The death of a bass boat and 10 other stories that explain Bryan Reynolds -

1. When Bryan Reynolds was a little boy, maybe 3 or 4 years old, his father, Greg, purchased a bass boat. Greg had visions of spending every Saturday with his son fishing their favorite spots on Percy Priest Lake, the reservoir near their home in Nolensville, Tenn. That, Greg decided, was where father and son would bond. And after a few trips together, Reynolds was hooked.

“He was starting to take to it,” Greg recalled, “but then came baseball.”

Reynolds picked up a plastic bat one day and started to hit foam balls around the front yard. One swing led to another, and soon Reynolds was signed up for T-ball. “That was bittersweet for me,” Greg said. He parked the boat behind the house and contented himself with watching youth baseball every weekend until his son tired of baseball.

He never did.

“Needless to say, that bass boat ended up gathering water,” Greg said, laughing. “It basically became a planter in the backyard. But Bryan was having a blast.”

2. Reynolds is perhaps the most soft-spoken player in the Pirates clubhouse. Apparently, that’s nothing new. His only sibling, Amanda, is older than he by a year and a half, and until Reynolds reached the first grade, “she was his sole means of communication,” according to their father.

“When he was a little kid, I thought, man, I wonder if he’s ever going to speak,” Greg said in a phone interview earlier this week. “Eventually, we figured out that he was just letting his big sister speak for him.”

3. Reynolds’ swing has always packed a punch. He was 6 when his father set down a batting tee, crouched and taught him how to “squish the bug” with his back foot. Greg had Reynolds practice pivoting on his back foot without swinging the bat. “One more,” Greg said, and Reynolds squished the bug and — oops — swung with all his might. The bat smashed into Greg’s knee.

“He was rolling around in pain,” Reynolds, now 24, told MLB.com. “I ran and hid behind the car.”

“Took my knee right out from under me,” Greg remembered. “I was trying to reassure him that I was all right, but I couldn’t get to my feet.”

4. On the same day the Brentwood High School baseball team’s tryouts began in the summer of 2009, Reynolds injured his hand sliding across home plate in a travel-ball game. He insisted on trying out anyway because he hoped to earn a spot that fall on the junior varsity team as a freshman.

Batting practice was underway when he arrived. A coach heard Reynolds, a natural right-handed hitter, could switch-hit and asked him to try left-handed. (Reynolds first tried the left side when he was 8, but it wasn’t until he attended a Vanderbilt hitting camp as a high school junior that he switch-hit in games.)

Reynolds stepped in the left-handed batter’s box, his injured hand throbbing. He hit the first pitch out of the ballpark. Then he had to stop. Reynolds had a broken hand. He was excused from the rest of the tryouts.

5. Reynolds never spent a day below varsity. When he was a freshman, the Brentwood ace was left-hander Robbie Ray — now a starting pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks. At the team’s first preseason game, a cluster of major-league scouts sat behind home plate.

“It looked like a shootout at the O.K. Corral every time he was about ready to pitch,” Greg said, laughing. “There were like 12 radar guns pointing at him.”

By the next year, Ray was in pro ball, and scouts had turned their interest to Reynolds. Several teams, including the Seattle Mariners and Baltimore Orioles, contacted Reynolds and informed him that they planned to scout him regularly. Today, Reynolds stands 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds, but back then he was spindly. His father nicknamed him “Stick Boy.”

“Fondly, by the way,” Greg clarified. “He was never short like his dad, but he was always skinny — not like his dad, unfortunately.”

6. Toward the end of his junior year at Brentwood, Reynolds collided with the outfield fence and suffered a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder. As soon as Reynolds was told the injury required surgery, he decided to phone Vanderbilt head baseball coach Tim Corbin. Reynolds wanted to give Corbin a chance to take back his scholarship and give it to someone healthier.

“When Bryan called, both he and I were shaking,” Greg recalled. “But Tim Corbin said, ‘We’re invested in you. You’ve got a place here. It doesn’t matter how long it takes.’ From that moment on, I knew Tim Corbin and Vanderbilt were special.”

Reynolds rehabbed and returned for his senior season, though he wasn’t allowed to play defense. Scouts had lost interest. When Reynolds visited Vanderbilt for his official recruiting visit, his right arm was in a sling. That was the weekend he met catcher Jason Delay, a fellow incoming freshman who’d become his roommate and, much later, a groomsman in his wedding.

7. Delay still ribs Reynolds about how he stole a starting spot as a college freshman and never gave it back. In the Commodores’ season opener, their starting left fielder failed to get a bunt down, fouling out to the catcher, and was yanked. Reynolds replaced him. He promptly smacked a pinch-hit single, then scored on a “ridiculous” acrobatic slide, Delay remembered.

Reynolds started the next two games, going 6-for-10 for the weekend, and was named the SEC freshman of the week. He then started every remaining game that season, leading the team with a .338 batting average — five points better than teammate Dansby Swanson, the No. 1 pick in the major-league draft a year later — as Vanderbilt won its first College World Series championship.

What still strikes Delay about Reynolds’ freshman year is how bad he was during the fall season. Seriously, Delay said, in Vanderbilt’s intrasquad games Reynolds had maybe two hits total. It was like that every year, too. Reynolds couldn’t hit in the fall, yet in the spring he raked. So when Reynolds batted .188 in the Arizona Fall League last year, Delay texted him, “You never have been able to hit in the fall anyway. Don’t worry about it too much.”

8. After batting .330 with a 1.064 OPS in his junior season at Vanderbilt, Reynolds was projected to be a first-round pick. But he wasn’t selected until late in the second round in 2016, pick No. 59, by the San Francisco Giants.

“It was painful to see the disappointment on his face,” his father said.

Reynolds could have returned to Vanderbilt for his senior season, but he felt there wasn’t much he could do to improve his draft stock. He signed with San Francisco for a $1.35 million bonus. Of the seven players drafted ahead of Reynolds in 2016 who have reached the majors, his 2.3 WAR, according to Baseball Reference, is better than all of theirs combined.

9. On Jan. 15, 2018, Delay got a text from Reynolds. In full, it read, “Uh oh.”

The Giants had traded Reynolds to the Pirates alongside reliever Kyle Crick for former National League MVP Andrew McCutchen. The trade reunited two Vanderbilt roommates. Delay had been drafted by the Giants in 2016, too, but he went back to school and was taken by the Pirates in the fourth round in 2017. Delay, now playing for Double-A Altoona, shares a two-bedroom apartment with Reynolds during Pirates spring training in Bradenton, Fla.

The pressure of being McCutchen’s heir apparent got to Reynolds in his first spring training with the Pirates. He went 1-for-21. He was pressing at the plate. His father would give him pep talks after every game. “After that,” Reynolds recalled earlier this season, “I stopped trying to be the replacement.”

“Haven’t needed (pep talks) since he’s been with the big-league club,” Greg said.

10. Greg had just subscribed to MiLB.tv to watch his son’s Triple-A Indianapolis games when Reynolds was called up to the majors April 20. Greg has since forgotten his login information because, like at Vanderbilt, Reynolds shows no signs of leaving the Pirates’ lineup. He made his debut against the Giants, of all teams, walked up to Johnny Cash and singled in his second at-bat.

“Now it seems like he might make it (in the majors),” Greg deadpanned.

Reynolds entered this weekend with a .354/.413/.552 batting line, with six home runs to pair with a .965 OPS and whispers of a National League rookie-of-the-year campaign mounting.

“I wish I could say I was accustomed to having a kid that could hit almost .360 in the majors, but that would be a bald-faced lie,” Greg said. “I’m not knocked over, because he’s always had really great hands and hand-eye coordination. I knew he’d hit for good average. I thought that meant .255 or .260. Not .360.”

Delay and Reynolds are in a big group text with their Vanderbilt buddies — a crew currently celebrating the school’s second College World Series title — and the chat has lit up lately with talk of the season Reynolds is having in Pittsburgh. Some are arguing that he deserves to be in the All-Star Game.

“No one is really surprised, to be honest,” Delay said.

11. Reynolds’ parents, Greg and Michelle, met while working at an insurance office in Nashville.

“I trained her initially,” Greg said, “and she’s been training me since.”

Despite living in Maryland for a few years while Greg was in law school — the kids were both born in Baltimore — the Reynolds family has always considered Tennessee home. It seems it’ll stay that way. Reynolds married his high school sweetheart, Blair, last winter, and the newlyweds are scouring the market for a home near Brentwood. Reynolds’ sister and her husband also live nearby.

“I’ve been really blessed,” Greg said.

In the offseason, Reynolds trains at Vanderbilt with Delay. And on off days, when he’s free for a few hours, Reynolds calls up his dad and they go fishing.

(Photo: Steve Mitchell / USA Today)

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