With Grandma’s Help, Mike Davis Rebounds From Forgettable Season : Test of His Ability Now Testament to His Faith

OAKLAND —  When all else fails--and everything did last year for right fielder Mike Davis of the Oakland A’s--there is always Grandma.

She lights up lives. She heals.

Unfortunately, her family is sometimes skeptical, for miracles don’t exist in 1985. She tells them to believe, but they can’t really. They need proof. They need signs.

Yet where have they been? When Mike Davis was 6, his Grandma pulled him up on her lap and told him he’d be a big league baseball player some day. She was right. Isn’t that a sign?

When Johnny Davis, Mike’s brother, hurt his ankle playing basketball and the swelling wouldn’t go down after surgery, Grandma screamed: “Joy! Peace! Happiness!” She touched the ankle. She soaked it in Epsom salts. She prayed. She screamed “Heal!” And the swelling subsided. Isn’t that a sign?

Once, she had been baby-sitting for another family, and the kitchen caught fire. Two little girls were trapped in the flames. She says she prayed. She says if they were going to die, she wanted to die, too. So she decided to go in with the girls. Just then, she says, an angel came and put out the fire. Isn’t that a sign?

Once, the brakes on her car failed as she drove down a hill. She says a man ran out from behind a building, a man she supposed was “a regular man.” She screamed for him to watch out. She prayed. She says he stopped the car with his bare hands. Isn’t that a sign?

In 1984, Mike Davis had a batting slump, his average ending up at .230. He also tied Kirk Gibson for the league lead in errors. Grandma told him it was a test, to believe in the Lord, to believe in her stories, to believe he could overcome. She prayed. He prayed.

In 1985, Mike Davis is hitting .312 with 14 home runs and 41 runs batted in. On April 26, actually, his average was .361.

Isn’t that a sign?

Mike Davis calls her often. Each time, she answers the phone and screams “Joy!” Mike screams it back.

“We are blessed,” she says.

He is, for sure. He has made a remarkable turnaround this season, one that is almost as hard to explain as his grandmother’s stories.

Slumps are certainly not unusual. Major league players begin slumps and break out of slumps daily.

But season-long slumps are at least a little different in that it’s the mind that is ultimately slumping. It starts as a 0-for-4 game and ends up being four sleepless nights. Soon, there are prolonged stretches on the bench. Soon, there is pressing to get off the bench. Soon, there are more and more strikeouts. Soon, there are more and more errors.

That was Mike Davis in 1984. Although few know it, fly balls scared him to pieces, even the routine ones. He’d jog to the dugout after the inning, his friend Dwayne Murphy at his side. “I almost dropped it,” Davis often said.

His batting average dropped, too, and that was much more serious because he had always hit for average, always been over .300 at any level. Two years before, when he was 23, the A’s had traded Tony Armas to Boston, handing Davis the right field job. Had they blown it?

The A’s hitting coach, Billy Williams, told Davis: “You can play in the big leagues. You can hit here. Don’t let anyone tell you something different.”

Williams knew what was going on, for he had been through it 23 years earlier. In 1961, Billy Williams had come up to the Chicago Cubs as a rookie, having hit .323 with 25 homers the year before in Triple-A.

“I was pressing,” Williams said. “I wanted it to come right now. And I was benched. I remember one night in Philadelphia, I didn’t get any hits. When the stadium lights went out, I was still on the bench. I wondered why I couldn’t hit. I sat on the bench, thinking about myself, and thought about what was happening.

“All of a sudden, I came to grips. I was pressing. The pitchers weren’t throwing any harder, but in my mind, I thought they were.”

It’s all a mind game, really. In the outfield, Davis was being much too mechanical, which is the wrong way to be when you’re playing next to Murphy, whose hands are as soft as a mother’s. Murphy spent a lot of time with Davis during the off-season. Murphy taught Davis how to be a hotdog, which sometimes is the key to becoming a good outfielder.

“Well, his offense messed up his defense, and he never got his total game together,” Murphy said. “Oh, we talked a lot. He was always booting ground balls. I thought he was a soccer player.

“Anyway, I changed his approach on ground balls. And he used to squeeze the heck out of the ball on fly balls. I wanted him to be a hotdog.”

So, in practice, Davis began to clap before catching fly balls. He caught them on his hip. He played Willie Mays.

“I’d say, ‘Be more aggressive,’ ” Murphy said. “If you dive and miss, so what?”

It all worked. Williams got him to hit .375 in September, and he got his average up to .230. Then, this April, he was player of the month. His batting average was up again, this time to nearly .340.

Defensively, he is feeling better because he has stopped wearing contact lenses, which made him squint. Besides that, the lenses shifted when he ran in on fly balls and he had to blink to fix them, often losing the ball in the process.

While wearing wire-rim glasses in a game last weekend with Texas, he made two diving catches, exactly what Soft Hands Murphy had had in mind.

Davis thanks Williams and Murphy, for they undoubtedly are big reasons for the end of the slump. But there are deeper reasons, which begin and end with Lena Davis, alias Grandma.

She is 66 and will not take aspirin. She had her own test of will when she suffered a stroke, a stroke that affected her brain and her right side. But she recovered, and amazingly went to a junior college in the Bay Area.

“You need tests,” she said. “There’s no way out. And if you can make it through, you can take anything. And you need the experience so you can help others. That’s why I had a stroke. I had to tell them (her family) that He was a hero. I’m 66, and I don’t take aspirin. I take no medication.”

Her son, John, has six children. They were born in San Diego and grew up there. Only Mike, in 1982, became a born-again Christian. Fortunately for him, Lena Davis lives in Oakland, where Michael plays. They talked frequently last year, talked about the slump, even though it is hardly mentioned in the family today.

“Why are we talking about 1984?” Davis asked, then shrugged and carried on. His wife Sandra won’t even call it a slump.

“He didn’t bring it home,” she said. “You wouldn’t have known he went through his so-called whatever.”

Whatever it was, he cured it with the help of Grandma. He had been reading and thinking religion, and he kept remembering a poem:

As children bring their broken toys with tears for us to mend,

I brought my broken dreams to God because he was my friend.

Instead of leaving Him in peace to work alone,

I hung around and tried to help with ways that were my own.

At last, I snatched them back and said: ‘ ‘ How can you be so slow. ‘ ‘

“ My son, “ he said, “ what can I do? You never did let go. “

Said Davis: “Basically, that’s what I’d been doing. I’d tried to work my way out of it (with Murphy and Williams). I worked on the wrong things until I realized I’d done all I could do, and said: ‘Lord, it’s yours.’

“It’s a big burden off your shoulders. It was His. Before, I was holding onto the reins. I put it in His hands, and then I relaxed. I let it happen.”

On a ledge, just inside the front door of 3606 47th St. in San Diego, is a big, black baseball bat. It is not used for baseball.

“That’s to beat up people,” said John Davis Sr., Lena Davis’ son and Mike Davis’ father. “Everyone else is religious. I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with beating up people if they cause you problems.”

So there are differences here, for John Davis, his wife, Rosetta, and his five other children are not especially religious. But they always were athletic, and so they also played an important role in Mike Davis’ growth as an athlete.

Basically, Mike was influenced athletically by John Sr., who once was a San Diego policeman; by his older brother, John Jr., who never could decide between basketball and baseball and ultimately made it in neither sport, and by his younger brother Mark, a senior-to-be at Stanford who has twice turned down pro baseball contracts so he could continue going to school.

“My son John was raised religiously,” Grandma said. “He’s more Godly than he can express. He doesn’t want anyone to know it. It’s his pride. He has a tough exterior.”

That is why he is sometimes called Mr. D. When Mike had graduated from high school and signed a pro contract, he had nicknamed his father that because daddy was out of style and because Mr. D fit John Sr.’s style.

Mr. D was raised in West Oakland, where he went to the same

high school as Bill Russell. Ever since Mike’s emergence onto the sports scene, stories have circulated that his father started on the McClymonds High School basketball team ahead of Russell.

Not true, Mr. D. says. Russell was older than he, and they only played together on the playgrounds, he said.

But he also said: “Bill Russell wasn’t a very good player in high school. He was just tall.”

A former Marine, Mr. D became a San Diego policeman--he now is the chief of the security force at a San Diego college--and that, too, fit his image. Once, before taking his wife to dinner, he said to John Jr.: “Johnny, if you’re smart, you won’t ride that bicycle.”

They left then, and John got on the bike, tried doing tricks and crashed. He needed stitches. Mr. D came home and got out his belt.

“I told you not to ride it,” he said.

John Jr.: “No, you didn’t.”

John Sr.: “Yes, I did.”

Rosetta reminded her husband that he had actually said: “If you’re smart, you won’t ride it.”

“He whipped me anyway,” John Jr. said.

John Jr. is otherwise known as Johnny D, and, today, he works as a sales rep in the Seattle area for a major brewery. He had been the first of the Davis brothers, and the best athlete, but his flaw was that he loved basketball more than a baseball player should. After all, he could do 360-degree spins before dunking. Baseball coaches told him to give up basketball, but he didn’t. He attended St. Martin’s College in the state of Washington, played both sports, and ended up with three serious injuries.

So he never made the NBA, and never got to the major league. After he graduated, he was given a tryout with the Houston Astros, but they said he was too old to be a rookie. So, now, he watches Michael play, and admits that he gets envious sometimes.

Still, he hasn’t given up on hoops. He’s currently organizing a summer league team and left this message on his answering machine: “Hi, this is John Davis. I’m not in right now, but if this is regarding basketball, leave your name and number, and I’m sure we’d love to have you play. If not (he sighs), I guess you can leave your name and number anyway (he sighs again).”

Mark, the youngest of the Davis brothers, is the cockiest. Consequently, he fits in well at Stanford, where he hit .347 for the Cardinal this season, a team that is, in the best Stanford tradition, different.

At Stanford, the ballplayers say what they mean. They say: “I will get a hit!” when they go to bat. They also say, to teammates who can’t bunt: “You’re not a very good bunter.”

They also have instituted the “Me-Me-Me, I-I-I Theory.”

Mark explained: “After a game, you come up to a guy and say, ‘How did the game go?’

“He’s supposed to say: ‘I was 3 for 5. Did we win?’ And then everyone on the team screams, ‘Me-Me-Me, I-I-I.’

“Of course, freshmen don’t know. We went up to a pitcher and said: ‘How did the game go?’ and he said: ‘We lost.’

“Everyone screamed, ‘Grow up! Grow up!’ He was supposed to say: ‘I didn’t pitch, darn it. Did we win?’ ”

So that’s Mark. He says: “I will make it to the big leagues,” and he says it after twice turning down the big leagues.

After his senior year of high school, he was drafted by St. Louis, but chose to attend Stanford. Just this month, the San Diego Padres drafted him, but he had decided he would sign only if they matched his money figure. They didn’t.

“Sure, I want to play,” he said. “And people always ask me if I do. But they had to meet my price. I have to draw the line somewhere and put a value on my final year (of school).”

Coincidentally, Mark also had a poor year in 1984, and he recovered, too.

Last winter, Mike Davis spent time on the A’s caravan, traveling around with other Oakland players, supposedly drumming up interest in the team. He was asked about his slump in 1984.

His answer was: “Comin’ alive in ’85.”

But he almost came alive elsewhere, because the A’s nearly gave up on him.

That’s typical of the A’s, who have been known to find, then give away talent. Their bosses look pleasant enough, for they are young and preppy. President Roy Eisenhardt wears sweat pants to nearly every game, apparently having jogged in from the tennis court just in time for the first pitch. Sandy Alderson, the vice president of baseball operations, carries a knapsack, giving the impression that he has a bushel of homework to do.

Baseball homework?

The A’s almost goofed on Davis. It’s team policy to offer only one-year contracts to younger players, and they offered him a one-year deal for 1985 that matched his contact in 1984. He almost went to arbitration before they induced him to sign with several incentive clauses.

In the meantime, they brought in outfielders Steve Henderson and Dusty Baker.

“You can’t say we gave up,” Alderson said. “We didn’t make a major deal, did we? But we felt we had to deepen ourselves at that position. In the event, (Davis) couldn’t handle left-handed pitching or the defense, we had to have an out.”

But it worked out. Davis had signed with the A’s out of high school--Hoover High in San Diego, Ted Williams’ alma mater--and he hit .391 at Modesto in 1979. By 1980, he was in the big leagues after a short stint at Double-A ball. He watched the famous outfield of Rickey Henderson, Murphy and Armas, learned that he wasn’t ready to break in and was sent down.

He told Grandma.

Said Grandma: “I got so upset. I said to Michael, ‘Are you hurt? Are you hurt?’ I was screaming it. And he was screaming that he was hurt. But the Lord told me he’d missed a step, that he had skipped Triple-A. So that explained it. He went back and got it.”

That year, Mike found God. He had visited his Grandma at one of her Bible studies, and he said: “She asked if I’d ever thought about bringing the Lord into my life. I said no. She asked if I’d like to, and I said I did. She said to thank Him for it, for cleansing my life, for being the Lord of my life, and the next thing you know, I’m screaming praises.

“I was screaming ‘Thank You, Jesus!’ And it came to me: ‘What am I doing?’ ”

He began to seek religion then, and later found it. His wife, Sandra, his high school sweetheart, says it has not changed him, but others say otherwise. Johnny said they used to drink beer together, but don’t anymore. Johnny said some of Mike’s friends think he talks too much about religion.

But Mike Davis sincerely thinks it is his role to pass on his belief, although that is a rather tough job with the A’s, who Mike says traded away most of their “saints” last year, Bill Almon and Jim Essian. He had recently scheduled a Bible study at his home, but it was canceled because the team wives were in a bowling league that particular morning.

If the wives don’t come to the Bible study, the players won’t.

But Davis carries on. He and Grandma work on Mr. D, Johnny and Mark, hoping they’ll be reborn. Is there hope? On Mike’s recent birthday, Mr. D sent his son a dictionary of Bible terms.

“If Michael’s religious, and he is, I want to make sure he knows what he’s talking about,” Mr. D said.

Isn’t that a sign?