Butch Huskey, Mets slugger who proudly wore Jackie Robinson’s number, dead at 54

Fifty years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball, the sport held a ceremony honoring him before the New York Mets hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers at Shea Stadium. With President Clinton and Robinson’s widow, Rachel, behind him on the field, commissioner Bud Selig told the crowd that MLB would retire Robinson’s No. 42 in perpetuity.

“Those players,” Selig continued, then paused as the fans roared at the surprise. “Those players who currently wear 42, including those like Butch Huskey of the Mets … who wear the number in tribute to Jackie, may continue to wear the number for the remainder of their careers.”

On that night — April 15, 1997 — Huskey would lead off the fifth inning of a scoreless game with a single, sparking a two-run rally for the Mets on their way to a 5-0 victory. Huskey was forever linked to Robinson, and proud of it.

“I never thought that I would ever see something like this in my life,” he told reporters after the game. “For Major League Baseball to retire Jackie’s number, that’s the utmost reward I can say I’ve gotten in my life.”

Huskey died on Friday, the Mets announced on X, without citing a cause. He was 54 years old. He played for the Mets in 1993 and from 1995 to 1998, then spent his final two seasons with the Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox, Minnesota Twins and Colorado Rockies, retiring with a .267 average and 86 home runs.

The Mets chose Huskey out of Eisenhower High School in Lawton, Okla., in the seventh round of the 1989 draft. He had dreamed of playing football for the University of Oklahoma, but his parents encouraged him to pursue baseball instead.

It worked out well: Huskey tore through the Mets’ farm system, winning the team’s Doubleday Award four times as the MVP of his minor-league level and earning a promotion in September 1993.

Butch Huskey wore the No. 42 jersey in all but one of his major-league home bases throughout his career. (Jon Ferrey / Allsport / Getty Images)

His debut was memorable, but in the wrong way: facing the Astros in Houston, Huskey struck out three times as Darryl Kile threw a no-hitter. While he struggled under the Mets’ hard-driving manager, Dallas Green, he blossomed under Bobby Valentine in that 1997 season, posting a .287 average with 24 homers and 81 runs batted in.

“He was a gentle giant, a super-nice guy, very polite,” Jim Duquette, the Mets’ farm director while Huskey played in the minors, said on Friday. “And man, oh man, did he have some kind of power.”

In 1997, Huskey hit one of the longest home runs in the history of Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, a rocket into the seldom-reached 600-level seats high above left field. Longtime observers compared it to a similar blast to right field, decades earlier, by Hall of Fame slugger Willie Stargell.

For Huskey, though, 1997 was the peak. He slumped the next year and was traded to Seattle for a minor leaguer. Huskey hit well for the Mariners and started in left field in the first game at their new ballpark, now called T-Mobile Park, that July.

Traded to the Red Sox later that month, he appeared in the ALCS against the New York Yankees, going 1-for-5 with a double. After splitting the 2000 season between Minnesota and Colorado, he played one more season in the minors before retiring.

At every stop except the Rockies, Huskey wore No. 42. Robinson’s story connected deeply with Huskey, whose father was African-American. A 1997 profile in the New York Daily News said that his mother was Native American, his stepmother was white, and he had aunts and uncles of Mexican and Asian descent.

When he read a book on Robinson in high school, Huskey had found the ideal role model.

“I told myself if I ever got a chance to play professional baseball, I would wear his number,” he told the Daily News. “I think about it quite often.

“It means a lot to me just to be put in the same sentence with him.”