At 82, Phil Regan stood on a major league bench again, not as a player but as the New York Mets' interim pitching coach, promoted in the middle of the 2019 season after more than six decades in professional baseball. Regan, the relief pitcher Sandy Koufax nicknamed "the Vulture" during a historic 1966 season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, died on July 8, 2026, at 89, according to ESPN, which cited his attorney, Matt Blit.

Philip Regan was born April 6, 1937, in Otsego, Michigan, and grew up in nearby Wayland. "My earliest recollection of the Tigers was listening to Harry Heilmann call games on the radio," he recalled in a 2019 interview with FanGraphs. He spent one year at Western Michigan University, then signed with the Detroit Tigers organization in 1956 for a bonus of $2,700. "At that point in time, if you got more than $4,000, you had to stay with the major league team for two years," he explained.

Regan reached the majors on July 19, 1960, with Detroit, but his six seasons as a Tiger were uneven. Along the way, a Tigers pitching instructor named Schoolboy Rowe reworked his delivery. "You have to get your arm up higher," Rowe told him. "We're going to get you a different breaking ball." The pitch was a slider. "I picked it up really quick, and it became probably my best pitch," Regan said in the 2019 FanGraphs interview. The club traded him to the Dodgers on December 15, 1965, for infielder Dick Tracewski, and the deal remade his career. Pitching almost entirely in relief for Los Angeles in 1966, Regan went 14-1 with a 1.62 ERA and led the National League with 21 saves, helping the Dodgers win the pennant by a game and a half over the San Francisco Giants and earning his only All-Star selection. He pitched twice that October as the Dodgers reached the World Series. The Sporting News named him NL Reliever of the Year and NL Comeback Player of the Year that season. It was also the year Koufax hung the nickname on him for good. "Regan, you're a real vulture getting my wins like that," Koufax told him, Regan remembered years later. "Even today, that's what a lot of people know me as."

Chicago acquired him in an April 1968 trade, and Regan kept pitching at a high level for the Cubs, leading the majors in saves again and winning a second Sporting News reliever award. He closed his playing days with a brief stop on the Chicago White Sox in 1972, finishing with 96 wins, 92 saves and 743 strikeouts across 13 major league seasons, MLB.com reported.

Regan did not leave the game. In 1974 he became head coach at Grand Valley State, building the program to a 176-153 record over nine seasons, winning two Great Lakes Conference titles and two NAIA District 23 championships, and sending pitchers Howard Bailey and Greg Cadaret on to the majors. The school inducted him into its athletics Hall of Fame in 1989.

He carried his reputation as a pitching teacher through six major league organizations over the following decades: the Seattle Mariners from 1984 to 1986, the Cleveland Indians in 1994 and again in 1999, and the Chicago Cubs in 1997 and 1998, where his staff watched rookie Kerry Wood strike out 20 Houston Astros on May 6, 1998, tying the modern major league record. In 1995 he managed the Baltimore Orioles for the strike-shortened season, finishing 71-73 and taking the club to a third-place finish in the American League East. Winters, he took his craft to the Caribbean, guiding Leones del Escogido to consecutive Dominican League titles and the 1988-89 Caribbean Series championship, then managing six clubs across two decades in the Venezuelan winter league, where he won titles with Caracas and Magallanes and tied the record for most seasons managed. Fans there called him "El Buitre," MLB.com reported, the Vulture in Spanish, a hemisphere from the Dodger bullpen where the name began. In 2000, he coached the pitching staff that won Olympic gold for the United States in Sydney.

His last organization was the one that first brought him back as a minor league instructor in his seventies. On April 7, 2017, a day after turning 80, he threw batting practice for the Mets at Citi Field. "I said I hope that when I'm 80, that I can throw batting practice," he told ESPN that day. "You keep doing it, keep doing it day after day. I think Jim Kaat said you'll rust out before you wear out, so it's probably true." Two years later, at 82, the Mets made him interim pitching coach after firing Dave Eiland in June 2019, one of the oldest coaches in modern major league history. His tenure in the role ended after that season, and in 2021 he returned to the Dominican Winter League as a pitching coach for Toros del Este, still teaching the pitch that had carried his own career.

Regan's baseball life ran nearly continuously for sixty-five years, from a $2,700 signing bonus in 1956 to a Dominican winter league bullpen in 2021. The pitchers he trained at Grand Valley State, in the Mariners' and Cubs' systems, and on winter league mounds in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela carried his instruction into their own careers, and the managerial record he shares in Venezuelan winter ball still stands under his name. A Dodgers teammate's needling nickname followed him from Los Angeles to Wrigley Field to Caracas, translated but never lost, used by a different generation of fans a hemisphere away for the same reason Koufax first used it: because Phil Regan kept finding ways to win.