In 1964, the year he revived his baseball career, Jim Owens nearly derailed the Cardinals’ pennant chances. He also struck out Lou Brock in his first at-bat for the Cardinals.
Once a prized Phillies prospect, Owens clashed with the club’s management and created havoc as part of a group of hard-drinking pitchers dubbed the Dalton Gang.
The Phillies finally gave up on him, and so did his next team, the Reds.
With his career spiraling, Owens, 30, got a lifeline from the Houston Colt .45s in 1964, and made the most of the opportunity. Used as a reliever and spot starter, Owens was most effective against the Cardinals. He was 4-0 with one save and a 2.51 ERA against them in 1964.
Only the Mets had a worse record than the Colt .45s in the National League in 1964, but the Cardinals were unable to take full advantage. Partly because of Owens’ success against them, it took the Cardinals until the final day of the season to clinch the National League pennant.
Great expectations
Owens was born in Gifford, Pa., near the New York state border. The Phillies were defending National League champions when he signed with them at 17 in 1951.
A right-hander, Owens quickly rose throught the Phillies’ farm system. He was a 22-game winner in 1952, and he won 22 again in 1953 for Terre Haute, a team managed by Hub Kittle.
“Owens was the finest pitching prospect this club ever had, and that includes Robin Roberts,” Phillies owner Bob Carpenter told the Philadelphia Daily News.
Owens got to the majors with the Phillies in 1955, but lost his first six decisions. He didn’t get a win for them until 1958. Owens finally began to fulfill expectations in 1959, when he was 12-12 with 11 complete games, but it also was the year he joined the Dalton Gang.
Gang’s all here
Turk Farrell, Jack Meyer, Seth Morehead and Owens were the Phillies pitchers in 1959 who formed the Dalton Gang. According to Sports Illustrated, Phillies coach Tom Ferrick gave the group its name because of their outlaw antics. The real Dalton Gang robbed banks and trains in the late 1800s, primarily in the Kansas and Oklahoma territories.
Sports Illustrated described the Phillies’ Dalton Gang as “a group of wild-living, fun-loving, hell-raising players” who shared a “common love of the fast, loose life _ hard drinking, frequent fighting, late hours and casual friendships.”
Si Burick of the Dayton Daily News called the gang “a hard-riding, after-hours” group, and cited Owens for being “known as an athlete of questionable off the field habits, one who has been especially indiscreet in the drinking league.”
Asked about Owens, Phillies manager Gene Mauch told Burick, “There are people in baseball who drink as much as he does, maybe more, but they don’t get into trouble like him.”
Farrell and Owens were road roommates for one year in the minors and four years with the Phillies. During the 1960 season, in an effort to stop the shenanigans, Mauch split up the pair, rooming Farrell with coach Ken Silvestri and Owens with coach Peanuts Lowrey.
“Silvestri would go to bed at 10 o’clock,” Farrell told The Sporting News. “I’d keep the TV set on until 4 and order up some beer. Jim did the same thing in his room. We kept this up for 10 days and finally Silvestri and Lowrey went to Mauch and begged him to change his mind. So Mauch roomed me and Owens back together.”
One year, the Phillies offered Owens a $500 bonus if he promised to behave. According to Sports Illustrated, he “didn’t even make it through spring training. He got involved in a barroom brawl in Florida, lost the bonus and was fined an extra hundred to boot.”
In 1961, when Owens stormed out of Phillies training camp because of a disagreement with Mauch and threatened to quit, Larry Merchant of the Philadelphia Daily News described him as “a magnificent pitcher from the eyebrows down” and said the reason for Owens’ sulking was “as clear as a head full of vodka stingers.”
Not done yet
After the 1962 season, the Phillies traded Owens to the Reds for infielder Cookie Rojas. Owens pitched poorly for the 1963 Reds and in July they sent him to their San Diego farm club.
The demotion apparently was a wakeup call for Owens. He was 4-2 with a 2.21 ERA for the Reds’ farm team. The Colt .45s claimed him in the December 1963 minor-league draft, and Owens went to pitch winter ball in Venezuela in order to prepare to make a bid for a return to the majors in spring training.
In Venezuela, facing lineups stocked with major leaguers, Owens was the league’s best pitcher. He was 8-2 with an 0.72 ERA. All was going splendidly until on Jan. 29, 1964, when Owens was taken to a hospital for treatment of a leg wound.
According to The Sporting News, multiple variations were reported of how Owens cut his leg. Two newspaper reporters said Owens “had been stabbed during a Valencia barroom argument.” Valencia police said Owens “attempted to act as peacemaker on behalf of a friend during a fight and was cut in the right thigh” by someone wielding a knife. The president of the Valencia ballclub said Owens was injured in a swimming pool mishap. Owens said he slipped in a bowling alley and fell on top of a glass tumbler.
Old pro
Stitched up, Owens reported to the Colt .45s and “was the surprise of spring training,” The Sporting News reported. He earned a spot in the starting rotation and was reunited with his Dalton Gang buddy, Turk Farrell, who also was a Colt .45s starter.
“I always thought Jim was a good pitcher,” Farrell said. “He got the shaft in Philadelphia. Everybody tried to tell him how to pitch and how to live and he never got to pitch enough. If they would have left him alone, he’d have been all right.”
On April 26, 1964, Owens started against the Cardinals and got his first win for the Colt .45s, beating his former Phillies teammate, Curt Simmons. Boxscore
Two months later, on June 15, Owens relieved, retired all nine batters he faced, and got the win against the Cardinals. Brock, acquired earlier in the day from the Cubs, appeared as a pinch-hitter and struck out on three pitches from Owens. Boxscore
Owens also got relief wins versus the Cardinals on June 24 and Aug. 19, and earned a save against them on Aug. 8.
“Although Owens has been haunted in his career by a reputation for off the field hijinks, he has been a model of good deportment on the Colt .45s,” The Sporting News reported. “It is plain Jim would like to live down the playboy label of his youth.”
Owens was called “Bear” by his teammates because he had “the square build and somewhat lumbering gait of a medium-sized grizzly,” The Sporting News noted.
The nickname also fit his demeanor. According to The Sporting News, Owens “stays to himself as much, or more, than any other player on the Houston club. He is quiet, seldom smiles and does not engage much in small talk. On the mound, he acts like a man in a bad temper. He scowls as he pitches, and when he takes a throw from his catcher, he jerks at the ball in a short, angry gesture.”
Owens finished with an 8-7 record, six saves and a 3.28 ERA for the 1964 Colt .45s. The next year, the team became the Astros, and Owens again was tough versus the Cardinals, with a 1-0 record, a save and 2.08 ERA against them.
In June 1967, Owens made his last appearance as a pitcher, giving up a three-run home run to Orlando Cepeda in a relief stint versus the Cardinals. Boxscore
In a reversal of roles, the one-time baseball bad boy joined management, becoming an Astros coach for the remainder of 1967, and stayed in the job until 1972.
“He knows more about pitching than anybody on this club,” Astros manager Grady Hatton told The Sporting News.
RetroSimba 
It’s interesting. Turk Farrell, another piece of the Dalton Gang, who was also with Houston that year went 3-0 against us. On April 24, 1963 against the Dodgers, Jim Owens became the first NL pitcher to have three balks in the same inning. Enjoyed your comments on the radio. It is difficult to immagine an intense Bob Gibson in a Harlem Globetrotters uniform!
Thanks for the Turk Farrell info. Thanks, too, for listening to my radio show appearance. Regarding Bob Gibson and his intensity fitting in with the Harlem Globetrotters, here is an excerpt of Gibson addressing that in his autobiography “Stranger to the Game:”
“The aspect of my Globetrotter experience I most enjoyed was playing the second and third quarters. Our clowning routines were scheduled for the first and fourth quarters. I was too competitive by nature to be content, basketball-wise, with goofing around. My time was the middle of the game when we set aside the silly stuff. If the Globetrotters had played more serious basketball, I probably would have been more serious about staying with them.”