Joe DePugh, Pitcher Who Inspired Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dead at 75

Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.

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

In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.

“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”

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

“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”

They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.