Jul 19, 2025, 06:12 PM ET<\/p>\n
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jeff Bittiger, a pitcher who played four seasons in the major leagues and spent the last 22 years as a scout in the Athletics organization, died Saturday morning, the A’s announced. He was 63.<\/p>\n
The team did not disclose a cause of death.<\/p>\n
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Bittiger made his major league debut for Philadelphia on Sept. 2, 1986. The 5-foot-10 right-hander went 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA in 33 appearances for the Phillies, Minnesota Twins<\/a> and Chicago White Sox<\/a>.<\/p>\n He pitched his last major league game in 1989 for Chicago, and the A’s said he continued to play independent ball until age 40.<\/p>\n As an area scout for the A’s, Bittiger signed right-hander Andrew Bailey, the AL Rookie of the Year in 2009, and he was part of the team’s professional scouting staff for the past decade.<\/p>\n “Jeff spent his whole life around the game: playing, coaching, and scouting. He was as good a person as he was a scout, and he was a hell of a scout,” Billy Beane, a senior adviser to Athletics owner John Fisher who previously served as the club’s general manager, said in a statement. “He knew pitchers inside and out and you could tell how much he loved baseball just by being around him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jul 19, 2025, 06:12 PM ET WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jeff Bittiger, a pitcher who played four seasons…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-9272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}