Only twice in MLB history has a player hit 25 home runs and stolen 80 bases.
In 1986 Eric Davis hit 27 home runs and stole 80 bases.
Rickey Henderson had slighlty better totals (28 HR, 87 SB), but it took him 608 at bats compared to only 415 for Davis. If you project Davis's numbers over 608 at bats he would have hit 40 home runs and stole 117 bases.
Even more incredible is the fact that Davis's 27 home runs was good for FIFTH in the NL during that dead ball era. His home run rate (.065) was almost identical to league leader Mike Schmidt (.067) who hit 37 in 552 at bats.
BTW Eric Davis was only 24 in 1986.
Davis could have been not just great, but one of the greatest of all time if he had stayed healthy.
This post seems a little random but I always like talking Reds baseball. The thing that I remember about ED was that he always looked so graceful and it didn’t matter if he was hitting, running bases or fielding. If he would have stayed healthy, wow! For those that never got to see that man field, he was as good as Billy Hamilton. He could time that jump over the wall and rob homers with the best of them. The only guy I remember seeing that did it better was a cat named Jim Edmunds. That guy really burnt the Reds. ED would have easily been a top 3 Red ever if he would’ve stayed healthy. One of my favorite all time Reds.
I'll never forget that home run in the 1st game of the World Series. Tim McCarver had been telling the world how the Reds had no chance
against Stewart right before that blast.
Quote:Davis, absurdly, was even better in 1987. On Opening Day, he went 3-for-3 with two walks, a homer and two stolen bases. Ten games into the season, Davis was hitting .526 with four homers and eight stolen bases. On May 1, he hit two home runs, including a grand slam. Two days later, Davis hit three more runs -- one to left, one to center and one to right. One of those was a grand slam, too. He also stole a base.
"Nothing surprises me anymore," Rose said. "He can be as good as he wants to be."
Later in the month, Davis hit his third grand slam, becoming the first to hit three in one month.
OK, we've waited long enough. Do you want to see the 162-game numbers for Davis, starting June 11, 1986 and ending July 4, 1987? Get ready for it, because it will not disappoint:
Davis played in 162 games, starting 152. He got 659 plate appearances. It is basically a full year.
Over that stretch, Davis hit .308/.406/.622 with 47 homers, 149 runs, 123 RBIs and 98 stolen bases (getting caught just 12 times).
In the equivalent of one year of baseball, Davis just about had a 50-100 … 50 homers and 100 stolen bases. It's almost laughable. It looks like a baseball video game on cheat mode. You can look and look through the history of baseball. You will not find anything quite like that.
What happened to Davis after that is, well, hard and cold reality … and one of the greatest anticlimaxes in baseball history. In 1987, Davis crashed into the wall at Wrigley Field going after a fly ball and slowed. He still finished with a 30-30 season … actually it was a 37-homer, 50-stolen-base season. That '87 season remains unique in this way. Nobody else who has hit 37 homers in a season has stolen 50 bases.
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