Sporting News What-If: Crash Davis hits record minor-league home run for Asheville Tourists

Ryan Fagan

Sporting News What-If: Crash Davis hits record minor-league home run for Asheville Tourists image

Editor’s note: The 2018 season marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the classic baseball movie "Bull Durham." In that film, Crash Davis hit his minor-league-record 247th home run for the Asheville Tourists, after he was released by the Durham Bulls. Well, the Tourists, now the Rockies’ Class-A team, wanted to celebrate the momentous occasion, so they asked Sporting News to write the story we should have written in the movie — Annie Savoy, you’ll remember, specifically noted that we didn’t say anything about the home run. We were more than happy to right that Hollywood wrong. This story appears in the current Tourists program, available for purchase at TouristsTrap.com. The team will commemorate the movie anniversary during its June 16 game.

This is the story we should have written ...

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the early evening hours on the first day of September, at a ballpark nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a minor-league baseball legend made history. 

Crash Davis, the switch-hitting catcher who made a career of swatting home runs across this baseball-loving country of ours, smashed his 247th minor-league dinger Thursday. Nobody has ever hit more homers in the minors, and this record-breaker was vintage Davis. 

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A lanky Columbia Senators right-handed pitcher, whose name is not important, let loose with a fastball heading toward the outer half of the plate as Davis dug his cleats into the batters box, telling himself not to pull his hips out too early. With a quick bat, Davis stayed back and smacked an opposite-field homer through the shadows of the setting sun and into the woods beyond the left-field wall, just above the ad for Bartles & James wine coolers. 

Davis allowed himself a smile as he watched the ball sail over the fence, then glanced back at the catcher as if to wonder why he would have attempted to get that fastball cheese past a hitter of Davis’s stature. If you didn’t know the home run — his 20th of the 1988 season — was a record-breaker, you wouldn’t have picked up any clues from the veteran as he jogged around the bases just as he’d done 246 other times in his career.

Thanks to a tip from anonymous but incredibly passionate fan in Durham, The Sporting News knew about Davis’ record chase. Sitting in the Tourists’ clubhouse after the game, Davis downplayed the historic moment, though.

“I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ballclub,” Davis told TSN. “I just want to give it my best shot, and good Lord willing, things will work out.”

He paused for a moment as he took off his shin guards, nodded at manager Jim Coveney, then turned back to this reporter. “Besides,” he said with a wry grin, “hitting 247 home runs in the minors is kind of a dubious honor, isn’t it?” 

We’ll go with a word other than dubious. Impressive. Monumental. Historic. Important.

Built in 1924, Asheville’s McCormick Field has hosted baseball legends in the past; Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played exhibition games here as their Yankee teams made their way north after spring training, and Jackie Robinson himself played here in 1948, when Tourists were a Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor-league franchise. 

Davis’ home run record is far from “dubious.” There are few people in the majors more respected than Davis, a man with a vault-like memory who can also remember even the smallest of details of every home run he’s ever hit, but also a quick wit that’s rattled opponents and umpires alike. When people speak of him, they speak well. “He’s played in more ballparks than I have,” said Max Patkin, the legendary Clown Prince of Baseball. “Hell of a guy. He’s really different. I actually saw him read a book without pictures once.”

That Davis, a player who’s succeeded more on brains than brawn, hit his record-breaking home run for a team named the Tourists is wonderful karmic coincidence. Davis, too, is merely a tourist in Asheville. The grizzled veteran of 12 minor-league seasons arrived in this mountain hamlet not long ago after driving across North Carolina with the top down in his road-weary Shelby Mustang. 

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Davis’ 1988 season started in the unlikeliest of places, back in the Class A Carolina league, with the Durham Bulls. His Triple-A contract had been bought out, and his new assignment was to mentor Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, a right-handed bonus baby the big club had invested heavily in. Davis wasn’t exactly thrilled. He was a veteran catcher, not a stable pony. 

Privately, many in the front office wondered about the contrast between LaLoosh’s million-dollar arm and what some called his five-cent head, and that’s why Davis was brought into the mix. Teaching LaLoosh, who chose the nickname “Nuke” early in the season, how to be a professional pitcher, was challenging, to say the least. The often-contentious lessons, sources told TSN, were wide-ranging, from simple things like the importance of keeping fungus off shower shoes to how to hold a baseball — like an egg, lest the batter scramble the pitch — to not thinking too much on the mound to the importance of not messing with a winning streak. 

LaLoosh, whose turnaround under the veteran’s tutelage was so remarkable that he was called up to the big club not too long ago, wasn’t the only one who benefitted from Davis’ time in Durham. Davis’ first home run of the season came against the Fayetteville Generals, a game the Bulls lost, 14-2, to drop to 8-16 on the season. The way those lollygaggers were playing, some felt that even winning eight of those 24 games had been a miracle. After a particularly putrid road trip, Teddy Cullinane, the team’s radio broadcaster, wondered aloud whether this was possibly the worst Durham team of the last half-century. 

But a funny thing happened in early June, right after an unexpected “rainout” — the result of malfunctioning sprinklers on the field, not storm clouds from Mother Nature — gave the Bulls a moment to catch their breath during a losing skid. 

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LaLoosh started listening to Davis and everything started falling into place, and Durham started winning. Davis kept hitting home runs, from both sides of the plate, and he even called his shots from time to time. LaLoosh stepped into his talent, and the team did, too. The Bulls swept four games in Kingston, took two more at Winston-Salem and kicked the ever-lovin’ snot out of Greensboro. By the time they swept both ends of a double-header on the Fourth of July, they’d crawled into a first-place tie in the Carolina League. 

The Bulls were playing the game with joy and verve and poetry. It was, in the words of The Sporting News’ passionate tipster from Durham, “the damnedest season I’ve ever seen.”

But when LaLoosh got the call to the majors, the big club had little use for a 30-something-year-old catcher with its Class A club. They wanted to give one of their young catching prospects from rookie-league Bluefield a bump up a level, so Davis was given the boot, an unceremonious end to a job very well done. 

He considered quitting. After a night of soul-searching with a trusted friend in Durham, though, Davis kept pursuing the dream. “As my manager once told me, ‘I get to come to the ballpark every day, and get paid to do it. Beats the hell out of working at Sears,’ ” Davis said. 

At this point, his major-league dream is likely done, and he knows it. 

Davis was in the bigs once, though, for “the 21 greatest days of my life.” Aside from the pitchers throwing exploding sliders and other ungodly breaking stuff, the little things are what he remembers most — like having someone else carrying his luggage, hitting white baseballs for batting practice, hotels with room service and playing in ballparks that felt like cathedrals. 

Sitting in front of his locker after his record home run — trust that the honor means more to him than he lets on — Davis is clearly contemplating his next step. With his experience as a player and his understanding of non-linear thinking, there’s little doubt he would be a great manager. And maybe that’s his ticket back to the majors. His work with LaLoosh in Durham was a masterpiece, and there is a rumored opening in Visalia next season. 

For now? With the clubhouse almost completely cleared out, in a moment of unexpected vulnerability Davis admits that he’s tired, that he doesn’t want to think about baseball. He just wants to “be” and maybe enjoy the moment with a good scotch. 

Plus, he has someone in Durham he wants to thank.

Ryan Fagan

Ryan Fagan Photo

Ryan Fagan, the national MLB writer for The Sporting News, has been a Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2016. He also dabbles in college hoops and other sports. And, yeah, he has way too many junk wax baseball cards.