Ode to Eric Davis

Jerry Crasnick has an article on ESPN recapping 6 of the winter's biggest offseason moves. One of them is the Javier Vazquez trade, in which Crasnick states that Chris Young, the prospect Arizona picked up, has been compared to Eric Davis. Now, if you're my age, you certainly remember Eric Davis. I remember him on the cover of the July 1990 issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids. He was in a lumber yard or a forrest or something; lumber = bats = a slugger, get it? The strange thing about that issue was that it came at the very end of May, pretty early for a July issue if you ask me. Plus, it was raining the day it came and it was chilly, so it didn't much feel like July. (Somebody had played tic tac toe on the bathroom door; the x's won, they went diagonally from the top left to the bottom right - if you don't get that reference you just aren't worth talking to anymore.)

Anyway, now that the crackhead convention has concluded, back to Eric Davis. If you're my age you remember him well, but you're not going to remember this:

Year Ag Tm   G  AB  R    H  2B 3B  HR  RBI  SB  CS BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG
+----------+---+---+---+---+--+---+---+----+---+--+---+---+----+----+---+
1986 24 CIN 132 415  97 115 15  3  27   71  80  11 68  100 .277 .378 .523
1987 25 CIN 129 474 120 139 23  4  37  100  50  6  84  134 .293 .399 .593  

Jesus. You see those numbers? That's just nuts. Who's doing that today? Beltran or Abreu are the closest you'll get, but they're not doing what Davis did in either of those years. When I see statlines like those I think to myself, "Crap, why the hell was I not in a roto league back then? To have benefitted from numbers like that, what a pleasure. Damn it, why did I have to devote so much time to playing in the sandbox and fingerpainting back in in 1986 at the expense of roto leagues, damn damn damn!" Does this ever happen to anybody else? You stumble across stats that make you wish Doc Brown would pop into your house right now with a Delorian so that you could experience having that player on your roto team in that year? Ok, this is getting weird, right? I'll stop. Anyhoo, as we know, Davis fell off this peak level, had a few more very good years, took a huge downturn, had a nice surprise year in 1998 with Baltimore, and retired far from being looked upon as an all time great. I hope he at least had himself as a sleeper in his 1986 roto keeper league.