Former Corona del Mar baseball star Matt Keough remembered
Matt Keough, a former major league pitcher who also appeared on “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” died on May 1. He was 64.
A graduate of Corona del Mar High School in 1973, Keough went on to pitch for the Oakland Athletics for seven seasons. He was selected to play in the All-Star Game as a rookie in 1978, and he earned the American League Comeback Player of the Year award in 1980.
His ex-wife, Jeana, who was married to Keough for 32 years, said that the cause of death was a pulmonary embolism.
“Matt was a great baseball man and a proud Oakland A,” Billy Beane, the team’s executive vice president of baseball operations, said in a statement. “He had an incredible passion for the game, and we were lucky to have him and his wealth of knowledge alongside us for the years he worked as a special assistant. He left an unforgettable impression on everyone he touched in baseball.”
Keough went 58-84 with a 4.17 earned-run average for his career, also spending time with the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros.
Tom Trager, who coached Keough for his junior and senior seasons of high school baseball, said Keough seldomly pitched for CdM. He said that Keough predominantly played shortstop, and the standout infielder may have been the reason why the Los Alamitos Griffins converted from using wooden bats to aluminum.
“At Los Alamitos, there was a wash between the foul line down the line left out to center field,” Trager said. “It was fenced, and there was a wash out there, and Matt hit one out over the wash.
“Dave Hernandez was the coach at that time at Los Alamitos, a very successful coach, and he said, ‘That’s it. I’m buying metals. I’m going down to the sporting goods store, and we’re buying metals starting tomorrow.’”
Keough arrived at CdM as a junior transfer from Pomona. He played baseball and basketball for the Sea Kings, which is how he met his best friend, Dan Grigsby.
Grigsby, the chief legal officer, general counsel and chief integrity officer for the Los Angeles Lakers, played on both teams with Keough, eventually serving as his agent for his professional baseball career.
When Keough was inducted as a member of the first Hall of Fame class for CdM baseball, Grigsby gave a speech and made the attendees laugh when he said Keough was the reason he had become a lawyer.
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Grigsby recalled that he had been named the team MVP as a senior because of the number of games he had pitched during the 1972 season. He never let Keough forget it, either, but he knew his best friend was in a different class the first time he was asked to warm him up to pitch.
“He throws the first pitch. He throws low-90s at least, almost took the glove off my hand,” Grigsby said of Keough, whose father, Marty, and uncle, Joe, both were major league outfielders. “The second one’s about the same and hurt my hand, so I put the glove on the backstop, just hung it there, and he consistently hit the glove and knocked it off the backstop while we warmed up.”
As loud as Keough could pop the glove, Jeana said that there was one kind of bang that Keough did not care to be around.
“We never understood why he hated Fourth of July,” she reminisced of Keough, who was born on July 3. “It was a given he wasn’t going to go anywhere with us on Fourth of July.
“Whatever we wanted to do, we had to do by ourselves, and then one day, he said, ‘Do you not get it? When you threw a bad pitch, fireworks went off.’”
Grigsby always admired Keough’s resiliency to come back from multiple surgical procedures, but a foul ball to the head while sitting in the dugout during a spring training game in 1992 brought his playing career to an end.
Keough went on to hold on-field and front-office roles with the Athletics, Angels and Rays. Grigsby thought well of his eye for talent as a scout, too.
“[Jerry West] is known as the best judge of talent in basketball, and I’d say Matt [was] comparable to him in baseball,” Grigsby said. “I’ve never seen someone who could look at a guy and just see things that you and I can’t see, even though I played baseball a lot.”
The Keough family endured another tragedy on April 6 when Keough’s daughter, Kara, lost her son, McCoy, due to complications during childbirth.
Keough is survived by his ex-wife, Jeana, and their three children, Shane, Kara and Colton, his parents, Marty and Sharon, and his three sisters, Staci, Dale and Raeini.
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