GLENN DAVIS
by Ed Agner
Request by Matt Hollinger
This is the baseball player not the former Heisman winner so if you’re thinking Mr. Outside, you’ll need to look elsewhere.  If Hollinger actually meant to request Mr. Outside then…it’s all Phil’s fault.

Right, so, I’ve actually been toying with a FPotM on Davis for a long time but I am no match for laziness.  Actually, I am a match for laziness.  It’s my closest comp now that I think of it.  Probably my best comp for every age, if I had a Similar Player By Age section.  Yeah, the fact that I’m padding already probably does not bode well for this piece.

Anyway, for those young‘uns amongst us, for us to properly contextualize Glenn Davis we will need to go way back in time to the mid-80’s.  Mmm, jr. high.  How I miss the youth and the hope and the freedom…and the hair.  Oh, the hair!  How I miss the hair! 

The mid-80’s – and the 80’s in full, really – was known as a pitchers era, which may be hard to wrap your head around now, but it is true.  Offense was built around speed, bunting, small ball and…I think Ozzie Guillen may need a moment now.  Pitching dominated, namely starting pitching, with the Dodgers, Mets, Giants, Cardinals and Astros dominating things either due to great arms, tricky new pitches, great defenses or park factors.

And nowhere were park factors a bigger matter than Houston’s Astrodome – the place where hits went to die.  For the life of me, I still can’t believe pitchers were paid to pitch there instead of vise versa, but whatever.  Bob Knepper needed to fund his Montana militia/crazy camp somehow I guess.

So yeah, this was not the era of the slugger and Houston was not a ball park conducive to slugging and yet…along came Glenn Davis just the same.  A first round pick out of the University of Georgia (and because he went to college, he sucks, of course, right?  I mean, that’s the party line in that state, isn’t it?  Stupid, horrible book.), he was the adopted brother of Storm Davis – a nominal pitcher for the Orioles and A’s (and if you didn’t know that after school story, then you just weren’t alive at that point because there was no way Vin Scully, Joe Garagiola or Tim McCarver went a telecast without beating that story to death and beyond.  Yeah, McCarver sucked then too.) – who just came out of nowhere in ’85 and started mashing the crap out of the ball and putting up eye-popping power stats in the death valley of all death valleys in Houston.

In ’86 Davis put up perhaps the best ever power season for an Astro hitter this side of Bagwell or Berkman – 31 dongs, 32 doubles and an OPS of 837 – to help lead the ‘Stros to the NL West title.  (I was going to make a remark about Davis getting robbed of the ’86 MVP then I saw Mike Schmidt’s season and decided to keep that on the down-low.  Yeesh, it’s easy to forget how good Schmidt was given how stupid he sounds when he opens his mouth now – the Joe Morgan principal, I guess.)  Of course, you know how ’86 went – the Mets somehow dodge Mike Scott a 3rd time in the NLCS then scoot one through the Red Sox – and there went to Astros best ever shot at the NL title…at least for 20 more years.

All the same, Davis kept plugging away through the late-80’s as arguably the best power-hitting first baseman in the National League – including a 1989 season that was even better than his ’86.  But the Astros had peaked in ’86; the offense was all Davis, the pitching staff got old and everyone else in the West (aside from Atlanta) was on the upswing, thus the Stros wallowed in mediocrity while Davis was one of the NL’s best kept secrets.

Now lemme clue you in on something – big, power hitting first basemen tend not to age well.  Really.  Honest.  And while that 1989 season sure was nifty, Davis was 28 years old then.  So while Davis ending up spending most of his age 29 season in 1990 on the DL may have been no surprise to most, there are always a few…let’s just say, not very bright organizations who are as shocked by a guy falling off the cliff as they are that the sun comes up every morning.  Let’s not name names here.  We’ll save that for the next paragraph.

So yeah, the Astros, clearly in a rebuilding phase, looked around at what they had and said…”Hmm, who can we find to be a sucker for Glenn Davis?”  And really, when is the answer never the Orioles?

So yeah, the O’s clearly not aware of where the aberration lied that was their strange reversal of fortune from an abysmal 1988 season to a near-miss 1989 to a pedestrian 1990, thought – HEY!  Let’s get us one a-them there big bats for our line-up!  Those Blue Jays won’t dominate our division anytime soon!  We can catch them!  Oriole Way!  Yay!

So in came Mr. Davis and off went some skinny, slap-hitting CF named Steve Finley, and two hard throwers with limited upside in Pete Harnisch and Curt Schilling.  Oh wait, it gets better for the O’s.

Sure, in the long term this deal was a horrible disaster but this sucks even in short team as Davis never even plays a complete season in Baltimore – 49 games in 1991 (cut short by Mr. Bible-thumper getting his butt kicked in a bar fight, of course), 106 in 1992 and 30 in 1993, compiling a grand total of 24 dongs in the three years – at $3+ million/year, thank you very much.  God the O’s are beautiful.

After first signing with the ‘94 Mets (who somehow don’t make everything even more beautiful by keeping him) Davis spends 1994 in the Royals minor leagues, then jumped to Japan in ’95 where he was mediocre enough to earn the distinction of being replaced by Kevin Maas on the Hanshin Tigers.
I assume he thumps a whole buncha Bibles these days.  But I don’t care enough to really look it up.  The important thing is that we can all laugh at the O’s yet again.  And really, what’s better than that?
Glenn Davis' Baseball Reference Page
http://www.baseballreference.com/bullpen/Glenn_Davis
http://www.astrosdaily.com/players/Davis_Glenn.html
Glenn is a hotel man!