Dr. Ron Taylor no longer gets restless when the major league baseball season starts up again, as it does this month. These days, as a team doctor for the Toronto Blue Jays, the 72-year-old family physician’s contribution to spring baseball is medical rather than athletic.

“My baseball career died a natural death. I had pitched in 500 big-league games and pitched in two World Series,” says Taylor, who was a reliever for the world champion ’64 Cardinals and ’69 Mets and called it quits in 1972. “I’d been pitching for about 16 years, and my  arm didn’t have much left in it. So I decided to get into medicine.”

Today, Taylor divides his time among his family practice at Yonge and St. Clair, S. C. Cooper clinic at Mt. Sinai and his on-call duties with the Jays.

Taylor’s interest in medicine was sparked in 1969 when, as a member of the World Series champion Mets, Taylor visited American troops stationed in South Korea just after the Tet Offensive, making appearances at a number of battlefield hospitals and getting to know the doctors on the ground.

Three years later, when Taylor decided it was time to leave the game he’d been playing professionally since Grade 12, he confided in a teammate — a young outfielder for the San Diego Padres named Cito Gaston, who is now back for a second stint as the Jays’ bench boss. “I just knew it was time to get out, so I told Cito.… I said, I’m going to go back to medical school, and he said, ‘No, really, what are you going to do, Ron?’”

Changing careers — especially to one so unrelated — at the age of 35 was no easy feat, but Taylor relied on his strong record as a student.

He was a stellar student at North Toronto Collegiate where he played basketball and was a football reserve for coach Hal Brown. “[He was] very focused and kind and soft-spoken, just a great man,” Taylor says of Brown.

Such was Taylor’s promise as a young prospect that he left school after Grade 12 to join the Cleveland Indians farm team, but he returned the year following to earn his diploma and later completed an engineering degree at the University of Toronto.

While Taylor’s baseball career came to a natural end, Taylor’s medical career is showing no signs of slowing down. Ask him when he’s thinking of hanging up his white coat, and you’ll get an honest reply: “I’m not,” he says.

The Toronto Blue Jays’ home opener against the Chicago White Sox is on April 12 at the Rogers Centre.