Not only legally wrong, but morally wrong.”