Eric Davis

Eric Davis could do everything a baseball player can do and do it better than almost anyone, a center fielder of such rare power and speed that scouts reached for Willie Mays to describe him. He became the first player in history to hit 30 home runs and steal 50 bases in a season, robbed home runs at the wall, and threw out runners with a cannon arm, all of it suggesting a career headed for the inner circle. Injuries and illness intervened, including a bout with cancer that should have ended everything and somehow did not. He won a World Series with the Reds in 1990.

The Next Willie Mays

Davis was born on May 29, 1962, in Los Angeles, and grew up in the same South Central baseball scene that produced his boyhood friend Darryl Strawberry. He reached the Cincinnati Reds in 1984 carrying the heaviest comparison a young player can carry, the next Willie Mays, and for a few seasons he came close to living up to it. He had power and speed and a center fielder's grace, and from 1986 through 1990 he averaged roughly 30 home runs and 40 stolen bases a year, the kind of two-way production almost no one in history has matched. The talent was breathtaking, and for a while it seemed limitless.

Thirty and Fifty

The signature season came in 1987. Davis hit 37 home runs, stole 50 bases, and drove in 100 runs, becoming the first player in the history of the game to reach 30 home runs and 50 steals in a single year, and he got there in fewer games than anyone before him. The year before he had hit 27 home runs and stolen 80 bases, a line he shares with only Rickey Henderson, the rarest kind of power-speed combination. He won three Gold Gloves in center field for good measure, gliding to balls in the alleys and climbing the wall to steal home runs, a complete player at the height of his powers.

The World Series and the Kidney

In 1990 the Reds shocked the baseball world, sweeping the heavily favored Oakland Athletics in the World Series, and Davis set the tone by homering off Dave Stewart in his first at-bat of Game 1. The triumph came at a brutal cost. Diving for a fly ball in Game 4, Davis lacerated a kidney and collapsed in the dugout, a frightening injury that put him in the hospital for weeks at the very moment his team celebrated a championship. It was the cruelest version of the story that would follow him, the brilliance and the broken body arriving together, the best night of his career nearly the worst.

The Body That Failed Him

The injuries never stopped. Across his career Davis fought a steady run of physical breakdowns, the kidney laceration, neck and knee and shoulder and hamstring problems, each one shaving games and seasons off a career that should have been monumental. He bounced from Cincinnati to the Dodgers to the Tigers and beyond, his production coming in bursts between the trips to the trainer's room, a player whose ceiling everyone saw and whose body would not let him reach it. The five-tool talent stayed visible whenever he was healthy, which was the problem, because healthy was something he rarely got to be.

The Comeback

The hardest fight came in 1997, when Davis, by then with the Baltimore Orioles, was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had surgery and started chemotherapy, and instead of disappearing he came back that same season, returning in September to help the Orioles clinch their division and homering in the playoffs, an act of will that stunned everyone who watched it. The next year, 1998, he hit .327 with a 30-game hitting streak, one of the best comeback seasons baseball has ever seen, and he won awards for courage and community that meant more than any of his numbers. He had beaten something far larger than a fastball.

The Numbers

Davis finished with 282 home runs, 349 stolen bases, and two All-Star selections, fine totals that fall well short of what the talent promised. The injuries took the rest, the seasons cut in half and the prime years interrupted, leaving a record that tells only part of the story. He was, when healthy, one of the most dynamic players of his era, a power-speed marvel who briefly stood with the best in the game, and the distance between that player and the final stat line is the measure of everything his body cost him. Few have been so gifted and so often hurt.

The Friendship

The thread that runs through his story is Darryl Strawberry, the friend he grew up with on the sandlots of Los Angeles. The two met as boys, competing in the same youth leagues, and both reached the major leagues out of the 1980 draft, Strawberry the first overall pick and Davis a later-round find who turned into a star. They were rivals on opposing high school teams and friends off the field, their paths intertwined from childhood through the majors, and they later spent a season as teammates on the Dodgers. Two kids from South Central had become two of the most electric players of their generation, bound together by where they came from.