Back to the Semi-Pros

Of course Ben Davis drove a nicer car than you, he just didn't act like it

March 23, 2009

Ben Davis went to my father’s high school. A reception room precedes the office of the dean of admissions, whose omnipotence carries to the ends of the world such that he decides who gets to pay $22,000 in a given year for the privilege of attending the Augustinians’ campus. When the sun is right—early on the East Coast—Malvern Prep’s acres almost bear outlines of the Villanova cathedral tower’s long shade.

Davis stood in the dean’s office, leaning against the wall, those protracted shadows shrinking. An ornamental side table lay underneath his feet.

We first met seven years ago in that office, when I was an eighth-grader looking to go to Malvern Prep for high school, but the conversation moved like traffic out of a concert venue. One-way. Frozen in time, Davis continually stared at a scorching home run he had just hit, his piped Malvern uniform still piping from the force.

Above the photograph of him, the title USA TODAY NATIONAL PLAYER OF THE YEAR hovered like a mistake curveball. Not many wide-eyed prospective students missed the framed poster on the dean’s wall. “Wow,” I said. That was our conversation. Then, he was Malvern’s finest athletic product, a Seattle Mariners catcher. Seven years later he would be my teammate.

After he bounced around for years from San Diego and Seattle to minor league stops at New York and Baltimore affiliates, the Orioles ended Davis’s career as a catcher midway through the 2008 season. Perhaps his lifetime .237 average meant that he never quite filled out the Dale Murphy, Johnny Bench comparisons. Defensively stellar, he was clocked at a freakish 95 miles an hour from home to second. His arm was never the problem, that was for certain—which is why, only weeks after his release from Baltimore, he decided to make a final comeback.

As a pitcher.

And since he knew my Delaware County (Pa.) semipro team’s pitching coach, Davis suited up for Chester in a few mound appearances. He hoped to get in shape and attract some major league organizations’ attention.

All of a sudden we were the talk of the newspapers. People besides our parents and girlfriends started to show up at games. An elderly Mickey Vernon—lifetime Delaware County resident and two-time American League batting champion—hung out in my dugout to see him pitch.

At first none of Davis’s college-age teammates knew how to approach him. A week earlier his teammates were former and future Baltimore Orioles. But he fist-bumped run scorers, interrupted The Delco Times interviews to congratulate teammates, and messed around on the bench. At one game my cleats exploded—that is, the soles wore so thin I couldn’t walk—and two days later he walked up to me, quietly offering to find an unworn pair from his old outfitting sponsor. Too bad his feet were somewhat bigger than mine.

His stories from the majors weren’t so different from ours from high school, except we knew the names. Once, he said, when he was with Seattle, a fan was heckling Bret Boone—the three-time-All-Star second baseman. Boone, all five-foot-nothing of him, was warming up in the on-deck circle.

“You’re even shorter in person than I thought!” shouted the heckler.

Most players hardly ever acknowledge insults, let alone respond. But Boone turned slowly, three or four bats still on his shoulder. He thought for a moment. He’d just signed a significant contract extension. “Yeah?” he asked the fan. “We’ll see how short I am when I stand on top of my wallet!”

“Our dugout fell over laughing,” Davis told our dugout, which was falling over laughing.

On the regular season’s final day, Davis’s last game, manager Dan McShane handed him the ball to start against Wayne and to secure a bye for us in the playoffs. We hated Wayne with a passion; they were Lake Forest, Bel Air, Greenwich all in one. They played on the Main Line, the most affluent part of suburban Philadelphia. At Chester, we had to hire police to watch our cars during games for fear of theft. We weren't all from the rough neighborhood, but we couldn't help but carry the pride of the hardscrabble town.

Wayne wouldn't even travel to Chester to play, lest the riffraff scratch their 911s. Each time, even for our home games, we had to go there. And to top it off, we'd never beaten them.

Davis had played in front of tens of thousands, made his major league debut less than a month before his Padres went to the World Series. He once broke up Curt Schilling’s bid for a perfect game in the eighth inning with a controversial bunt.

But he played first-place Wayne with the same enthusiasm as he would the first-place Dodgers. Like the rest of us did.

Late in the game, a Wayne hitter dinked a humpback liner toward me at second base. It seemed to be drifting out of my reach into shallow right center. Its backspin carried the ball over my shoulder. I leaped and twisted to backhand it over my right, throwing side and twisted back again to protect the open glove side from the earth.

The cheers came from more people to see a game of mine than in three years, and having kept the runner off base in a 2-0 game, we whipped the ball around the infield and back to Davis, still electric. “That’s a great f------ play!” he screamed as he pointed to me from the mound. I wondered what other second basemen he’d once shouted that to.