Joe Depugh, launcher who inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “glory days”, died at 75

Joe Depugh, the teammate of the little league of Bruce Springsteen, who inspired the successful song of the rocker “Glory Days”, a Sagratisif and Sweet-Amer hymn in their Hardscrabable childhood in Freehold, NJ, where time has been spent by “Wink of a Young Girl’s”, died Friday in West Palm Beach, in Florida. It was 75.

The cause of death, in a hospice, was cancer of the metastatic prostate, said his brother Paul.

In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose sporting capacities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star launcher, gave him the nickname of Saddie.

“Bruce lost this big match for us for a year,” said Depugh in the Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stayed in the right field, where you think it is out of danger. But this important game, we had a lot of missing guys, and we had to play him.”

In the last round, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.

“In fact, it hit him on his head,” said Depugh, “and we lost the match.”

They remained friends in high school, linking their turbulent house life and their distant and alcoholic fathers. After graduating, Saddie took off to play rock ‘n’ roll in bars and discos. Joe, who excelled in several sports, tried for the Los Angeles dodgers but ended up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

In 1973, when they had been disconnected for years, these two childhood friends came up against the headliner, a bar on the roadside in Neptune, near the shore of Jersey. Mr. Springsteen entered; Mr. Depugh was released.