TACOMA, Wash. — Aaron Pointer is celebrating his 80th birthday today.
As he looks back on his life, Pointer still has fond memories of his time as a professional baseball player, which includes accomplishments few can match.
“I never dreamed that I’d live this long, to be 80,” he said with a laugh.
During Pointer’s career, he played for the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros, along with professional teams in Japan and Venezuela.
He also played for the Class-A Salisbury Braves in North Carolina in the South Atlantic League, where Pointer became the last player to bat over .400 in a full season of professional baseball in the U.S. in 1961.
That record still stands.
His career also includes a stint with the Tacoma Cubs, now known as the Rainiers. After he retired in 1971, he came back to settle in Tacoma, working for Pierce County Parks and Recreation. He now serves as Park Board Commissioner with Metro Parks Tacoma. In 2008, he was inducted into the Tacoma Hall of Fame.
Yet for all of his accomplishments, Pointer currently doesn’t qualify for a full MLB pension.
The MLB changed the rules for who could qualify for its pension and heath care benefits in 1980. Players now become eligible for health care after playing one game in the majors, and receive a pension after 43 days on a major league roster.
But since the changes weren’t applied retroactively, Pointer and over 600 other retired players still didn’t qualify.
MLB released a statement in 2011 saying a new agreement was reached between Major League Baseball, the Major League Baseball Players Association, and the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association that says these players qualify for an annual payment of up to $10,000.
But Pointer only receives around $1,200 a year, before taxes, along with a notice that it may not be available the following year.
It’s a sore subject for Pointer, and feels that he and his contemporaries were left behind.
“A lot of people, when they get out of baseball, they’re just on their own,” Pointer explains. “They just don’t have a chance to do anything after spending ten years of the best years of their lives playing baseball, just left out in the cold, and not even a thank you.”
Pointer says that he’s thankful that he doesn’t have to rely on the MLB payments to get by, but many of his counterparts can’t say the same, and they deserve more.
“All those years we spent doing our thing in baseball, it’s just a shame that they forget about us and not recognize us for the work we did,” he said. “There are guys that’re really hurting…there are guys that’re out there that deserve at least medical or something to help them at least live their lives for all they’ve done for baseball.”
But at the end of it all, Pointer still appreciates the game of baseball. But he says it won’t be a topic of discussion at his birthday dinner.
“It’s a great sport, it’s a great teacher, it teaches sportsmanship and how to get along with other players and how to lose, and how to win, and those kinds of things are important in life,” he said. “It’s just too bad that money got so involved.”