LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The best baseball players get to the major leagues and stay forever. The average career for a big-league pitcher is nearly five seasons.
Many guys bounce between the major and minor leagues. Players laugh about that whirlwind experience. They call it a cup of coffee.
You can't fit Randy Wynne's career in any of those slots,
"I got a half cup," Wynne said.
At 31 years old, Wynne is a durable right-hander who has pitched as well as anybody on the Louisville Bats' roster this season. But the back of his baseball card says his major league career lasted 3 hours and 28 minutes.
One big-league game. Eleven batters. Seven outs. One walk. One single. Two doubles, both by Braves' all-star Ronald Acuna, who taunted Wynne with the "little man" gesture when he reached second base.
June 25, 2023. Great American Ball Park. Cincinnati, Ohio. After a 3 a.m. wakeup call and multiple flight issues leaving Charlotte, Wynne's Uber from the airport in northern Kentucky arrived in downtown Cincinnati about an hour before the 1:40 p.m. first pitch.
He entered the game in the top of the fourth inning after a mostly sleepless night, minimal warmup and no idea the Reds were actually going to send him to the mound that day.
Maybe he would pitch Monday when the team started a road trip in Baltimore. Or Tuesday. He thought he'd stick with big club maybe seven days.
No. This was his moment.
"I'm walking on the field across the bullpen track or the warning track and I like couldn't feel my feet hitting the ground," Wynne said. "It felt like every cell in my body was vibrating."
He retired Braves' outfielder Michael Harris Jr. on a fly ball to center field. He pitched a scoreless fourth and a scoreless fifth. He retired Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley and Matt Olson, a trio of National League all-stars, on a fly ball and two ground outs. That works. He belonged.
"After the first out, I remember looking around the stadium and going, 'That's sooooo many people. It's people up to the lights all the way around,'" Wynne said.
He exited with one out in the top of the sixth after Acuna rattled his second double into left-center field.
Acuna later scored on a 3-run homer. That pinned the loss on Wynne when the game ended with a 7-6 Atlanta victory. At 5:08 p.m.
Within a half hour, Wynne was summoned into manager David Bell's office. Wynne would not accompany the Reds to Baltimore. He would drive back to Louisville with his wife, Hannah, and baby daughter, Alanna.
Wynne's big-league career lasted 3 hours and 28 minutes.
"I jokingly told told the boys they should call me Half a Cup," Wynne said. "I skipped (pregame) stretch and the postgame."
But you should only call Wynne "Half a Cup" if you don't believe in his perseverance and determination to keep remaking himself as a stronger, more effective pitcher.
Wynn is 31 going on 21, doggedly taking the baseball in any game or any situation that Bats' manager Pat Kelly asks.
"It's a great story to tell your young prospects who sometimes have been catered to their whole careers," Kelly said. "Just to see a guy fight for everything he's ever gotten.
Start? Sure. Relieve? Of course. One inning or four innings? Doesn't matter. Ten days between appearances or one day of rest? Wynne would pitch every day if you asked him.
"I just love throwing a baseball," he said.
Just give him the damn ball. He's always been a Just Give Him The Ball guy. That's what Wynne will always be, determined to savor more than half a cup of coffee in the big leagues.
"I've taken a lot of jobs and routes that a lot of other people trying to make it to the big leagues might not have taken," Wynne said. "I just wanted to play and I wanted to show that I could do well at whatever level I was at."
Wynne is not on the Reds' 40-man roster, which means Cincinnati would have to remove a player to make room for Wynne. Another franchise could pursue him, of course, but he's been available for years. In an era when velocity rules, Wynne's fastest offering tops out at 93 mph, several ticks below what big-league teams expect from bullpen arms. Relievers need heat to escape jams with strikeouts. Wynne finds another way.
In his first 18 appearances this season, Wynne crafted an earned run average of 2.03, second best on the team, with guile and the deception he creates by throwing six different pitches. He went to Australia last winter to perfect a cut fastball, his sixth pitch.
Just don't tell Wynne the odds are tilted against a happy ending. People have told him the major leagues were out of reach since he was a 17-year-old high school pitcher in San Diego.
Wynne thought he had secured a Division I baseball scholarship to a West Coast Conference school. Then he tried to pitch through an elbow injury that led to surgery. The offers disappeared.
"I didn't realize that I needed Tommy John surgery and I tried to throw through it for about a year," he said.
He pitched two seasons of junior college baseball — and pitched well. The Division I offers never returned. Missouri Baptist University gave him an opportunity to pitch two seasons at the NAIA level, not the pedigree of a big-league draft pick.
He went 5-0 with with 34 strikeouts and 7 walks in 2016. Good. Very good. But not good enough. But Wynne was not drafted.
Wynne moved to suburban Phoenix. He took a job selling pretzels at a mall to earn the $2,000 he needed to participate in a tryout camp for Independent League baseball, a level of the game where only hard-core dreamers need apply.
"I worked at Wetzel's Pretzels before Arizona Winter League," he said. "Literally handing out sugar, selling pretzels at the mall."
He lasted five innings with the Lake Erie Crushers and got released. Wynne drove from Cleveland to Missouri and slept on a couch in a friend's apartment for a week.
He had an offer to play with one the four teams in the United Shore Professional Baseball League, which launched outside Detroit in 2016. They offered $600 a month — and all you can dream.
"I called my Dad and said 'I'm maxing out my credit cards and I have enough money for one more flight,'" Wynne said.
"Should I fly home or should I fly to this start-up league in Michigan?
"He asked me if I had more ball in me. I said that I felt like I did. Then he said, "Well, go to Michigan.'"
Michigan it was. Wynne struck out 55 while walking 8. Dominant stuff. He established himself as one of the league's best pitchers. He earned a second season — at $650 a month.
In 2018, that got Wynne to a more established level of independent ball, where he earned $1,000 a month with the Evansville (Indiana) Otters who play a four-month season.
How do you live on $4,000 a year — or less?
By taking other jobs.
"I was an unskilled laborer for like four years," Wynne said. "Granite installation. Tile and grout. I've done roofing. I've done landscaping. A lumber yard. A lot of physical stuff."
And a lot of resolve. It was in June of Wynne's second season in Evansville when scouts from the Reds finally saw what Wynne has always seen in himself — a guy who believes he can trick professional hitters.
Wynne was 26 years old when the Reds signed him to his first pro contract — on Fathers' Day 2019.
Wynne had called his father once that Sunday but he called him again after the Otters' management told him the Reds had purchased his contract.
"The second call he was like, 'What do you want? Why did you call me again?'" Wynne said.
"I said, 'Oh, you're going to like this one.'
"So I told him, and he was ecstatic and went and told my mom, and I'm hearing screaming in the background."
They put him with a bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds at their training complex in Arizona before promoting him to short-season Class A ball in Greeneville, Tennessee, and then their Low-A affiliate in Dayton, Ohio.
Like most minor leaguers, Wynne lost the 2020 season to COVID-19 but he pitched in 25 games at Class AA Chattanooga in 2021.
Wynne's three-season run in Louisville began in 2022. He won six games in 2022 and three last year. This has been his best summer. Through July 23, he had his lowest earned run average as well as the first time in AAA allowing fewer hits than innings pitched.
That's progress. And it's wonderful. But it would be more wonderful if it resulted in another opportunity in the big leagues. He's fooling more hitters. But it's harder to fool Father Time. Not that Wynne is ready to stop trying. He isn't.
"I'm playing for a lot of things," Wynne said. 'But I'd be lying if I didn't say that this whole offseason I wasn't convinced I'm not going to be the One Day Guy.
"I refuse to be the One Day Guy."
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