[1] Yankees management believed he could handle the first base job and traded Skowron to the Los Angeles Dodgers before the 1963 season.

[1] After the 1969 season, despite having won his third Gold Glove Award, the Yankees traded Pepitone to the Houston Astros for Curt Blefary.

[12] In June 1973, Pepitone accepted an offer of $70,000 ($480,000 today) a year to play for the Yakult Atoms in Nippon Professional Baseball's Central League.

Pepitone spent his brief career in Japan skipping games for claimed injuries only to be seen out at night in discos, behavior which led the Japanese to adopt his name into their vernacular as a word meaning "goof off".

Bouton said that Pepitone went nowhere without a bag containing hair products for his rapidly balding head and that he took to wearing toupees.

[16] In January 1975, Pepitone published his own tell-all baseball memoir, titled Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.

The book received substantial attention for its many revelations, particularly about his abusive father and his self-lacerating candor about his self-destructive ways.

[22] After the Trenton franchise disbanded in 1979, Pepitone became the team president and first baseman for Chicago Nationwide Advertising of the North American Softball League (NASL) during their 1980 season.

[23][24] Pepitone was suspended for six games by NASL Commissioner Robert Brown for "conduct detrimental to professional softball"[25] and was out for the season in August with a thigh injury.

[26] The Yankees then hired him as a minor league hitting instructor at the end of the NASL season, bringing his professional softball career to a close.

[29] After Pepitone was sent to prison, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner re-hired him in 1988 as part of a work-release program to serve in the development of minor league players.

[35] In October 1995, the 55-year-old Pepitone was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated after losing control of his car in New York City's Queens–Midtown Tunnel.

[1] On March 13, 2023, Pepitone died of a suspected heart attack at his home in Kansas City, Missouri, at the age of 82.