LAS VEGAS — The fifth in an occasional series of profiles on Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.
Mike Davis spent 10 seasons in the major leagues, where he played for Billy Martin and next to Rickey Henderson. He topped 20 home runs twice and stole more than 20 bases three times.
He was, by all measures, an exceptional player.
Yet in Los Angeles he’s remembered — when he’s remembered at all — for just one plate appearance.
Dodger Mike Davis, center, is congratulated by teammate Mickey Hatcher, right, and Rick Dempsey following his fourth inning two-run home run in Game 5 of the World Series on Oct. 20, 1988.
(Eric Risberg/AP)
“One thing in 10 years,” Davis sighs, more in acceptance than disappointment. “That’s boiling your career down.”
That trip to the plate ended in a two-out walk. Yet without that walk, Kirk Gibson doesn’t hobble out of the dugout to hit one of the most memorable home runs in Dodger history. Without that walk, the Dodgers don’t win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series — and maybe they don’t win the World Series at all.
And without that walk Vin Scully never utters one of his memorable calls: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”
“A lot of things had to go right for us,” Davis said. “And it turns out that it was so historic, that’s all they’ve talked about for the last 30, 35, years.”
For Davis, 66, that was half a lifetime ago. Since then he’s made and lost more than one small fortune, got divorced, cycled through a number of careers, reconnected with his father and seen his deep relationship with God challenged by a politician.
“It’s happened that way,” Davis said over a late breakfast of French toast and bacon at a diner not far from the Las Vegas strip.
“I’ve made mistakes in my life,” he added quietly. “I’ve made mistakes, yeah.”
Before he became a Dodger, he and Oakland teammate Dwayne Murphy each agreed to loan a budding hip-hop musician and former A’s batboy named Stanley Burrell $20,000 to produce his debut album. Burrell would release that album under his stage name, MC Hammer, and go on to win three Grammys and sell more than 50 million records worldwide. But the singer failed to honor his agreement with Davis and Murphy, forcing them to sue.
That wasn’t the only dispute Davis would have with Burrell and his team over money, nor the only bump on the road from World Series stardom to the rest of his life.
He owned a condominium complex for a while before selling at a loss when he had trouble collecting rents. Then he and Murphy opened a modest nine-store chain of clothing outlets that also closed at a loss.
“That was a nightmare,” Davis said.
He coached at a high school in San Ramon, Calif., where Davis managed the baseball team and Murphy the football team. Davis was then a minor league hitting instructor for four teams and two organizations, tried online sales, currency trading and even sold insurance — first life insurance, then burial insurance.
“It was sad because you would prey on people that lost somebody, and you’d come in and try, with the guilt trip, to get them to to make sure their kids weren’t paying for their burial,” he said. “I felt like the Grim Reaper.”
Nothing worked. And soon Davis’ marriage was crumbling as well.
Former Dodgers outfielder Mike Davis throws a ball during batting practice for the Nevada Sports Academy 16U traveling baseball team on Sept. 24 at Faith Lutheran Middle School & High School in Las Vegas.
(David Becker/David Becker)
But if he’s made mistakes he’s also made amends, eventually finding peace and purpose in Sin City, first by supporting his father in his final days and then by returning to the start of baseball’s circle of life to mentor the players taking their first awkward steps on the road that led him to riches, then ruin.
“The kids absolutely love him,” said Justen Grenier, who has coached alongside Davis for seven years. “And he just loves the kids. He loves giving back. I think it just goes back to who he is.”
One plate appearance may be all most people remember him for, but Davis refuses to let that define a life and a career that has hardly been a walk in the park.
“He was down and out until he went to Vegas to help his dad. And he’s probably as happy as I’ve seen him in the last 10, 15 years,” said Murphy, a close friend since he and Davis played together for the first time in 1980. “Things just turned around for him.
“And every time I went down to Vegas and talked to him, he never really said why.”
Davis knew he was going to do something memorable in his first and only World Series. He was in prayer, he said, when God told him he would hit a home run. And if heaven tells someone in the Davis family something good is about to happen, it’s probably best to listen.
When young Mike was still in grade school, his grandmother lifted him onto her lap, gave him a fielder’s glove and told him she’d gotten word from on high that he’d be a big-league baseball player someday. And, she added, you’re going to play for her hometown Oakland A’s.
Ten years later, he was selected in the third round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
Then, midway into Davis’ rookie season, grandma Lena told him he was going to start that night’s game, something he had done just three times in three months.
“She was into prayer all the time. She spent a lot of time talking to Jesus,” Davis said. “And my answer was ‘I know you know Jesus, but you don’t know Billy Martin.’”
But that night, 10 minutes before the first pitch, another player was pulled from the lineup with back spasms and Martin, the A’s irascible manager, wrote Davis’ name in his place. Six innings later, Davis hit his first major league homer — just as his grandma had predicted in the note she left in Davis’ pants pocket.
That history of divine intervention did little to persuade his Dodgers teammates when Davis told them of the World Series prophecy he’d received — partly because Martin was a pussycat next to Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda.
And Davis was deep in Lasorda’s doghouse after a career-worse season in which he slashed .196/.260/.270 with two homers and more strikeouts than hits in 108 games. The year before, he had hit .265 with 22 homers and 72 RBIs for Oakland, earning a two-year $1.975-million free-agent contract from the Dodgers, who saw Davis as the missing piece in their outfield.
However, just before spring training the Dodgers added Gibson, who became available when he was declared a free agent by an arbitrator in a collusion case brought against MLB owners. That signing created a logjam in the outfield. And things got worse for Davis when he stepped into a pothole and injured an ankle during a farcical spring training visit to Puerto Rico.
Playing on one leg, Davis hit just .188 in the first month of the season and didn’t get his first home run until late June. But he made the World Series roster just the same and with the Dodgers trailing 4-3 and down to their final out in Game 1, Lasorda was out of options. So he called Davis out of the doghouse and sent him to the plate to hit for shortstop Alfredo Griffin.
“When opportunity showed itself, and I’m coming up in the bottom of the ninth, all I could think about is the word that I received from God,” Davis said. “Oh, here it is.”
Dennis Eckersley’s first pitch was the only one close enough to hit and Davis just missed it, fouling if off. With light-hitting Dave Anderson scheduled to hit next, Eckersley, respecting Davis’ power and unaware Gibson had spent the last two innings in the batting cage getting ready to hit, pitched around his former teammate, throwing four straight balls to put the tying run on base.
Gibson then limped gingerly to the plate. With a torn medial collateral ligament in his right leg and a strained knee and torn hamstring in his left, it was unlikely he’d be able to drive the ball. That meant Davis had to get into scoring position to give his team a chance.
After spending the first couple of pitches timing Eckersley’s move to first, Davis tugged at his uniform pants, signaling third base coach, Joey Amalfitano, that he was ready to go. Amalfitano signaled back the OK and on a 2-2 pitch, Davis stole second without a throw.
Dodger Kirk Gibson raises his arm in celebration as he rounds the bases after hitting a game–winning, two–run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Oakland Athletics 5-4 in the first game of the World Series at Dodger Stadium on Oct. 15, 1988.
(AP)
“If I would have got thrown out with Kirk Gibson at the plate, you would have had to bury me at second,” Davis said.
It was a gutsy play that completely changed Gibson’s at-bat. He no longer needed an extra-base hit to tie the game; a blooper to the outfield would be enough.
“I wanted to hit the ball over the shortstop’s head,” Gibson would say later. “I just visualized it, and when you do that, it slows you down. It put me in a good mindset.”
What happened next hasn’t been forgotten nearly four decades later. Eckersley threw the back-door slider Gibson was waiting for and he reached out with an awkward swing to line the full-count pitch into the right-field pavilion for the biggest home run in franchise history.
“A lot of people talk about the home run only,” said Steve Sax, who was in the on-deck circle when Gibson homered. “But the preemptive strike in the whole thing was Mike and the walk, which was huge. He set the whole table for us.”
And while the Gibson’s homer has become the stuff of legend, what’s become forgotten is the home run Davis hit five days later. Given the green light to swing at a 3-0 pitch, he hit a fourth-inning homer that drove in the winning run in Game 5, giving the Dodgers their final championship of the 20th century and making good on the prophecy he had received in prayer before the World Series started.
For Davis, in a season that had been so improbable, the impossible had happened.
“That’s something that isn’t talked about a lot,” said Mike Scioscia, the Dodgers starting catcher that season. “But it was important.”
Davis played just one more season in the majors before retiring at 32, following unsuccessful league trials with the Yankees, Giants and Expos. The spring training ankle injury with Dodgers and a knee injury sustained when he kicked a door in frustration halfway through his final season in Oakland conspired to bring his once-promising career to a premature close.
What followed still remains a blur.
Few of the jobs he tried made much money and, with the exception of the coaching gigs, none of them brought much happiness or fulfillment. That didn’t come until 2009, when he moved to Las Vegas to take care of his ailing father, John, a former Marine and San Diego police officer who attended high school with baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson and played playground basketball in Oakland with basketball Hall of Famer Bill Russell.
“My mother had passed and my father was going through dialysis and had fallen a couple of times. He needed help,” Davis said of his father, who died five years later of renal failure. He was 78.
Former Dodger outfielder Mike Davis coaches young players from the Nevada Sports Academy 16U traveling baseball team on Sept. 24 at Faith Lutheran Middle School & High School in Las Vegas.
(David Becker/David Becker)
And while Davis wouldn’t have admitted it then, he needed help too. He found that when when he reconnected with his dad in his final days.
“During that time we got know each other,” said Davis, who left home to play ball when he was teenager. “It was awesome.”
The dark mustache he wore in his playing days has expanded into a neat salt-and-pepper beard and his body, well, it’s expanded too. Less than a year ago Davis, who played at 190 pounds, had ballooned to more than 300. He’s lost about 50 pounds in the last six months.
The athletic grace Davis had as a player is mostly gone and he moves stiffly when he walks, a souvenir from the knee and ankle injuries that ended his career. Still, after moving from Arizona to Nevada, he tried trading on his baseball resume by joining a burgeoning group of former big leaguers — one which includes four-time batting champion Bill Madlock; former American League MVP Jason Giambi; and José Canseco’s brother, Ozzie, who spent parts of three seasons with Oakland and St. Louis — in coaching kids.
“The coaching really keeps me busy, keeps me doing stuff,” Davis said. “I stopped doing anybody under 12, under 13 years old, in private lessons, because I don’t want to babysit. You can get that from a minor league player, a high school kid.
“I think what I give you is something special.”
Former Dodgers outfielder Mike Davis looks on as players from the Nevada Sports Academy 16U traveling baseball team practice at Faith Lutheran Middle School & High School in Las Vegas.
(David Becker/David Becker)
Many of his players agree.
“Other coaches, they really just care about winning the game. Mike cares about me individually,” said Anthony Syzdek, 15, who has been with Davis more than half his life.
“He’s probably the friendliest coach you’ll ever meet. He knows a lot about baseball. So like any question I have, he’ll answer for me.”
But his teachings don’t stop at baseball. He gives life lessons as well.
“Mike’s always teaching,” said Terra Pashales, who pays nearly $400 a month for her two boys, Jackson and Jameson, to play on Davis’ under-16 travel-ball team. “He talks to them about everything. He talks to them about their manners and everything baseball. He just goes above and beyond.”
When Davis arrived for a recent midweek practice at the west Las Vegas Christian academy his team calls home, the gate to the field is locked. By the time he finds somebody with a key, the sky is already growing dark so Davis and Grenier rush the players through a number of fielding drills, stressing fundamentals, not flash.
About halfway through the two-hour workout a weary Davis, wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt with 6-4-3 — the scoring sequence for a double play — stenciled across the front, takes a seat in a plastic chair near the plate. But the encouragement, delivered in a peppy, upbeat cadence, never stopped.
Dodgers outfielder Mike Davis speaks with player Jackson Pashales, 14, as they walk along the baseline.
(David Becker/David Becker)
“Keep those feet moving! C’mon guys!,” he shouts at one point.
“How are you feeling?” he asks of a player coming off a slight injury. “You moving OK?”
Away from the field Davis, who is decidedly old school, admits it’s getting harder and harder to get young players to play the game the right way. But he hasn’t given up — and not just in Las Vegas.
For the past decade, Davis has also returned to Vero Beach, Fla., the Dodgers’ former spring training base, each summer for the Hank Aaron Invitational, a diversity-focused baseball development experience for as many as 250 high school-age players. There he has coached alongside dozens of other ex-major leaguers, part of what he sees as his responsibility to give back to the game by giving opportunities to Black and Hispanic players.
“A lot of these guys have been told how good they’ve been since they’re been 10 years old,” he said. “I’m saying the same stuff over and over again, so it goes in one ear, out the other. They see major leaguers, they see Derek Jeter doing that jump throw from shortstop and everybody wants to do the jump throw instead of setting their feet and throwing it over there.
“There’s a cool gene that’s out there where everybody’s got to be so cool. I become the bad guy a lot of times because I’m screaming at them to do it the right way.”
Baseball isn’t Davis’ only passion — nor is it the only thing that has recently tested some of his most deeply-held precepts. For Davis, his Christian beliefs have long been the foundation of everything he does and his faith has taken him around the globe to share the Gospel.
Former Dodgers outfielder Mike Davis looks on as he coaches the Nevada Sports Academy 16U traveling youth baseball team.
(David Becker/David Becker)
“One of the things my dad will say is ‘I know the Bible and I know baseball,’” said Davis’ daughter, Niki, who works in the modeling industry in Los Angeles. “Getting back into coaching and doing things that he is passionate about, that he loves and that he knows like the back of his hand, that did kind of help him find something that he feels comfortable and good about again.”
Recently, however, Davis felt forced to choose between his community of faith and faith in his community when the conservative, Pentecostal church he attended lined up behind a politician, Donald Trump, instead of Jesus.
“I heard the pastor say they picked their tribe with who they’re going to follow,” said Davis. who speaks in a slow, quiet voice that gives his words extra weight. “I couldn’t believe it. I got thrown for a loop.”
“The investment that God has made in me as I’ve traveled around the world and watch(ed) him do amazing things in people’s lives; that’s what I programmed myself with,” he continued. “I consider myself a warrior ready to defend the Gospel at the drop of a hat.
“I wasn’t planning on defending it against my fellow Christians.”
So Davis left that congregation, his faith in the Gospel strengthened even as his faith in the church wavered. Because if nothing else, Davis has learned the power of a well-timed walk.
