The “pitcher with unbelievable stuff, just with no control over where it’s going” is a well known player type in baseball. In fact, the most enduring character from one of the most famous baseball movies — Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn from Major League — is that exact player.
You could say that the Vaughn character drew inspiration from many different players over the years. However, according to the director of the movie, the player who most inspired the pitcher was a Yankee: Ryne Duren. Today happens to be Duren’s birthday, so let’s look back at the original “Wild Thing.”
Rinold George “Ryne” Duren
Born: February 22, 1929 (Cazenovia, WI)
Died: January 6, 2011 (Lake Wales, FL)
Yankees Tenure: 1958-61
Duren was born in Wisconsin in 1929 and grew up working on his family farm. He would credit the manual labor he did in his youth with helping develop his arm muscles. On the baseball field, he tried out for his high school’s baseball team as a pitcher, but poor control led him to hitting and injuring a teammate, as the team opted to use him as a position player instead. In 1945, he came down with rheumatic fever, which left him bed-ridden for several months and also caused problems with his vision.
After high school, he began playing for local teams, and returned to the mound. While he often couldn’t control where the ball was going, he had an absolutely blazing fastball, which led to the St. Louis Browns taking a chance and signing him in 1949.
Even after that signing, it would be several years before Duran saw the mound in a major league game. His aforementioned poor vision caused problems with control and seeing the catcher’s signs in the minors. Over the course of his first two seasons in the minors, he issued 271 walks in 275 innings. Eye doctors encouraged him to give up baseball, but he was too much of a sicko to do so. Instead, Duren began wearing thick, tinted “Coke bottle” glasses, which he would do throughout his career.
Duren never truly would rein in his problems with walks, but his other numbers, especially his strikeouts, eventually became too much to ignore. He got the call up to the big leagues in 1954, joining the Baltimore Orioles — where the Browns had moved to that year. His one appearance that year didn’t go great and the O’s returned him to the minors the following year. While he improved his control somewhat upon going back down, Baltimore ended up dealing him to the Kansas City Athletics.
Upon moving to Kansas City, Duran got a chance back in the big leagues, and started to develop his reputation as the hardest thrower around, and someone you didn’t want to face … just not necessarily because he was really good. He put up a 5.27 ERA in 42.2 innings with KC, while he walked 30 batters and hit two others in that time. Despite that, he would soon find himself on the move again, and to a team higher in the standings.
Back in May, Billy Martin and several other Yankees had been involved in the famed “Copacabana incident.” Martin had the reputation of a troublemaker, and the incident was something of a final straw. At the trade deadline a few weeks after, they sent him to the A’s in a multi-player deal, with Duren among those going the other way.
To start, the Yankees sent Duren back down to the minors, where he impressed. That led to the team bringing him back up for the 1958 season. In his first full season in the bigs, Duren posted a 2.02 ERA in 75.2 innings, while recording a league high 19 saves. While he still issued plenty of walks, that season got him a second-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting, as he helped the Yankees to a World Series title. Duren got off to a bumpy start in said Fall Classic, allowing a walk-off single to the Braves’ Bill Bruton in the opener, but he rebounded to to earn the save in Game 3 with two scoreless frames and then won the win-or-go-home Game 6 back in Milwaukee with 4.2 innings of one-run ball, preserving a 2-2 game into extras before the Yanks scored two in the 10th.
Meanwhile, Duren was also becoming quite the character on and off the mound. His wildness, iffy vision, and trademark glasses have already been mentioned, but it goes beyond that. When called upon, Duren would opt to hop the Yankee Stadium outfield fence instead of open the bullpen door. Upon reaching the mound, he would then often intentionally sail his first warm up pitch way over the catcher’s head, playing up his wildness and trying to strike a little fear into opposing batters.
All of that stuff is pretty amusing, but Duren also had to deal with some issues off the field. Throughout his career, Duren battled alcoholism and related mental health issues. At a later stop in his career, he threatened suicide, only to be talked down by his then-Washington Senators manager Gil Hodges. After finishing his playing career, Duren got sober and spent much of his later life as a speaker and counsilor on addiction issues.
On the mound, Duren fell away after notching a 1.88 ERA in 76.2 innings 1959. He was sub-replacement level for the AL champs in 1960 and the Yankees eventually dealt him away to the expansion team Los Angeles Angels in May 1961. He spent the rest of his career as a journeyman, never quite managing to harness his raw stuff into anything consistent. One bit of trivia about him is that late Cubs legend Ryne Sandberg was named after the pitcher (many kids in the 1980s and ’90s with baseball-loving parents were subsequently named after Sandberg).
Upon his death in 2011, the always quotable Yogi Berra had another one:
“Ryne could throw the heck out of the ball. He threw fear in some hitters. I remember he had several pairs of glasses, but it didn’t seem like he saw good in any of them.”
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series here.