Note: This is a guest post from Nate Dunlevy
My love affair with baseball began with the same cliches that every child of the ’80s retells. I don’t know if it was staying up late to watch Bill Buckner make the same error I made a thousand times, or if it was the wood paneling or just the sheer weight of cultural inevitability that forces smart kids of limited athletic ability to gravitate toward baseball and the infallibility of its countless numbers. You can take those same basic myths, chop them up 28 different ways, and dust them with names of local heroes and you’ll have an origin story for most every baseball fan between the ages of 36 and 46.
My addiction to AM radio and 6:35 start times began with Eric Davis in 1987. For what amounts to a moment but feels like forever, he was the best player on the planet. Oddly enough, Davis wasn’t my favorite player (that was Buddy Bell, then Chris Sabo and then Barry Larkin), but he was the most captivating. I couldn’t name all five tools, but I knew he had them. Fast. Strong. Davis was the perfect athlete.
His greatness and my own dubious grasp of economics led me to hoard dozens of his baseball cards. A friend’s mom heard I was a Reds fan and gave me a few old cards she had lying around. My glee at finding out one was a Fleer Eric Davis rookie card was containable. The fool! It was worth at least $20. She might as well have handed me a brick of gold.
Davis lit up baseball that thrilling summer. He was easily on pace to be the first 40-40 player, needing only three home runs in late August when the pursuit was cut short after he ran into a wall at Wrigley Field. (The image of Cubs fans pouring beer on him as he writhed on the warning track birthed its own special kind of hate in my 10-year-old heart against that franchise, one that still burns.) For the first of what would be too many times, injuries caused by playing the game without regard for his personal health robbed him of greatness.
The next summer, I begged my parents to take me to Cincinnati for baseball card day. I desperately wanted the first Sabo card ever printed (pictured below), but it was Davis that provided me the perfect memory. He hit the first home run I ever saw in person, a walk-off two-run shot to beat the Braves 2-1. (Technically, Jeff Tredway hit the first home run I saw, an inside-the-park job earlier that game, but that hardly counts.)
Injuries took their toll on Davis. Sabo moved on from the Reds, and ultimately it was Barry Larkin who defined my fandom as I spent the 90s hanging on his every at-bat. Years later, I was there at Cooperstown for his induction. One of my oldest friends, a Cubs fan of all things, came with me, and as we walked the village, we saw Eric Davis. I went up to him and asked if I could shake his hand to say thank you for giving a child a perfect day at the park so many years before. He was warm and gracious and friendly to us.
To everyone who grew up a Reds fan in the 1980s, Davis was the great “what if?” In the end, he had a marvelous career and is much loved, if only for narrative re-writing homerun in the first inning of Game One of the 1990 World Series. It prompted one of the great headlines the next day: “Davis Stuns Goliath”.
It was fitting to meet him in Cooperstown, even if his body betrayed him ever getting there as an inductee. He suffered kidney damage diving for a ball in Game Four of that series and took years to fully recover. He sacrificed his health to win a World Championship, still the only one the Reds have won in my lifetime. Eric Davis made me a baseball fan. If that doesn’t deserve a handshake and a heartfelt thanks, then I don’t know what does.
Have you met one of your baseball heroes from the 1980s? I want to hear about it! Click here for details and tell me your story.
by Nate Dunlevy
ABOUT NATE DUNLEVY: Nate Dunlevy is the author of Invincible, Indiana a novel about basketball and small-town Indiana. His work can occasionally be found at ColtsAuthority.com and his books can be found at MadisonHousePublishing.com. He tweets @natedunlevy
