Robert Leon Huskey, known throughout professional baseball as Butch Huskey, was an American first baseman and outfielder who played in Major League Baseball from 1993 to 2001, spent his most productive years with the New York Mets during the club’s mid-1990s rebuilding phase, and accumulated 60 home runs across seven major league seasons while becoming a fan favourite at Shea Stadium for the straightforward power hitting that made him one of the more imposing physical presences in the Mets lineup of that era. He died on 7 August 2026 in Lawton, Oklahoma, at the age of 54 after a brief illness.
He was born Robert Leon Huskey on 10 November 1971 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, a city in Caddo County in the southwestern part of the state. Anadarko is located near the Wichita Mountains and close to the historical boundaries of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservations, situated in a part of Oklahoma that has the particular character of the southern Great Plains, flat agricultural land interrupted by the rocky outcroppings of the Wichita range and shaped by the combined history of the Oklahoma Land Runs, the displacement of Native American nations, and the agricultural and ranching economy that settled the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He grew up as a multi-sport athlete with the power, physical size, and natural coordination that attract professional baseball organisations, and the New York Mets selected him in the 7th round of the 1989 amateur draft when he was seventeen.
He spent four years progressing through the Mets minor league system, developing his hitting against increasingly accomplished pitching at each level of the organisation and working on the defensive skills at first base and in the outfield corner that would define his role at the major league level. He made his MLB debut in 1993 and began contributing as a regular starting player in 1996, when he hit 15 home runs in 118 games for a Mets team that was searching for the combination of pitching and hitting that could rebuild the franchise following its decline from the championship standard of the 1986 World Series team. The 1986 Mets had been one of the most talented and celebrated teams in baseball history, built around players including Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, Dwight Gooden, and Darryl Strawberry, and the franchise spent the following decade managing the departure and decline of that talent while developing the next generation of players.
His contribution to the Mets during the mid-to-late 1990s was as a power bat in the middle of the order, a player whose 48 home runs and 204 RBI across 399 games with the club reflected genuine run-producing ability even if it did not represent the elite level of offensive contribution that franchise players provide. His physical presence at the plate, a large man with genuine power to all fields, gave the Mets lineup a physical dimension that the organisation valued and that the Shea Stadium crowd responded to with the enthusiasm that power hitters tend to generate regardless of their overall offensive profile. After the Mets traded him following the 1998 season he played for the Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox, Minnesota Twins, and Colorado Rockies in brief stints before his major league career concluded in 2001.
He returned to southwestern Oklahoma after his playing career ended, settling in the Lawton area and living away from the New York and professional baseball environments where his career had been made. His death at 54 ended the life of a professional baseball player whose career had given the New York baseball public a straightforward power hitter to appreciate during one of the franchise’s rebuilding decades, and whose name was remembered by Mets fans of the 1990s era as part of the cast of players who represented the club through the years between the 1986 championship and the late 1990s competitive team that reached the 2000 World Series. He was 54 years old.