Low-key Ray likes the quiet
The eighth in a series profiling inductees into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2021. The induction ceremony will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Friday at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
FAYETTEVILLE — The news that he had been accepted for induction to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame came as a surprise to former University of Arkansas baseball player and longtime Major League Baseball second baseman Johnny Ray.
“I mean, I was just glad and honored. Totally unexpected,” Ray said. “But it’s something I can look back on and say I was pleased with what
I accomplished over at Arkansas.”
They don’t come much more modest than Ray, a switch-hitting dynamo on the Razorbacks’ first College World Series team in 1979.
Ray, 64, hit .319 at Arkansas, was a two-time All-Southwest Conference selection for Razorback teams with a combined 80-28 record, and a 12th-round draft pick by the Houston Astros. He played 10 seasons in the big leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates and California Angels before finishing his career in Japan.
Former Arkansas coach Norm DeBriyn said one of Ray’s strongest assets was his competiveness.
“I mean, for Johnny Ray, winning was a big deal,” said DeBriyn, who recruited Ray out of Northeast Oklahoma A&M in 1977. “That compact swing and being a switch hitter. He was one of those guys that the higher level he played, the better he got.”
Since his professional career ended, Ray has led a quiet life on land he inherited in eastern Oklahoma, content in family life with his wife Tammy, their children Johnny Jr. and Jasmine, and now their grandchildren. In a recent phone conversation, Ray was proud to announce the happy boy heard in the background was his grandchild Channing.
His hometown of Chouteau, Okla., about 78 miles west of Fayetteville, bears a road sign that reads “Chouteau, OK. Home of Johnny Ray.”
He explained his devotion to his roots in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last year.
“You hear all these horror stories,” Ray said when asked about being financially comfortable in retirement. “In Oklahoma, you’re not in L.A., you’re not in Chicago, you’re not in New York. So money should be very conservative where you were from, so you didn’t have to spend a whole lot to have something.
“You just kind of live comfortable and do the things you want to do and not have the headaches of individuals coming at you and trying to get you to do this or do that. I like being around my family and being away from people, so it was a perfect scenario for me.”
Ray has been consistent in his tightknit family approach.
“[California] has nothing to offer me. I like my privacy,” he said in a 1988 story in The Oklahoman when he played for the Angels. “Once the season is over I prefer to get home, kick back and not talk baseball.
“There’s no phony to the people back home. I’ve known most of them all my life, and they like me because I’m Johnny Ray, not Johnny Ray the baseball player.”
Ray, who last year was chosen No. 3 by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette among the all-time former Razorbacks in Major League Baseball, said he was attracted to Arkansas baseball by DeBriyn.
“Coach was an integral part of me first going there, and I was impressed with the sincerity which he acted with when he was recruiting me,” Ray said. “Most coaches, usually when your eligibility ends the university doesn’t have any further use for you.
“But he’s more than that. He’s more than a coach. He is still that today. And that’s one thing I really love about him and his family. They treated me the same as if I’d been there playing back in the 70s when we were playing. He holds a special place in my heart and my family’s.”
Ray said signing with the Razorbacks was, in retrospect, the best thing he could have done at the time.
“I liked my teammates,” he said. “I wasn’t an outgoing person, so I stayed pretty much to myself and did what I was supposed to do, which was play baseball and go to school.
“It was a fun two years for me there. I enjoyed it, made a few friends. Matter of fact, I still have several friends now off our team that we still stay together and do things with.”
Ray said he’s remained buddies with Kevin McReynolds, Scott Tabor, Tim Lollar, Rob Kauffman and others from the 1979 Arkansas team that lost 2-1 in the College World Series final to Cal State Fullerton.
A career .290 hitter in MLB, Ray was traded in 1981 from the Astros to the Pirates, the organization for which his father, Ray Charles Ray, had played.
He made an immediate splash, earning National League Rookie of the Year honors from The Sporting News after playing in all 162 games.
He led the NL in doubles with 38 the next season while winning the Silver Slugger Award as the league’s top-hitting second baseman with a .283 average. He led the NL with 38 doubles again in 1984, the year in which he posted a career-high .312 batting average, good for fifth in the league.
Ray was consistently one of the hardest players to strike out in both his college and professional careers, finishing with six seasons in the majors with less than 40 strikeouts in more than 530 atbats. With the Pirates in 1985, Ray had 24 strikeouts in 594 at-bats.
One of Ray’s great career regrets was playing on teams that were not World Series caliber.
“There just wasn’t a whole lot of highlights because we never got a chance to play in the playoffs,” he said. “They didn’t have the wild card or the second wild card or nothing like that during my career.
“I played with Dave Parker, Bill Madlock, Bill Robinson, all those guys off the ’79 team. Omar Moreno. I was fortunate enough to have my locker next to Willie Stargell. He talked to me about a lot of things other than baseball, and what is expected of you and he helped me a lot.”
Ray made the American League AllStar team with the Angels in 1988, a year in which he hit .306 with 42 doubles, 83 RBI and a career-high 184 hits.
Ray has kept to himself and family even tighter during the coronavirus pandemic and will not attend the induction ceremony in person Friday.
“Like I told them, until we get a grasp on this thing, we’re basically homebodies now,” Ray said.
And for Ray, being a homebody in his hometown is A-OK.