Remembering Padres All-Star Pitcher Randy Jones

To know Randy Jones was to love Randy Jones, the San Diego Padres left-handed pitcher from a long-ago era, who died Wednesday, November 19, at 75 after battling a series of maladies.

The last time I saw him was at the end of this past season in the Padres clubhouse at Petco Park. He was hunched over, walking with the aid of a cane and hovering above Mason Miller, the club’s latest in a long history of young, stud relievers.

Jonesy was yucking it up with Miller, a trade deadline acquisition from the Athletics, who has already steeped himself in Padre lore.

Miller, the team’s pending closer in 2026, follows in the footsteps of three Padre National Baseball Hall of Fame closers — Trevor Hoffman, Rollie Fingers, and Goose Gossage, plus a National League Cy Young Award winner in 1989, Mark Davis. There were other greats along the way: Heath Bell, Huston Street, Craig Kimbrel, Kirby Yates, Josh Hader, and most recently now free agent Robert Suarez, to name a few.

Miller was well-aware of Hoffman, the National League’s all-time leader with 601 saves, second only to the 652 Mariano Rivera spun for the New York Yankees.

When Miller was a rookie in 2024 with the A’s and blew his first save, his manager Mark Kotsay, made a call to Hoffman and asked him to impart some wisdom to the young flame-throwing right-hander. Kotsay and Hoffy were old friends from their days as Padres teammates. Hoffy made the call.

When Miller arrived in San Diego he had yet to actually meet Hoffman, but he realized how much of an icon he was as one of only two players — Tony Gwynn is the other — to play either all or most of their careers with the Padres and have plaques in Cooperstown.

“There’s a street outside the ballpark that has his name on it,” Miller said about Hoffman. “That’s all you need to know.”

The late Gwynn, with his 3,141 hits and .338 lifetime batting average, has a street named for him as well.

Miller has since met Hoffman and has been apprised of the Padres’ historical reliever lineage. He was lucky enough to meet Jones before he died.

Miller throws 100 miles per hour regularly with a pinpoint fastball and a nasty slider. Jones threw his fastball in the high 70s with a great curveball and a vast array of junk to keep hitters off balance. Miller has a 42.7% strike rate. The Padres don’t have a long history of great starters, but Jones was one of them, the first Padre 20-game and Cy Young Award winner and two-time All-Star back in the 1970s. He won 20 and 22 games each during the 1975 and 1976 seasons. He also lost 22 in 1974.

But he and Miller had two things in common: They both worked rapidly and threw strikes. In his 10-year career, Jones only walked 503 batters in 1,933 innings. He once went 68 consecutive innings without walking a batter during his 1976 NL Cy Young Award winning season.

“The art of pitching is just disrupting timing,” Hoffman said recently. “You learn to throw a batting practice fastball. Back in the day guys had the ability to throttle back. Now guys are 100% on every throw. There’s an art to throwing a pitch and make it look like something different.”

That day in the Padres clubhouse the conversation wound around to the famous game in 1977 when Jones matched up against Jim Kaat, the Hall of Famer then with the Philadelphia Phillies, at old Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego’s Mission Valley.

Time of game, 1 hour, 29 minutes. Final score, Padres, 4-1. Yes, that’s right. I was just a young reporter covering the game for a Philadelphia area paper back then. At the time of that chance meeting in the Padres clubhouse at Petco, I was finishing my 50th season covering baseball.

Jonesy remembered all the details. He threw a complete game four-hitter allowing a run while striking one and walking one. The previous season he completed 25 games. There were just 13 complete games in the entire NL last season.

“That was philosophically the way I approached the game,” Jones once told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “I went out in the first inning and wanted to throw three pitches. I’d throw 89, 88, 92 pitches in a nine-inning game.”

Miller was properly in awe. Perhaps someday he’ll be a Padres elder meeting with a young player in the clubhouse, and another older baseball writer will stop by.

All I know is this: I’m proud to have known both of them. Jones at the front end and throughout my long career. Miller at the back end.

There’s nothing sweeter than that. Keep fooling them Jonesy, wherever you may be.