Lavarnway makes name for himself in Reds debut
CINCINNATI — Ryan Lavarnway made a name for himself in Great American Ball Park on Friday night, but he doesn’t yet have a name tag over his locker in the Cincinnati Reds clubhouse.
Everybody else does, but not Ryan Cole Lavarnway of Woodland Hills, California. After what he did Friday night he should have a gold-plated plate with his name in diamond chips.
In his Reds debut, the 31-yearold catcher doubled home a run on the first pitch he saw. Then he hit a three-run home run. Then he hit a solo home run — two homers, a double and six RBIs.
But no name plate. As Rodney Dangerfield would say, “No respect.” And Lavarnway was not in Saturday night’s lineup.
He does, though, have a walk-up song. It’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, in honor of Lavarnway’s wife, Jamie, a strong supporter of his long and winding baseball life.
Asked if his telephone blew up after his raucous game, he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah.” From whom? “Everybody I know in the world.”
Lavarnway is no bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rookie. His career stops resemble the spinning marquee of a Greyhound bus:
Lowell, Greenville, Portland, Salem, Boston, Pawtucket, Margarita, Atlanta, Gwinnett, Baltimore, Oakland, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Cincinnati.
And through all that, when he played Friday night it was only his 147th majorleague game in eight years.
Did he ever think about quitting? After all, as a philosophy major at Yale University, he is expected to be a deep thinker.
“Give it up? Not really,” he said. “There is nothing else I’d rather do. I get to go to the field and do the thing you’ve loved to do since you were 5 years old. You call it your job and it is pretty special.
“This life has its difficulties, but it also has its benefits,” he added. “I have a very supportive wife, Jamie (the brown-eyed girl), who makes it doable and makes it worth it.”
Jamie used to be a food blogger. She doesn’t do it as much as she once did, but she and Ryan still check out and critique restaurants.
“That is the kind of thing we do for fun,” he said. “We travel around and go to nice restaurants. That’s what we spend our time and money on.”
How does a kid from California end up playing baseball in New Haven, Connecticut at a blue-blood school like Yale? It is more of a training ground for U.S. Presidents (George H.W. Bush) and baseball commissioners (A. Bartlett Giamatti) than for professional baseball players.
“I was recruited there to play and I wasn’t recruited many other places,” he said. “It was my best academic and athletic option.”
His athletic accomplishments were awesome. In his junior year in 2008, Lavarnway led the Ivy League in home runs (13), RBIs (42), walks (29), slugging percentage (.824), and on-base percentage (.541). He batted .398.
He was the Ivy League’s all-time leader in career home runs with 33 and won the Ivy League player of the week award three times in his first season’s first four weeks.
And he has a slight link to Cincinnati’s Hall of Fame catcher, Johnny Bench. After his junior year he was a semifinalist for the Johnny Bench Award, emblematic of being named the best catcher in college.
The winner that year? Buster Posey.
Not too many baseball players study philosophy and Lavarnway said, “They told me to study what I enjoy and I took a smattering of different classes my freshman year and that’s what I enjoyed.”
So forgive Lavarnway if his All-Star lineup contains names like Aristotle, Plato, Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche and Jung.
Contact this contributing writer at Halmccoy1@ hotmail.com.