Randy wasn’t Ready for the big time

Welcome to Hideous Baseball Week at Diamond Hoggers. If you have a nomination of a ballplayer from the past who specialized in being unspectacular, tweet us the nomination or send us an email to diamondhoggers_at_gmail_dot_com. Now enjoy our next nominee, Randy Ready.

Randy Ready was just one of those guys who held a team back. He was also one of those small-framed 80’s ballplayers that seemingly hung on forever, carving out a big league career that spanned longer than Hulkamania (1983-1995). But it’s how he played out the ‘dash’ on his player epitaph that will leave you saying, he was kind of hideous.

If you collected baseball cards back in the days that I was growing up, you ended up with about 15 Randy Ready cards of variety. These were the cards that you probably used to stick in your bike spokes or if you weren’t into that you probably weren’t careful eating breakfast and spilled some Eggo syrup on–ruining it forever.

He’s somehow parlayed his mediocrity and perseverance into being the current hitting coach of the San Diego Padres. What exactly is he coaching them on? How to play 15 years in the bigs and hit 40 home runs? Maybe he’s teaching them how to mentally deal with hitting under .240, because he did that no fewer than six times. Three of those times he was riding the interstate. Maybe PETCO isn’t the only reason that Padres players struggle to put up big numbers afterall.

Sparkling career OPS of .745, 27 stolen bases in 42 attempts. Played every non-battery position under the sun except shortstop; and why the Hell not stick him there at that point? Guy was a .966 career fielder.

Randall had one appearance in a postseason game–and it came in the 1992 ALCS. You might not remember it, but you guessed it. He struck out. The A’s lost that series.

He played for six different teams and wore nine different numbers during that span. None of which were particularly cool. And rumor has it he lost his current number several different times in his career in a bet with teammates on how many balls he could hit out of the infield in batting practice.

He was that token “flea” in 80’s video game baseball that you buried on the bench and if you had to play, you were FUBAR because seeing him hit one hard was about as common as a lunar eclipse.

He was teammates with Hall of Fame players like Rollie Fingers, Rickey Henderson, and Tony Gwynn among more. They don’t remember his name. He was probably much better buddies with teammates Carmelo Martinez, Tim Spehr, and Omar Olivares. In fact, all of them still talk weekly.

Randy Ready, welcome to the innocuous Hall of Hideous. If not for this post, he might never have a post written about him on a blog again.