A coach's heart means everything to Tigers prospect Jace Jung
Texas Tech's Ray Hayward helped Jace Jung develop his swing, and inspired Jung in a different way after a heart and kidney transplant.
theathletic.com
To Tigers prospect Jace Jung, a college coach’s heart means everything
Cody StavenhagenSep 22, 2022
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On a warm Texas afternoon, Jace Jung connected with a baseball that kept climbing higher and higher into the Lubbock sky. It was the ninth inning against Kansas State, and the ball soared past the right-field scoreboard at Rip Griffin Stadium to put Texas Tech ahead 7-6. A walk-off home run.
After he rounded the bases, when the adrenaline finally started to fade, Jung told reporters he was dedicating it to Texas Tech assistant Ray Hayward.
At the time, Hayward had been away from the team for almost four weeks, battling serious complications from what was supposed to be a routine heart procedure.
Jung was used to looking up at his coach — who would often sit near scouts in the stands — before every at-bat. Hayward, with his quick humor and wealth of knowledge from a lifetime around the game, had that sort of calming presence. When Jung looked up before that at-bat against Kansas State, Hayward was not there. No one was sure whether he would ever return.
“Hayward is always with me,” Jung said that afternoon. “Right now, he’s struggling, getting back on his feet. And that was for him.”
(Zac BonDurant / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
When the Detroit Tigers drafted Jung at No. 12 this summer, evaluators all noted Jung’s unconventional setup at the plate. He holds his bat almost parallel to the ground, shades of Rod Carew. It looks unorthodox, almost uncomfortable. But it worked when Jung hit that home run against Kansas State. It worked when Jung hit .335 with 14 home runs in his final season at Tech.
That funky setup started during work in the cage, where Jung put in time almost every day as a freshman.
Hayward is a special assistant for Texas Tech, which comes with a complicated set of NCAA regulations. He can observe players but is not permitted to instruct. Anything he picks up must be relayed to players through other coaches. Hayward is still around every day and develops close relationships with players. He had a special interest in Jung because his older brother Josh — who recently made his MLB debut with the Rangers — also played in Lubbock. The younger Jung had been around the program for years before he ever put on a Red Raiders uniform.
So Hayward would often watch Jung hit, and he started watching Jung’s hands, noticed he was wrapping the bat too far around his head. The extra movement was making Jung late on inside pitches. Hayward had an idea — for Jung to change the angle of his bat, almost lay it down to help create a more direct path to the ball — and relayed it to the coaches. It seemed odd, until Jung heard the full explanation.
“Longer through the zone, more bat lag, more contact points in the zone,” Jung said. “It was one of those things where you hear all the positives and it was like, ‘Why don’t more people do this?’”
Jung began trying the new approach, and it worked. He used it during 2020 hitting sessions and in summer ball. Over time, the setup became more and more exaggerated. There were times Hayward and Texas Tech head coach Tim Tadlock thought about saying something. But Jung continued to hit, so there was no going back. The bat placement is now a trademark part of Jung’s game, and any time he is asked about it, he gives credit to Ray Hayward.
Hayward was an invaluable resource for the Texas Tech program — an experienced coach, a trusted voice. He was an MLB pitcher in the late ’80s for the Padres and Rangers, worked as an area scout for the Tigers from 1994-99 and became a respected pitching coach at Oklahoma before returning to scouting with the Marlins. Hayward has spent his life in ballparks, feels most at peace there.
“Just a special guy, special coach,” Jung said. “He’s just one of those people that has stories left and right. You can sit there and listen to him for days.”
So when he was absent all spring and into the summer, it felt like a piece of the Texas Tech program was missing.
It was supposed to be a routine procedure.
“A minor heart valve thing,” Hayward said.
One morning this spring, Hayward, who is 61, drove himself and his wife, Jeannie, in his truck from Lubbock to Fort Worth, where he was scheduled for the procedure. Just a week or so earlier, he had been throwing batting practice to Jace Jung. He went into the hospital on March 21, and it’s still difficult to explain what went wrong. The simplest way to put it: Hayward had a series of major complications both during and after the surgery.
“When they went in and fixed it, it threw my heart off-rhythm,” Hayward said.
Hayward’s heart rate kept rising and he went into atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can be life-threatening. Doctors kept using cardioversion, or low-energy shocks, to try to restore a normal rhythm. He developed severe swelling and fluid around his heart. A heart valve started leaking blood.
“It just went from one thing to another,” Hayward said.
At one point during a run of five surgeries, doctors came out and told Jeannie things seemed to be going well. About an hour later, they returned with different news. The bleeding was bad, and they weren’t sure the procedure was going to work.
Hayward went in expecting to return to Lubbock in three or four days. He did not wake up for more than three weeks. Doctors put him in a medically induced coma, hoping it would allow his heart to restore its normal rhythm.
As he fought through the complications, Hayward needed the aid of machines to keep his heart functioning. He was placed on life support and connected to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, machine, which performs the actions of a heart and lungs — pumping blood outside the body, adding oxygen, removing carbon dioxide and pumping the blood back into the body.
“The minute they took me off that ECMO machine,” Hayward said, “it went right back haywire again.”
When Hayward finally awoke from the coma, he slowly started answering commands by blinking or nodding his head. Hayward stayed on the machine, and doctors eventually determined he needed a heart transplant. His kidneys had failed, so he would need a kidney transplant, too.
Ray Hayward, second from right, working with Texas Tech players including Josh Jung, Jace’s brother. (Courtesy of Texas Tech Athletics)
Tim Tadlock still remembers the day vividly. His Red Raiders had just pulled into Grand Canyon University to begin a midweek series. It was April 5, only a few weeks since Hayward was put in the induced coma. The players had started to learn more about Ray’s situation.
“You could just tell there were guys that just weren’t present because they wanted to know how he was doing,” Tadlock said, “because he was supposed to come home, and he didn’t.”
Early on, Jeannie was keeping a large number of people updated through a group text. Tadlock says he could tell something was off with his team that day; they were all worried about Hayward.
“We said, ‘Look guys, he’s gonna be fine,'” Tadlock said. “At that time I really thought he’d be home a lot sooner.”
But no one was quite sure what to think.
“There was a time,” Jung said, “where we didn’t know if we were gonna have him for too much longer.”
The Red Raiders lost both games of a midweek series to Grand Canyon, and Jung hit a small slump. He went 2 for 14 in the four games between the first Grand Canyon game and the homer against Kansas State.
Tadlock thinks Hayward’s absence might have been especially hard on Jung. Hayward was an important emotional sounding board for young athletes going through the rigors of college baseball.
“It was definitely shocking and emotional for everybody in the clubhouse, especially people who were close with him,” Jung said. “You don’t want to lose a guy like that.”
Hayward had come to Lubbock in the first place because of Tadlock. When Tadlock got the job at Texas Tech in 2012, he had wanted to get the best pitching coach he could find.
When Hayward was first offered the job, some people thought he would never take it. He was raised in Enid, Okla., and other than his foray into pro baseball, everyone thought he was an Oklahoman for life. But Hayward decided moving six hours south wasn’t too bad. He had been able to stay based in Oklahoma as a scout, but he desperately missed working hands-on with players. As a scout, sometimes he would fly in one day, watch a game, and fly out the next.
He missed the relationships you build in this game, the ones that are hard to replicate when you’re not around the same people day after day.
So Hayward moved to Lubbock, where he watched his son play high school baseball and college ball at Lubbock Christian. He and Jeannie became grandparents and started to fall in love with the community.
“My son’s married and got a little boy,” Hayward said. “When I saw that little boy I thought, ‘We might not be moving from Lubbock.’ My wife, no way. I’m gonna have to blindfold her and tie her up to get her
out of here. We may be here for good.”
Jace Jung could relate. A native of San Antonio, he watched his brother play at Texas Tech and decided to follow in Josh’s footsteps. Lubbock can be a complicated place, out in the loneliness of west Texas. There are dust storms and flat, dry ground that stretches to the horizon. On a map, it’s easy to see how far removed Lubbock is from everywhere else.
Texas Tech, too, is known for a rowdy and rabid fanbase, one whose passions can almost clash with Lubbock’s otherwise low-key vibe.
Jace and Josh Jung both fell in love with the town and make their homes there now.
“It’s hard to explain,” Jung said, “because people think there’s not much out there. But when you are in that community, everybody knows everybody and everybody wants to help you.”
Ray’s support system eventually started posting online updates to CaringBridge, a website for sharing health updates, and all sorts of people donated money to help cover his medical expenses. Texas Tech’s FCA chapter held a prayer rally on the baseball field in his honor. Players like Jace Jung spent a lot of time thinking, learning, reflecting.
“We thought he’d be back in two weeks, three weeks,” Jung said. “All of a sudden things started going wrong with the surgery and all that stuff. I’m just sitting there, like, ‘Man is this really happening?'”
Hayward wore No. 13 in his playing days, so those following his journey began setting alarms for 1 p.m.
Each day at 13:00 hours, they would say a prayer.
On the eve of the Big 12 tournament in late May, Tadlock and assistant coach J-Bob Thomas visited Hayward in the hospital. His condition had improved enough that he had been transferred to a transplant hospital, but no one was quite sure how this would all end. He was on the wait list for a new heart.
Tadlock and Thomas talked with Hayward for at least two hours that day, about his recovery, about their families, about baseball.
What struck Tadlock most was something one of Hayward’s doctors said. Every day, Hayward would rise from his bed and go sit in a chair nearby. When Hayward first arrived at the transplant hospital, his muscles felt weak from all the time in the coma. Simply getting up and getting in the chair was a fight. Most transplant patients, the doctor said, cannot do much besides lay in bed. But there Hayward would be, in the chair practically from sun up to sun down.
“The doctor shared with us that he hadn’t had too many patients in need of a kidney and a heart transplant show that type of commitment,” Tadlock said.
For Hayward to be put on the national transplant list, he had to show he was strong enough to be a viable candidate for a new heart. He remained connected to the ECMO machine, with all its wires and beeps becoming a part of life. Hayward had to first show he could walk, and on May 2, he left nurses in awe when he rose and walked nearly 20 feet for the first time. They said they had never seen anyone on an ECMO machine make it that far.
“The way he tells it, they’d ask him to do something and they’d think it was a big task,” Tadlock said. “Of course, his whole life if somebody asked him to do something, most of the time he did more. That’s just how he thinks and how he’s always done things.”
Eventually, Hayward was walking up and down the hall, nearly 300 feet. He got on the transplant list, and now in that hospital room, he was joking with Tadlock about all the time he spent sitting in that chair. My butt kinda hurts, he said.
All the while, Jeannie sat by her husband’s side, through every battle, every surgery, every long night. The family started hearing from more and more people in the baseball community. Pro scouts — some Ray knew and some who weren’t even in the industry the last time he was a scout — were doing whatever they could to help. They transferred Marriott hotel points to Jeannie, so she could sleep in a hotel rather than the hospital.
At 10:30 on that night in late May, a doctor entered the hospital room with good news. They had found Ray Hayward a new heart.
The day before Jace Jung set off for Lakeland, Fla., to begin his professional baseball career, he stopped by the Texas Tech baseball complex.
He opened a door, and sitting there in a chair was Ray Hayward. After weeks of inpatient rehab, he returned home to Lubbock on July 22.
“He just had the biggest smile when I walked in,” Jung said. “I thought he was gonna cry when he saw me.”
Jung got a little choked up, too.
“I was like, ‘You can’t do that!’” Jung said.
The heavy feelings did not last too long. Soon Hayward was acting like his old self, telling stories and cracking jokes. Hayward kept making self-deprecating remarks about how much weight he had lost and how skinny he looked.
“It kind of helped the soul a little bit, getting to see him before I left, knowing he’s OK,” Jung said.
Hayward made sure to wish Jung well on his journey into pro baseball. He says Jung is destined to hit in the big leagues.
“You watch him every day like I did, and every time he steps up to the plate you’re going, ‘OK what’s about to happen?'” Hayward said. “That’s when you know it’s pretty special.”
Hayward is still in Lubbock now, doing well despite a demanding recovery ahead. Even when he received his heart transplant, it wasn’t smooth sailing. His aorta crumbled like paper during the transplant. Another surgeon had to come in and help.
“Every doctor I saw after I got over to their hospital just looked at me and shook their head: ‘I have no idea how you’re here,'” Hayward said.
Hayward’s body, though, has accepted the new heart well. He had a checkup in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, where he talked with one of the nurses who watched over him. She told him a story about the day they brought him into the transplant hospital.
“I told them when they were bringing you over, ‘That guy, I don’t know why you’re bringing him, he’s not going to make it,’” the nurse had said.
Said Hayward: “Well, I’m glad you were wrong.”
Ray and Jeannie sit together in the mornings now. They talk and drink coffee and pray. Hayward often tries to process everything he has been through.
“It’s hard for me to fathom,” he said. “Every morning it’s hard to fathom that I got a different heart and kidney. It’s hard to understand, really grasp it and get your head around it.”
He had a checkup recently, and things still seem to be trending in the right direction. The doctors weren’t too worried, but his heart rate was a little high.
“I told them, ‘Well it’s 20 years old,” Hayward said. “It’s trying to work in a 61-year-old body.”
Hayward has good days and bad days. On the bad days, it’s hard to get out of bed. He is on a plethora of medications, some that zap his strength. His body is still adjusting to the new heart, still recovering from so many surgeries and so much time in a hospital bed.
Credit, again, to Jeannie.
“Of course my wife is good at calling me out on stuff, calling me a big ol’ wussy,” Hayward said. “That makes me want to get up and prove her wrong. She does a good job.”
One August day, Jung sat in the stands at LMCU ballpark, home of the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps, and thought about his old coach and all he learned.
“You got to be careful, and you’ve got to enjoy every moment, reflect on the good moments in life and not so much the bad ones,” Jung said. “That’s kind of what I was doing as he was going through this, reflecting on all the good times we had together, the talks and everything.”
Even on bad days, it is difficult to keep Hayward away from the baseball field. He has cardiac rehab in the mornings and often works with a Texas Tech trainer in the afternoons. He’s able to ride a stationary bike and handles exercise well. But there are still days he only has enough energy to do one form of rehab. He can still get worn out just walking across the baseball field.
On one particularly hard day last week, Tadlock told Hayward he understood if Hayward wanted to go home.
“No,” Hayward said. “I spent enough time inside. This is good for me.”
“So you sit there and you share that with your team,” Tadlock said. “‘Look guys, there’s gonna be days you don’t feel good. There’s gonna be days you don’t feel 100 percent. You still got to show up.’”
And that reminded Tadlock of another story. Hayward had only been back in Lubbock for a few days when Jeannie left the house to get her nails done. Tadlock was at Rip Griffin Stadium working a baseball camp when another coach came by and tapped him on the shoulder.
“You won’t believe who’s in there,” the coach said. “It’s Hayward.”
Tadlock was in disbelief until he learned the reason Hayward had grabbed the truck keys and snuck out of the house. Toby Speight, the nurse practitioner who had watched over Hayward’s rehab, had a teenage son who plays baseball. Hayward told him that if Speight or his son ever came to Lubbock, he would be sure to see them.
“He had been home less than a week. Probably four days,” Tadlock said. “I’m telling you, if the guy tells you he’s gonna do something, just consider it done.”
Sure enough, Speight and his son came to that baseball camp at Texas Tech. So there Hayward was on a hot summer day, sitting up in the stands, talking with one of the nurses who had helped keep him alive.
“They said at the hospital it’ll be a good year before you feel right,” Hayward said. “That’s the only problem I have now, is patience.”
