DENVER — It was an innocuous question, one that was made for TV, one of those feel-good pregame show queries leading up to Opening Day — but what it spawned was a mystery to many for months. On March 27, as the Reds were wrapping things up in Goodyear, Ariz., several of the players were brought into the Zoom room at the team’s complex to do interviews in preparation for Opening Day. At the time, it was Jesse Winker’s turn.
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About eight minutes into the session, there was a call for any last questions; new Reds TV play-by-play man John Sadak asked about playing in front of fans on Opening Day, something that at the time was still novel after the 2020 season was played in empty ballparks.
“Is there anybody in your world, in your family, in your life, that is going to be in the stands that didn’t have a chance to be there last year?” Sadak asked.
“Yeah man, um … yeah,” Winker stopped.
He then got up and walked away, out of the room.
There are some players who obviously don’t like Zoom and don’t like being asked questions by the media. Jesse Winker has never been one of those. He’s one of the club’s friendliest players — not just to media but also to everyone who is in the team’s orbit.
That’s why it was so surprising when Winker’s abrupt departure left everyone staring at the team’s Zoom backdrop — a black background with the Reds, Reds.com and PNC Bank logos — for a strangely quiet 30 seconds. Rob Butcher, the team’s director of media relations, then popped up in front of the camera and said, “Hold on, guys, be right back.”
Seventy-eight seconds later, Winker came back into the frame.
“I’m just looking forward to seeing my family,” he said. “That’s it. Cool?”
And then he walked away, out of sight, interview over.
It was certainly strange at the moment, but still, it’s the type of thing that is easily forgotten hundreds of Zoom sessions later. It wasn’t until July 1, when the All-Star Game starters were announced, that all the dots were connected.
That “family” Winker was looking forward to seeing was really one specific family member: his daughter, Wren, born in May 2020, a little girl who had never been in the stands for one of his games before. But she would be there Opening Day, and leading up to it, Winker knew that.
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“It was the first game she was going to come to, and it meant a lot to me,” he said recently. “It’s been very emotional for me throughout the year because I want to just be able to stop and think about all the — everything that has gone on in her little life already, and sometimes I just catch myself thinking, ‘Holy cow, this is so cool.'”
Winker had talked his teammates’ ears off about Wren since the day she was born, May 27, 2020, but publicly he hadn’t said anything about her, hadn’t acknowledged her existence in the media. It wasn’t that he was hiding her, just that he didn’t know exactly what was the right avenue to talk about his young daughter publicly.
That avenue finally came July 1, the day the All-Star starters were announced during the middle of the team’s game with the Padres at Great American Ball Park. Winker was back on a Zoom after the team’s walk-off victory. A self-described “crier,” Winker teared up several times during the five minutes and 51 seconds he talked about reaching the All-Star Game.
He finished, “There’s a lot of people I need to sit up here and thank, but we’d probably be here for the next hour. I really want to thank my teammates and my family and my little girl at home, my daughter. Thank you.”
It was the first time he’d mentioned her, and it marked a departure from his approach earlier this year.
“It just felt right,” he said the next day. “It just felt right and I wanted to be able to talk about it and not cry about it.”
He failed.
“It’s hard. The more and more I talk about it, the easier it gets,” he said. “It’s emotional for me because there’s a lot of love for this little girl, not just from me but my entire family.”
His entire family — mom, dad, brothers, sister-in-law and nephew — were at Coors Field on Monday and will be there Tuesday, as Winker is introduced as the National League’s starting left fielder. In the stands, for her first All-Star Game, will be his daughter, Wren.
Wren Winker will be at Coors Field because of Jesse Winker. But in Jesse Winker’s mind, he is there because of Wren.
After hitting .298 and .299 in his first two seasons in the big leagues, Winker played in a career-high 113 games in 2019, but he saw his batting average dip to .269 and his on-base percentage drop to a respectable but disappointing .357 — hardly the .405 he put up in 89 games in 2018.
Winker had established himself as a big-leaguer, but just what kind of player was he? He’s never been a power hitter, but more of an average guy. To be charitable, he’s not fast and his defense in left field was, also to be charitable, not winning him any awards.
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So if he was hitting .269, just what kind of value did he bring to the Reds? After the 2019 season, the Reds stockpiled outfielders, adding Nick Castellanos and Shogo Akiyama, while Aristides Aquino had just come off a historic first month in the big leagues. First base was occupied, so where else would the left-handed Winker go?
He had hit a crossroads in his career and in his life, and he knew it. And then Wren arrived.
“I was kind of stalling out, and nobody knew that,” Winker said, looking back to that time. “I was kind of stalling out, in my own head at least. I didn’t know — it was kind of like Groundhog Day and then boom, she came into the world and it gave me a whole new bit of purpose.”
In addition to purpose, Wren gave Winker perspective.
“It’s the first time in my life that it’s not about me anymore,” he said. “It’s about here and when you wake up and have a responsibility outside of yourself, outside of what you’re going to cook yourself for breakfast that day, it’s impactful, right?”
Now when he is home, he is Jesse the dad, and he devotes everything to that job. And when he is on the field, he is Jesse the baseball player, fully committed and locked in, and he has never, ever been as good at that job as he is right now: .301 average, .921 OPS, 19 home runs at the All-Star break. And he knows why.
“To be honest with you, having that little girl is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “She’s only 1 and she doesn’t know that, but I thank her all the time.”
Jesse is the third of Joe and Karen’s three boys. He’s not just the younger brother to Joey and Ryan, but since the Reds took him with the 49th pick in the 2012 draft, he’s been nearly everyone’s little brother.
Winker’s like a Labrador retriever — goofy, good-natured, lover of everyone and loved by everyone. Anyone who owns a Lab can sing their praises — even when they’re infuriating, you can’t be mad at them. And on the field? Winker’s that kid who never seemed like he was trying but was still as good as or better than anyone else. He’d never rub it in anyone’s face; it was just effortless.
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Tucker Barnhart, drafted three years before Winker, still laughs about the first story he heard about the kid with the beautiful left-handed stroke. The first time an 18-year-old Winker met then-Reds field coordinator Freddie Benavides, he said, “Wink can do two things — Wink can swing the stick and Wink can really swing the stick.”
“That tells you all you need to know,” Barnhart said, laughing after telling the story.
Teammates with the Reds since Winker was called up in 2017 as a 23-year-old, Barnhart has watched Winker grow. With a locker situated next to his for many of those seasons, he’s heard plenty from Winker. Whether it’s singing, rapping, talking, joking, laughing, whatever — it’s rarely quiet around Winker.
At his heart, Winker has always been a big kid. A big kid with a big swing, but a big kid nonetheless. As with any youngest sibling, he’ll get teased by his elders about being mom’s favorite. And yes, he’s a momma’s boy. Even in the middle of an interview Monday outside of Coors Field, he was asked about his dad throwing him batting practice growing up. Those cliches are tough to get around in sportswriting, because they’re so easy, and because Joe Winker built his sons a batting cage and threw BP to all of them daily. It’s part of the origin story, how his dad and brothers helped make him into an All-Star. Still, “make sure you mention my mom,” he said, being sure to mention Karen by name.
(“First off,” Karen Winker wrote in a text to confirm that he’s her favorite, “I don’t have a favorite. They’re all spectacular. But his brothers would definitely say he’s the favorite.”)
Two years ago in Atlanta, Karen Winker was in town with her oldest son, Joey, and his wife, Layne, who was then pregnant with Joe and Karen’s first grandchild. JJ Winker was born in October 2019. The soon-to-be grandparents were over the moon. But so was the soon-to-be-uncle.
Before even being a blood uncle, he’s been “Uncle Jesse” to Jay Bruce’s two sons, sending them Buffalo Bills jerseys to try to turn the two Texans into fans of his favorite team. He’ll visit the Bruce family every offseason, spending as much time with the boys as with Jay.
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Last week, video of Winker singing along with Nick Castellanos’ son, Liam, went viral. It showed, basically, two kids having fun at the ballpark.
Winker loves kids so much that he’s hoping to one day write a kids book.
“Maybe a series or a novel — I don’t know what about,” Winker said. “I just want to do that.”
But sometimes around the time he became an uncle, he found out he was going to be a dad. It’s not something he was planning on or planned for, but sometimes that’s what life is like.
“I don’t think you’re ever ready to be a dad,” he said. “I had no idea, but I learned very, very quickly on the fly. I knew from the second I found out that I was going to be a father, I was all-in. I was all-in.”
The Mead notebooks are $1.99 at Target. Winker has two of them, one with a black cover and another with a red cover.
Every day, he writes in them. One is for his thoughts, the other for his feelings.
“I’ve learned so much from this 1-year-old baby of mine that I like to write things down so I don’t forget,” he said. “I look forward to sharing with her one day because I know there’s going to come a time when we have a conversation or conversations and I look forward to telling her what I learned from you. At this time when you were 2 or 1 or whatever. It’s cool, man.”
This habit is about as old as Wren, something he started last year. Already, he’ll go back and flip through the pages, to find out what he’s made it through. It’s not a way to search for answers, to try to repeat things for an end result — it’s to show where he’s going and what he’s overcome.
“I think it shows growth,” Winker said. “I like to go back and see how, see what may have been bothering me at one point in my life.”
Everyone had extra time last year, but his was just a little different. Winker, like most baseball players, did what he could do to stay in shape for the postponed baseball season, but he was also a new dad. There were new experiences every day.
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Sometimes, he writes mundane things like what he did that day, what he ate or how he slept. Other times, it’s quotes, things he heard. Then there’s also the feelings, the fears, the questions — all the things that go with parenting, in or out of a pandemic.
“Being in quarantine and being a new dad, it just kind of had me thinking a lot,” Winker said. “For me, when I leave the field, I’m Jesse the dad. When I’m at the field, I’m Jesse the baseball player, and that’s how I like to break things up. Writing allows me to blend both of those. I just enjoy. I don’t do it for any particular reason, I just do it — I like to do things because I like doing them.”
Writing is a passion, one that one day he hopes to explore more, maybe writing children’s books, maybe making music. For now, it’s journaling. Often, he’ll walk out to the field for batting practice with ink smudges on his hand, the perils of being left-handed and using cheap pens.
“To be honest with you, it’s two bucks, but to me, it’s the world,” he said. “As long as I have that and my fanny pack, I’m good. You can take everything else.”
Monday’s entry will pretty much write itself, as Winker went through the All-Star experience — interviews, batting practice with Fernando Tatis Jr. and the rest of the game’s biggest stars and took in an epic Home Run Derby from the sidelines.
But it’ll be a moment after being followed by MLB Network cameras and hitting balls into the seats of Coors Field that will live inside those notebooks. In there, he’ll write about looking into the stands from the field to find those people that mean so much to him, the people who got him there.
Scanning the hundreds in the stands, he’ll note the feeling of seeing his mom, then his brother, Ryan, who was holding Wren, motioning them to the front row atop the camera well at the end of the first-base dugout and taking Wren from his brother’s arms and back onto the field and walking her through the crowd on the actual field full of baseball’s biggest names. Just a man and the person he loves the most.
“It’s perfect,” he said.
(Top photo of Winker and Wren: C. Trent Rosecrans / The Athletic)