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Continuing with your votes for the 100 best Hall of Fame candidates. No. 95: Willie Davis Score: 23.86 There's a lost generation of players in the 1960s who, because they didn't put up the sorts of numbers that people had grown used to seeing from young stars, were saddled with...
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Willie Davis didn’t just get zero votes in 1985 when he was first eligible, he suffered an even greater indignity. He didn’t even make the ballot.
The curse of promising indeed
Some good player didn’t make the ballot a couple of years ago, and we went through the best players who never made one. I’m pretty sure Davis is the choice as the best player to never make it.
I think it was Javier Vazquez that didn’t make the ballot.
I know Joe’s been writing about sports his entire adult life. Still though, I don’t know how he has all these stories.
Joe, if you’re reading this, can you indulge me (and I’m assuming the rest of us) on how you have all these stories. Have they been told to you and you remember them? Do you have a biography site that has fun anecdotes on seemingly mundane sports figures of the past? Is it as simple as typing “Gene Tenace” into google and hoping something comes up?
Maybe I don’t even want to know the answer. I do wonder, though. I guess I’ll see you all later in the week when he has more incredible anecdotes on players 90-86!
I’d bet he has a subscription to a newspaper database which gives better results than Google.
As a Dodger fan in the mid to late 60s and later, I got to wondering how it was possible that (as you noted) some people may have never heard of Willie Davis. Several years he was arguably the best every day player the Dodgers had. Of course, some of his best years were post-Koufax when the Dodgers were remarkably bad and featured players like Ron Fairly and Wes Parker. But, I mean, he played in LA. He played with Koufax and Drysdale and Wills, and Frank Howard. So he was on World Series winning and losing teams…. very high profile teams in a very high profile market. And he was the freaking starting gold glove winning centerfielder, not just some guy. AND he was super fast and exciting to watch when he hit a ball into the very large gaps at Dodger Stadium. He would just tear around second for the inevitable triple (if you thought Willie Wilson was fast, you should have seen Davis). He was also VERY popular in LA. AND he was a bit of a character too. He’d sometimes make an outrageous proclamation during spring training like, “Well this year, I think I’m going to go ahead and hit 50 HRs”, or something like that. He was a great interview, because he was liable to say anything, though nothing that fans took all that seriously since we knew him. But how is it that anyone hasn’t heard of a guy like that? He was clearly Hall of Very Good material, not Hall of Fame, but he was a heck of a player and a lot of fun to watch.
I was a Dodger fan then too and always enjoyed Willie. My favorite memory was when Jerry Doggett was interviewing him on the post game show and Willie kept talking about how much Buddhism was helping his hitting. The very mainstream Doggett didn’t know quite what to say.
I do remember the Buddhism stuff. Davis was very colorful and said lots of off the wall stuff. Jerry Doggett IMO was the worst announcer ever. How he came to be the 2nd Dodger announcer I’ll never know. You’d have Vin Scully at the beginning of the game and be loving it…. then the 3rd or 4th inning would come around and it would be Doggett. OMG I hated that. And Doggett trying to interview anyone was a painful experience to watch, but he had no chance with Willie Davis. Doggett, I’m sure, was trying to stick to some sort of script, at least in his own head. And there was no way he could keep up with Willie. Thanks for reminding me of that!
There’s a funny story about Davis’ Buddhist chants irritating his Japanese teammates in David Whiting’s “You Gotta Have Wa.” If you like Joe’s baseball writing, I recommend Whiting’s books.
Except, it’s Robert Whiting. Oops.
I’ve never been able to keep Willie and Tommy Davis straight, which probably reduces the value of both of there careers in my eyes.
There was also the football Willie Davis, who was a real Hall of Famer and today blots out the Dodger in internet searches.
I don’t subscribe, so don’t know if his being left off the ballot was covered. He played in the majors through 1976, then went to Japan for two years, then came back for a full season with the Angels where he only batted 60 times. He finished up in 1980 with a season in Mexico where he also ended up a player-manager. They say he just didn’t get the votes to be on the ballot, but until I see a document evidencing that I’m betting that with all the back and forth the Hall just screwed up on when his 5 year clock started ticking.
I met the football Willie Davis. He was holding court at the bar of, I think, a Cheesecake Factory in Marina del Rey (LA). With that big bald dome of a head he was very recognizable. When we walked in, he was like “hey guys, come over and join the fun”. So we got drinks and listened to Willie Davis for an hour or so as he talked about his glory days with the Packers. When we left, he got up and made sure to shake our hands. What a great guy.
He had the most WAR of batters on the Dodgers in three seasons: 1964, 1969, and 1972.
The stuff about John Franco made me think of something (really unimportant) that I’ve often thought of as a Mets fan: from the late 60s through the mid-aughts they were ground zero for lefty relievers.
McGraw, Orosco, Myers, Franco, Wagner. That’s pretty close to the all-time list of top lefty closers.
Another fun fact: Franco and Myers were traded for each other, a deal I HATED at the time. I still feel that way.
But as to Joe’s point, as a Mets fan, Franco was about as fun/entertaining as taking a fastball to the groin.
My favorite Gene Tenace stat is this: Despite a batting average 95 points lower, Gene Tenace’s OBP is identical to Tony Gwynn’s — .388
and there it is..
Shout out to Epstein for what is now in running for best one liner HoF.
Who as writer who got the quote?