Jim Kaat calls from his hotel room at the Westchester Country Club early on a Thursday morning. He is pleased with Matt Fitzpatrick’s U.S. Open victory. “He makes 12 major champions I’ve played with,” Kaat says, and names most of the others on the list: Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Raymond Floyd, Jeff Sluman, Paul Azinger, Ian Baker-Finch, Orville Moody, Charles Coody and Greg Norman.
Baseball is where Kaat (pronounced “cot”) made, and continues to make, his mark. But golf is a big part of his life, too. A round of golf will follow the interview. In the afternoon, he will ride to Yankee Stadium where he and longtime partner Bob Costas will call the evening’s Yankees-Astros game for the MLB Network Showcase. A ceremony will precede the game where Kaat will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Yankees, for whom he was a longtime television analyst (he also pitched for the Yankees in 1979 and 1980).
That’s a full day for anyone, let alone someone who turned 83 last November. But Kaat has no intention of taking it easy. In addition to occasional broadcast duties, he has a lot on his plate.
He has a new book out, “Good as Gold, My Eight Decades in Baseball,” which is dedicated to Kaat’s daughter, Jill, who succumbed to neuroendocrine cancer in March 2021. His proceeds will go to the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation.
On July 16 he will have his number 36 retired by the Minnesota Twins, for whom he won 190 games (a statue of his likeness will join those of Kirby Puckett, Harmon Killebrew and other Twins greats on Target Field’s plaza at a future date). In August he will attend festivities in St. Louis honoring the 1982 Cardinals, with whom he earned his only World Series Championship ring late in his career.
And of course on July 24, Kaat will receive his greatest honor – induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
For decades – in fact, almost from the day he first was eligible in 1989 – an oft-asked question among baseball fans is: Why isn’t Jim Kaat in the Hall of Fame? He won 283 games during his 25-year career (1959-83), which ranks fifth on the all-time longevity list. If that’s not enough, Kaat won a record 16 consecutive Gold Gloves; he and Greg Maddux undoubtedly are the greatest fielding pitchers in baseball history.
The fact that Kaat’s enshrinement is belated does not dampen his gratitude for the honor or his enthusiasm for the game of baseball. If Kaat has any regret about his current whirlwind of activity, it’s only that he has a little less time for golf. Meaning that there are some days when he can’t work in a round.
Golf was not part of Kaat’s youth in Zeeland, Michigan, a small city in the southwestern part of the state, settled in the mid-19th century by people, like Kaat, of Dutch ancestry. His father owned a dairy company. Kaat excelled at basketball and baseball at Zeeland High School.
Given the long Michigan winters, baseball season was short and comprised of just 12 games. However, he made enough of an impression there – and for one year at Hope College, a small liberal arts school in Holland, Michigan – to be signed by the original Washington Senators in 1957.
He was called up to the majors at the end of 1959 and on the last day of the season gave up a double to 41-year-old Ted Williams. Kaat notes that Williams’ career started in 1939, and that late in his career Kaat pitched to Julio Franco, whose career extended until 2007. Thus, as a player, Kaat is a link to 68 of Major League Baseball’s 146 years.
In 1961, the Senators moved to Minnesota where Kaat had his best years. In 1965, he started an American League-leading 42 games, winning 18 to help the Twins to the pennant. He squared off against the immortal Sandy Koufax (now a good friend) three times in the World Series, pitching the Twins to a complete game victory in Game 2, but losing Games 5 and 7 as the Los Angeles Dodgers won the series.
Kaat was even better in 1966, winning 25 games. He would have won the Cy Young Award, except it was the last year that only one prize was awarded for all of major league baseball, instead of one for each league as has been the case since 1967. Koufax won 27 games for the Dodgers in 1966 and received the award.
“I was used to hitting 90 mile-per-hour fastballs, and it surprised me that hitting a stationary ball could be so challenging.” –Jim Kaat
During that era, Kaat considered golf a waste of time. That changed when he was about 30 years old and attended a local sports awards luncheon in the Twin Cities.
“Fred Cox, the Minnesota Vikings’ kicker, invited me to play,” Kaat recalls. “Back then, you had to special order left-handed clubs.” Hence, although he threw and batted left-handed, at first, he played golf as a righty.
By March 1969, Kaat had enough interest in golf to venture to the Rio Pinar Country Club near Orlando, Florida, on an off day during spring training to watch the PGA Tour’s Florida Citrus Open (he remembers that Ken Still won). He was hooked on the game, both as a player and as a fan.
It’s unsurprising Kaat adapted to golf as he is a remarkable athlete. Tall and lean (6-foot-4, 205 pounds during his playing days), he was a fitness and nutrition buff during a time when many ballplayers ignored conditioning. He had a pitcher-respectable .181 lifetime batting average, and his 16 home runs are tied for 17th on the all-time list for hurlers. In 1976, when he was 37, Kaat had enough foot speed to be inserted into four games as a pinch-runner while with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Kaat never mastered golf the way he did baseball. “I was used to hitting 90 mile-per-hour fastballs, and it surprised me that hitting a stationary ball could be so challenging,” he says. However, most recreational golfers would happily trade for his game. At his peak, Kaat carried a 5 handicap. He also has three aces on his résumé. “The most memorable was at the 13th hole at Seminole, when I was playing in a member-guest.”
As with baseball, Kaat is part of golf history. He played right-handed until 1994, when he was having problems with his short game. By then, Kaat was in his mid-50s, but he tried playing left-handed. He struggled at first, but soon found he was more proficient as a lefty.
His ambidexterity as a golfer is what got him into the record books, in a manner of speaking. In 2009, playing left-handed, Kaat shot his age (then 70) for the first time at Glens Falls Country Club in Upstate New York. Then, on December 7, 2013, when he was 75, Kaat shot his age playing right-handed at the McArthur Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Florida. Cliff Schrock of Golf Digest asserts that Kaat is the first to accomplish that feat.
Kaat uses lightweight XXIO clubs, favored by many older players to get the most out of diminishing swing speeds. He owns a full set from both sides and his bag usually contains both left-handed and right-handed clubs (but within the 14-club limit allowed by the rules). He drives left-handed (the side on which he gets more distance), but plays to the green with whatever club he is most comfortable with. He’s also been known to go out with a caddie with two sets of clubs and play one ball from each side, recording two scores.
Any baseball fan will love “Good as Gold,” a very easy read. Of course, the book mostly deals with Kaat’s eight decades in baseball as a player, coach, and broadcaster, but he also touches on golf. In the introduction, to make the point that not all changes to baseball are for the better, he writes about how Greg Norman changed the design of the Medalist course in Hobe Sound for the worse (in Kaat’s view). As a result, Kaat and a number of other members resigned from the club.
Just as Kaat is opinionated in the baseball broadcast booth, he has thoughts on the present state of professional golf. He is pleased former top amateur Pierceson Coody – grandson of his friend, 1971 Masters champion Charles Coody – spurned the millions offered by LIV in order to play the Korn Ferry Tour, where he recently won the Live and Work in Maine Open to boost his chances of earning promotion to the PGA Tour. “I am a huge fan of the young players on the PGA Tour and I hate to see people that specialize in greed, arrogance and deception triumph,” Kaat said.
Kaat the pitcher was a joy to watch, and, for his teammates, to play behind, because he wasted no time between pitches. He played long before radar readings were a ballpark staple, but he never was regarded as a hard thrower.
“I have absolutely no idea how many miles per hour my fastball traveled,” he says. “Fast enough, I guess.”
Kaat’s goal was to induce soft contact, not strikeouts. On July 11, 1976, he threw a complete-game shutout for the Phillies against the San Diego Padres that lasted 1 hour, 36 minutes – a pace unheard of today (he only had three strikeouts, two being future Hall-of-Famer Willie McCovey).
Similarly, Kaat is averse to slow play on the golf course. He takes no practice swings, and in a foursome strives to complete 18 holes in no more than 3 hours, 45 minutes. “My golf hero is Lauren Cupp,” he says of his friend, the golf coach at Hamilton College in central New York and women’s speed golf record holder (in 2021, Cupp ran a course in less than 51 minutes while shooting a one-under par 72). “I walk some but take a cart and have the caddie drive it.”
After Jim’s wife, MaryAnn, passed away from cancer in 2008, Kaat reconnected with Margie Bowes, a Florida golf pro he knew, who also was widowed. Shortly after Jim and Margie were married, they were invited to play storied Ekwanok Country Club, designed by Walter Travis in 1899, in Manchester, Vermont. They now spend the summer and fall in Vermont, within walking distance of the Ekwanok clubhouse. Ekwanok is a beautiful, but sublimely difficult, golf course. Its gently undulating terrain masks its challenges.
“We call the patio at Ekwanok ‘Golf Heaven,’ ” Kaat says.
Margie, who regained her amateur status, is more focused these days on the bountiful trout fishing in southern Vermont.
Today Kaat is a 13-handicap and still sometimes shoots his age. He was tough-as-nails on the mound – unafraid to brush back a hitter – but is convivial on the golf course.
“I remember what the late Jim Hand, who I knew when he was the president of the USGA, told me,” Kaat said. “He said his goal was to make sure the people he was playing with had an enjoyable day.”
As he looks forward to joining the roll of baseball immortals enshrined at Cooperstown, Kaat also aims to maximize the health benefits of golf. “My goal this summer is to walk faster when playing alone, in the late afternoon or early evening,” he said. “I put six clubs in my MacKenzie Walker bag and play the lower eight holes at Ekwanok. I am going to try to improve my walking pace by the end of the golf season.”
But Kaat also is mindful of another friend’s advice. “Don’t ask an 80-year-old how he played,” the friend told him. “Just ask, ‘Did he play?’”