The Q — Batter up at Rotary Club

This is the latest in an occasional series of posts about history of The Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls.

Jim Bouton’s recent baseball memoir that revealed petty locker room jealousies was hurtful to some fellow athletes who are “fine individuals,” but the book did not tarnish the reputation of baseball in general, former Major League first baseman Dale Long said in 1970.

“If Bouton needed a buck he should have asked us. A lot of us would have sent him a buck,” Long said, speaking to the Glens Falls Rotary Club at The Queensbury Hotel on Nov. 23, 1970.

Long, who lived in Clifton Park at the time, had left professional baseball five years earlier and taken up a second career in chemical sales.

He played professional baseball in 1945–1963, including 10 seasons in the majors.

He had a .267 batting average and hit 132 home runs in his 10 seasons in the majors, according to baseball-reference.com.

He was an umpire for the International League for two seasons after he stopped playing.

Long “regaled” Rotary Club members with his stories about playing with the St. Louis Browns, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees, including playing with the Yankees in the World Series of 1960, 1962 and 1963.

“The man Branch Rickey tried to make into baseball’s only left-handed catcher when he was with the Pirates related his experiences with other ball players and managers,” The Post-Star reported the next day.

Long said the top Major League pitchers he faced were Harvey Haddix, Lou Burdette and Tommy Byrne.

Long said the reserve clause, in which a team retained rights to a player after a contract expired, would probably be modified, but baseball could not operate without some form of reserve clause.

Click here to read the most recent previous post in the series.