In a 12-year Major League career with three teams, first baseman Mike Hargrove, with his time-consuming routine before each pitch, earned one of the game's great nicknames: "The Human Rain Delay."

Now that nickname can be applied to another former big leaguer, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., who for six days kept the U.S. Senate from passing a simple one-month extension of unemployment benefits.

Before embarrassed Republicans finally moved to rein in the Rain Delay on Tuesday afternoon, 400,000 Americans stood to lose jobless benefits as early as this weekend. Other spending in the measure would help pay for health insurance for 500,000 laid-off workers, fund Medicare payments for doctors and support key transportation projects. Bunning's stall threatened all of them.

Old No. 14, the only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame ever elected to Congress, seemed oblivious to the consternation. During a marathon session Thursday night, he groused that he'd missed a basketball game on television.

Such are the sacrifices he was willing to make in defense of the principle that if Congress is going to pass a $10 billion spending bill by unanimous consent, it should do so out of last year's $787 billion stimulus bill and not add more to the federal deficit.

He has not always been so adamant about the pay-as-you-go principle, but in recent years he's become a deficit hawk's deficit hawk, as well as becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable.

Doubts about Bunning's temperament caused his Kentucky colleague, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, to nudge the 78-year-old Bunning into announcing he would not seek re-election this year. Filibustering the unemployment benefits extension might have been Bunning's payback to McConnell, the Senate GOP leader.

As the stalemate continued into Tuesday, Republicans began to worry that they'd be blamed again, as they were in 1995, for shutting down key government programs. Without the extension, more than 400,000 unemployed Americans would have found themselves without a check as early as next week.

Nationwide, about 500,000 laid-off workers would have seen their Cobra health care payments nearly triple.

McConnell didn't want that albatross around the GOP's neck, nor did he want the party to appear to be more obstructionist than it already is. But neither did he want Republicans to have a recorded vote on more deficit spending. But by Tuesday afternoon, McConnell was working on a deal to give Bunning a recorded vote.

In broad terms, Bunning has a point: With the federal deficit at $1.7 trillion, Congress can't continue spending money indefinitely without raising revenue or cutting programs.

But with the economic recovery uncertain and unemployment still at 9.7 percent, more government spending is needed right now to offset the human misery caused by government failures to enact sound tax policies and to regulate financial institutions.

The larger questions are best left for another day, with a full and vigorous debate, not the uncertain moods of one cranky 78-year-old old righthander who very late in his career came up with a trick pitch.