Jeff Passan broke the news first, and it hit different because Regan wasn't some name attached to one team or one era. This was a guy who pitched in the 1960s, managed in the 1990s, and was still coaching pitchers into his 80s. That kind of longevity in a sport this hard on the body and the ego is basically unheard of.
Longtime pitching coach Phil Regan, whose career in baseball spanned seven decades, died today, his attorney, Matt Blit, told ESPN. Regan was 89. He managed the Baltimore Orioles for one year and served as pitching coach with the Mariners, Cubs, Indians and Mets, among others.
Before he was a coach, Regan was a reliever good enough to earn a nickname from Sandy Koufax. In 1966 with the Dodgers, Regan went 14-1 with a 1.62 ERA out of the bullpen, leading the league in appearances and saves. Koufax started calling him "The Vulture" because he had a habit of swooping in for wins in relief, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.
That '66 season was the peak of his playing days, but it was really just the first act. Regan hung up his cleats in 1972 and never really left the game, moving into coaching by 1974. From there he bounced through pitching coach jobs with the Mariners, Cubs, Indians and Mets, and in 1995 he got his lone shot managing in the majors with the Orioles.
Maybe the wildest stat isn't from his playing career at all — it's that Regan was still working a big league bench as recently as 2019, when the Mets brought him back as their interim pitching coach at age 82. Most people are retired for two decades by that point. Regan was out there teaching guys a third his age how to get outs.
Guys like Regan don't get the Hall of Fame plaques or the retired numbers, but they're the connective tissue of the sport — the ones who saw the game change from the mound to the dugout to the bullpen phone across generations. Seven decades in baseball is a career almost nobody gets to have, and Regan made the most of every year of it.