Later Years
In December, 1969, Oyler was traded to the Oakland A's with pitcher Diego Segui for infielder Ted Kubiak and pitcher George Lauzerique. Oyler was sold by Oakland in April, 1970 and played his final 24 games with the California Angels, managing a perfect fielding percentage but only a .083 average at the plate. After his major league career ended, Oyler was a player-coach for the Hawaii Islanders and Salt Lake City teams of the Pacific Coast League before retiring in 1973.
After Oyler retired from baseball, he settled in the Seattle area, working for the Safeway supermarket chain, managing a bowling alley in Bellevue, Washington and working at Boeing. ("Seattle Pilots ... Where are they now?" The Seattle Times, July 9, 2006) Oyler played slowpitch softball in Seattle from 1973-1980 and also occasionally pitched batting practice for the Tigers when they were in Seattle playing the Mariners. He suffered a heart attack at his Redmond, Washington home on January 26, 1981, and died at the age of 42. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Sunset Hills Memorial Park, Bellevue, Washington (Gethsemane Section, Grave 85).
In a May 2007 article titled "Baseball, Partying, and Alcohol Abuse," Oyler's former Detroit roommate, Denny McLain claimed that Oyler was "an alcoholic" who "died prematurely." One of the authoritative histories of the team also reports that many of the 1968 Tigers drank "a lot," that Oyler was "later in AA" and that "alcohol may have adversely affected (Oyler's) career." (Patrick Harrigan, "The Detroit Tigers: Club and Community 1945-1995" (Univ. Toronto Press 1997), p. 145.)
Read more about this topic: Ray Oyler
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in years ... there is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)