A 50-100 season? Eric Davis could've done it

A version of this story was originally published in February 2022.

“Once you can’t hit any more home runs or strike any more guys out, trust me: They forget about you.”

Eric Davis was addressing the University of Northern Colorado’s baseball team after last January's Friends of Baseball Breakfast of Champions youth fundraising event in Greeley, Colo.

After speaking to a few hundred people at the annual program, which has featured All-Star and Hall of Fame players, managers and executives since its inception in 1988, Davis was bestowing upon the UNC players the wisdom he gained from a 21-year professional baseball career, including 17 seasons in the Major Leagues.

Davis, who turned 60 on Sunday, was by no means suggesting that pursuing a career in baseball was a bad thing, or somehow not worth it. To the contrary: He was cautioning the young men about allowing others to dictate their legacies.

“Life is about chapters,” he told them. “How many of y’all played Little League? That chapter’s over. High school ball? That chapter’s over. This is your chapter now. You’re responsible for what you write.”

Davis knows something about chapters. He's written many, and he’s had to turn the page on a lot of adversity, from injuries that stole much of what may have gone down as one of the greatest careers in baseball history, to a life-threatening disease he faced while he was still playing.

Through all of it, Davis learned something: You can’t let other people define the word “success” for you.

“That’s for you guys,” Davis said after the event, responding to a question about what might’ve been had he remained healthy during his MLB career.

“People build up to regrets,” he continued. “If you say, ‘Man, you didn’t come up to be Willie Mays,’ that was for you. That wasn’t for me.”

Davis didn’t bring up Mays’ name arbitrarily.

When the Reds drafted him in the eighth round out of Los Angeles’ Fremont High School in 1980, Davis was brimming with physical gifts rarely found even in a five-tool player. His combination of power and speed was breathtaking, and the comparisons to Mays quickly became commonplace after questions about Davis' baseball savvy -- he was focused mainly on basketball in high school, and had scholarship offers to Pepperdine, Arizona and Arizona State -- subsided.

That’s a lot of pressure on a young player trying to establish himself. How does someone in that position cope with it?

“You don’t,” Davis said. “It’s a disrespect to Willie. And I said that on the radio. But it was funny that me and Straw [Darryl Strawberry] came out of South Central L.A. and he was compared to Ted Williams and I was compared to Willie Mays. That had never happened before, two guys who grew up together being compared to two of the greatest of all time.

“But I always thought it was a disrespect to Willie. I was just a baby.”

Davis’ performance after he turned pro only added fuel for the comparisons. In 430 Minor League games from 1980-85, he had a .907 OPS with 78 homers and 213 steals, overcoming a slow start to leave the Reds organization marveling at his incredible abilities.

Though he made his MLB debut in 1984, it wasn’t until ’86 that Davis became an everyday player for Cincinnati. And then he started to do things people who’d spent their entire lives in the game had never seen before.

“I was watching some early films of Hank Aaron the other day,” Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench said back in 1987. “Eric has that same strength, the ability to create things at the last second with his bat.”

“As an overall package,” said Davis’ teammate and early mentor, Dave Parker, “there’s no one in either league who can play with Eric Davis.”

Davis’ first Major League manager, Pete Rose, put it plainly and succinctly:

“He can do anything he wants in a baseball uniform,” said the all-time hits king.

There have been 40 players in MLB history who have hit 30 or more home runs and stolen 30 or more bases in the same season. There are four in the 40-40 club: Jose Canseco (1988), Barry Bonds (1996), Alex Rodriguez (1998) and Alfonso Soriano (2006).

No one has inaugurated the 50-50 club. But if anyone was on his way to that unprecedented milestone, it was Davis. If not for injury after injury, “Eric the Red” could very well have become the first player in MLB history to hit 50-plus homers and steal 50-plus bases in the same season.

Over a 162-game span from June 18, 1986, through July 10, 1987, Davis hit .307/.405/.629 while launching 49 homers and swiping 93 bases. If you shift the dates back a bit, from June 8, 1986, through June 27, 1987, Davis hit 46 home runs and stole 99 bags. He’s the only player in MLB history to have a 162-game stretch with those numbers. A composite of the two periods yields 49 homers and 99 steals.

The 50-50 club? Try 50-100.

“I changed the dynamics on how it was viewed,” Davis said. “Because Bonds and Griffey and those guys, they didn’t do what I did.”

Davis is right. Never mind the 50-50 club -- even if you took every 162-game stretch in Bonds’ career in which he hit at least 40 homers and stole at least 40 bases, his highest home run total was 51, but his stolen base figure topped out at 44. Griffey never stole more than 30 bases in any 162-game span.

In fact, Bonds, the best position player of the 1990s in terms of Baseball Reference WAR (80.2) before he rewrote the record books at the turn of the century, may have gotten much of his style from Davis.

“I’m the one who bought Barry his earring,” Davis said. “The diamond with a cross on the bottom of it, it was what I wore. All of his emulation was about what I was doing. The high-top shoes, all that stuff.”

This wasn’t braggadocio on Davis’ part. He was stating it in a matter-of-fact manner. He knows he didn’t become one of the greatest players of all time. But for a snapshot in time, he may very well have been the game’s best position player, and one of the best players many in and around baseball ever saw with their own eyes.

We’ve mentioned Bonds and Griffey, the premier sluggers of their era. But to truly grasp what Davis did from 1986-87, you’ll need to look at another legendary player of his time: Rickey Henderson.

The all-time stolen base king set a record with 130 steals in 1982, and his 1,406 career steals easily make him the greatest basestealer in the game’s history. But to put some more context around Davis’ 99 steals from June of 1986 to June of ’87, consider that Henderson never stole more than 93 in any 162-game span from 1986-87.

Davis was on his way. He was 25 years old and putting up numbers no one had ever seen before. For a moment in time, he was Aaron and Henderson combined into one player.

Then it all started falling apart.

On Sept. 4, 1987, Davis injured his rib cage while slamming into the brick outfield wall at Wrigley Field to make a game-saving catch. It was just one of many examples of his tremendous defense in center field, defense that won him three Gold Glove Awards. But the beauty of this play was mingled with bitterness, with the injury causing him to miss 17 of the final 27 games of the season.

Davis hit poorly when he got back into the lineup while wearing a protective vest around his ribs, and as a result, he finished with "only" 37 homers and 50 steals in 129 games, still managing to post 7.9 WAR (Baseball Reference) and finish ninth in National League MVP Award voting.

Davis would never play in more than 135 games in a season again, and he failed to appear in 100 or more games in seven of his remaining 13 seasons in the Majors. Whether it was hamstring, wrist, knee, shoulder or other ailments, Davis just couldn’t keep himself on the field. He missed the entire 1995 season with serious neck issues.

In 1996, Davis won the National League Comeback Player of the Year Award after posting a .917 OPS with 26 homers and 23 steals during his second stint with the Reds -- he was traded to the Dodgers prior to the ’92 campaign before being traded to the Tigers midseason in ’93.

Injuries had become a frustrating theme in Davis’ career to that point, but in 1997, it wasn’t an injury that kept him away from the game. It was cancer.

Having signed with the Orioles and getting off to a great start at the plate, Davis was diagnosed with colon cancer on May 25. He had a baseball-sized tumor removed and within less than four months, he was back in the lineup for Baltimore.

Davis returned to action even while still undergoing regular chemotherapy treatments, helping the Orioles win the AL East and reach the AL Championship Series. He then had a strong season at age 36 in ’98, leading Baltimore with a .970 OPS to go along with 28 homers in 131 games.

Despite the amazing comebacks, the injuries didn’t relent, and Davis played in just 224 games for the Cardinals and Giants over the final three seasons of his career.

Davis is one of 16 players in MLB history to hit at least 250 home runs (282) and steal at least 300 bases (349). But the “what if” element will always cause us to wonder if he might have placed himself into a class all his own had he not been plagued with injuries throughout his career.

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But that’s for us. Not for him.

“I know what it is,” Davis said of his phenomenal stretch in the late 1980s. “My contemporaries know what it is. But I dictate what’s for me. When you talk about accolades and how I’m viewed, ask the people that are viewing me. I’m not viewing myself. I don’t write a column about myself. I don’t judge myself.”

When he was speaking to the UNC players, Davis didn’t mention the injuries. He didn’t mention the cancer battle. He didn’t mention the “what if” shrouding his Major League career.

What he stressed was the definition of “success.”

“Find what success means to you as an individual,” Davis said. “Own your own moment. Don’t let anyone else own it.”

Davis owned his moment. It was a brief moment, but it was magnificent. He long ago stopped hitting mammoth home runs and stealing bases with blinding speed.

But we haven’t forgotten about the man who might have been Mr. 50-100.