Arizona MSBL Member Jim ‘Botts’ Botten Passes Away at 87

Editor’s note: The Arizona MSBL representatives asked that we not recognize the specific person who submitted the following very touching eulogy.  In their words:

“We ALL have authored this, as this is how all of us feel about Botts.  It’s to be thought of as a love letter to Botts from the league and all the players he touched.”

In Memoriam — Jim “Botts” Botten

There are players who love the game, and then there are players who live the game. Jim Botten was both, and he did so with a toughness, competitive fire, and absolute devotion that left every one of us better for having shared a diamond with him.

Jim passed away recently at the age of 87, leaving behind family and friends who loved him deeply, and an entire baseball community that will feel his absence every time we take the field. We knew him as ‘Botts’. And if you played in this league, you knew exactly what that name meant.

He played competitive amateur baseball in the Arizona Men’s Senior League until he was 85 years old. Let that number sink in for a moment. Eighty-five years old. Still competing. Still stepping into the box and still expecting everyone around him to do the same.

Botts didn’t just show up to participate. He showed up to play. There is a difference, and he made sure you understood it. He was no-nonsense on the field, competitive to his core, and he held his teammates to the same standard he held himself. That standard, it turned out, was a pretty high one. The man was in the Minnesota Amateur Baseball and Softball Halls of Fame.

He was inducted into the Arizona Men’s Senior Baseball League Hall of Fame in 2025. A University of Minnesota graduate who carried that Midwestern toughness all the way to the Arizona diamonds, where we were lucky enough to call him a teammate, riding to many games on a Harley Davidson.

If you never saw Botts pull into the parking lot on that bike, helmet swapped for a batting helmet, ready to go, that image alone tells you everything you need to know about the man. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a badass. The kind of guy who made you stand up a little straighter just by being around him.

He wore number 12. Remember it.

For those of us in our 50s, 60s, and 70s who sometimes wonder how many seasons we have left, Botts answered that question every single time he showed up to play. He answered it without a speech or a motivational poster. He answered it by climbing off his Harley, pulling on that number 12 jersey, and going to work. In doing so, he quietly reset what the rest of us believed was possible.

He wasn’t just playing baseball at 85. He was telling all of us that you can too. He was proof, in the most powerful and practical sense, that the love of the game doesn’t have to have an expiration date. That the smell of fresh-cut grass, the crack of a bat, the chatter of teammates in a dugout, these things belong to anyone willing to show up and compete, regardless of what the calendar says.

On the days when our knees ache, or our backs complain, or we wonder if we’re being foolish for still doing this, we now have a name to call on. We have a number to look up at. We have Botts.

Baseball has always been a game of generations, passed from one set of players to the next. Jim Botten gave this league something rare, a living example of what total, unapologetic devotion to the game looks like. Two state Halls of Fame and one Arizona Hall of Fame later, he was still out here with us, still grinding, still competing, still riding in on that Harley like he had something to prove. Maybe he did. Or maybe he just loved it that much. Either way, we were the lucky ones.

The Arizona Men’s Senior Baseball League is a better, tougher, more inspired community because Jim “Botts” Botten chose to keep playing. Because he chose to show up. Because he never once treated age as a reason to stop doing what he loved or as an excuse to lower his standards.

We will miss him on the field. We will miss him in the dugout. We will miss that Harley in the parking lot and the competitor who climbed off it.

Number 12 is retired in our hearts.

Play ball, Botts! You earned your rest. And the rest of us? We’ll keep playing, and we’ll keep competing because you showed us exactly how it’s done.