Famous Minor/Major Leaguers/Chris Davis

Former MILB Radio guest/first baseman/third baseman Chris Davis of the Texas Rangers organization certainly had a marvelous third season in the pros - and a great rookie year in the majors in 2008! Let’s measure how he did by looking at his numbers, shall we?

He started the year at the Double A level with the Frisco Rough Riders in the Texas League, then progressed to Triple A with the Oklahoma Redhawks. After that, he made the “Big Club” with the Rangers mid-summer. Frankly, this guy is pegged for stardom unless he does something really stupid off the field which I don‘t suspect he won‘t.

At Frisco in ’08, he hit .333 with 13 home runs and 42 runs batted in. At Oklahoma, he hit .333 with 10 homers and 31 ribbies. Then, with Texas, he hit .285 with 17 round-trippers and 55 RBI during the latter half of the summer.

GOSH!!! What a year! Overall, Davis hit .309 with 40 homers and 128 RBI during the course of a full, complete season. That’s pretty impressive. But, that’s not even close to what some previous major leaguers accomplished in the minors before they embarked on star-studded careers.

First, I offer up Wally Berger, a former member of the old Boston Braves from the earlier century. In 1929, all he did was hit .335 with 40 homers, 170 runs scored, 249 hits and 166 ribbies in 199 games. Next, I will put Sam Chapman on the board, a former New York Yankee. In ’29 with St. Paul (Minn.) of the American Association, he hit .336 with 31 home runs, 137 RBI, 162 runs scored, 43 doubles and 222 hits in 168 games played.

There’s more!!! Tommy Davis TWICE led the minors in batting average. He won a batting crown at Kokomo of the Midwest League in 1957 with a .357 average along with 104 ribbies. Then (not surprisingly) he also won the Pacific Coast League batting title with a lofty .345 mark in ’59.

According to Crash Davis in that famous pool room scene in Bull Durham where he punched Nuke LaLoosh, “That’s a career.”

Davis would go on to lead the National League twice in batting in ’62 and ’63 (including an NL-leading 153 ribbies in 1962) before becoming one of the first great designated hitters in the Amercian League in the 1970s.

Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean won a league-leading 26 games for Houston in the Texas League in 1931 before becoming an icon with the St. Louis Cardinals. Joe DiMaggio established himself way before his Yankee days by hitting in 61 straight games with the San Francisco Seals of the PCL in 1933.

Lefty Grove (another Hall of Famer) was seemingly stuck in the minors back in the ’20s before he embarked on his stellar stint in the majors with the Athletics and Bosox. He won 25 games in 1921 and another 27 contests in both 1923 and ’24 with Baltimore of the International League before going to the big leagues. Along with Denny McClain in 1968 and Dean in ‘34, he’s the only other pitcher to win 30-plus games in a single season since 1931.

Finally, I present Lefty O’Doul, an awesome hitter who won two National League batting titles in 1929 with the Phillies with a .398 mark and again in ‘32 with the a .368 average for the Dodgers.
Here’s what Lefty did in the minors back in 1925 with Salt Lake City of the Pacific Coast League: .375 batting average, 24 home runs, 191 ribbies, 63 doubles, 185 runs scored, and a whopping 309 hits in 825 at-bats. O’Doul played in 198 games that year and led the league in hits and triples with 17.

Why do I bring all these mundane stats/numbers to your attention? Because in this day and age, minor league baseball is different in a whole ‘nother sense! Back years ago, players could make as much and even more money playing in the minors in the larger classifications than they could in the major leagues.

Before the time of airplanes and such, trains/railroads were the only way to go across the country. It took too long to go from coast to coast for road trips on a train back in those times and it really wasn’t financially feasible. So, great players on the West Coast often stayed home to play there, where the PCL was a really much-established and respected entity - often called the “third Major League” behind the Junior and Senior Circuits of MLB.

Then, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants took flight to California in the late 1950s, that’s when the majors (in my mind) actually took hold of the notion that minor league baseball could help them in ways nobody had envisioned up to that point. Besides building a future nucleus for your top team, you could also now build a fan base for the parent club in smaller minor league cities at the time like Oklahoma City, Denver, Salt Lake, Alburquerque, Toledo, etc.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that someone like Chris Davis back in the very early days could very well had numbers like O’Doul posted when he was in the minors. We’ll never know, but it would be exciting to see how well he would have done. After all, he’s had a great first year in the major leagues and a great minor league career leading up to it. Plus, you heard Mr. Davis first here on MILB Radio!!!!!!