Showing Restraint : Dodgers’ Eric Davis Says He Will Try to Avoid Injuries

He is known to some as an arrogant, selfish player, merely another star who doesn’t work harder than he needs to and needs to work harder than he does.

To this, Eric Davis simply shrugs. He knows there is little he can do about an image that, at times, has him as a murky character, with rumors linking him to drugs, alcohol and rehabilitation centers. “I don’t even take aspirin,” Davis says.

But this is a player so competitive that even a game of checkers is important. He has a pool table in his home and is known to challenge anybody who walks in, including a photographer who showed up once simply to take his picture.

“We even get into arguments about college basketball players--he wants his players to be better than my players,” said Reggie Montgomery, Davis’ longtime friend from Los Angeles.

Montgomery will tell you that Davis does charitable deeds and doesn’t even take the tax write-off. Team publicists swear that Davis is very cooperative, usually an indication of who the nice guys are on a team. Club officials say that Davis is a hard worker, one of the first to get to the ballpark and one of the last to leave. Davis will tell you he has never missed a bus or plane.

But these people despair over the one thing Davis does miss--games.

In the last two seasons, Davis has played an average of 82 games. Before that, since 1986, his first full season with Cincinnati, he averaged 124 games.

Last season, Davis spent nearly as much time on the disabled list as he did on the field, sidelined because of wrist, hand and shoulder injuries and twice having surgery. He had lows for his career in almost every category, including his .228 batting average and five home runs in 76 games.

All of those were baseball injuries, traceable to his style of diving for balls and crashing into fences.

“Eric has never been rewarded for what he does on the field,” Darryl Strawberry said. “The outcry is always that he is hurt, but . . . he uses his body to play, and people don’t see that and yet that’s the only way he’s known how to play.”

At 6 feet 3 and 185 pounds, Davis’ body composition--mostly bone, not much muscle and no noticeable fat--makes for his fragility. But does that make him a stiff, a word heard more than once over the winter on radio talk shows to describe Davis?

“I was surprised when I met Eric,” Brett Butler said. “I had heard he was a selfish, arrogant individual who wasn’t a team player. Then when I heard he was coming to Los Angeles, I thought, ‘OK, I will withhold judgment until I see the man.’ But when I met him and watched him play, I knew he has been wrongly judged.

“Outsiders may think about Eric like I did before he came to the Dodgers, but if you are on this team, you know what kind of person he is. He does everything to help the team and plays so hard. Some guys just get banged up more than others, and Eric has been unfortunate.”

The most public sympathy Davis has received was when he was lying in the hospital in Oakland after suffering a torn kidney diving for a ball to help Cincinnati win the 1990 World Series. Word got out that owner Marge Schott had not called Davis and would not pay the $15,000 for a charter plane to take him back to a hospital in Cincinnati.

“I called Marge from the hospital, and she didn’t even call me back,” Davis said. “Bob Quinn (the club’s general manager at the time) said I made enough money to pay for my own plane. “

Schott eventually paid for the plane, but the episode left its imprint. So did taking a pay cut from $3 million to $1 million to re-sign with the Dodgers for this season, but not because of the money. Davis, who can also earn up to another $1 million by staying on the active roster, scoffs at a system that he says punishes those who play hard while rewarding others who don’t.

“I have figured out it’s not what you do on the field, it’s how many games you play in,” Davis said.

With that in mind, Davis spent the winter trying to add fat to his body to help cushion his falls, although he says he doesn’t plan to fall as much. His new philosophy is to quit knocking himself out so that he can stay in the lineup and drive in runs.

Montgomery says the way for Davis to stay injury free is to stay on his feet, to play hard but in control.

“I know what he has said, but when the ball is hit, he’s going to catch the ball,” Montgomery said. “This isn’t a year about the hoopla of Eric Davis. the big ballplayer. This is a year where Eric’s manhood will be tested.”

Davis’ new no-dive philosophy has already irritated at least a few fans, which prompts Davis to note that he is “damned if I don’t dive and damned if I do.”

Said Butler: “Eric doesn’t need to prove to anybody on the team what type of player he is. We all know. We just hold our breath that he stays healthy because he means a lot to this team.”

Orel Hershiser, asked if Davis will be able to play less aggressively, simply shook his head. He had watched Davis leap against a chain-link fence during a recent exhibition to keep a fly ball from becoming a home run.

“Eric is an outstanding defensive outfielder, and he’s going to catch them all, I think,” Hershiser said. “If there was ever an example of when you wouldn’t lay your ribs over a chain link fence and risk injury to your rib cage, it’s in an exhibition game. What’s he going to do when he gets to the triple decker?”

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Davis grew up in a small house in South-Central Los Angeles. He says his father worked three jobs to give him everything he needed, although not everything he wanted. He had a good dinner every night, and his Christmas was usually better than those of some of his friends’.

Davis says drugs never appealed to him because from what he could see, if you used drugs you wouldn’t have a job.

He and Strawberry became good friends when they played together for three summers for the Compton Moose. Davis didn’t go to college, even though he was offered several basketball scholarships. Instead, he was drafted as a shortstop by the Cincinnati Reds after graduating from Fremont High and, at 18, was in rookie camp.

There were a few rocky times in the minors, not the least being 1981, Davis’ second season, when a Red player development official wanted to release him. Four years later, Davis, Kal Daniels and Kurt Stillwell were voted the top prospects in the American Assn.

Davis, switched to center fielder, came up to stay with the Reds in 1986, and his image of arrogance began taking shape. Jim Ferguson, longtime Red publicist who is now with the San Diego Padres, said that Davis had a slight speech impediment and was almost shy about talking with reporters.

“I think that is why he backed off a little, and that translated into arrogant,” Ferguson said.

In 1988, Davis got off to a slow start and says there was talk about the Reds trading him. One morning, he was awakened at 6:30 and informed that a Cincinnati newspaper had a front-page story saying he would be traded because he was on drugs.

“Davis on drugs--that story flew like someone who just won the lottery,” Davis said. “The guy who wrote that story didn’t even ask me about it before he wrote it.

“There were always these rumors in Cincinnati about drugs and alcohol, rumors about things I wouldn’t even know, started by people I didn’t even know for some odd reason--maybe the way I dress or something.

“After that story, I met with the press and aired them out, and then I quit talking with them. And, of course, when they printed the story saying the story was wrong, it was little redemption. It was a little thing on the back page of sports.”

Davis said he was summoned to then-manager Pete Rose’s office, where Rose and General Manager Murray Cook asked him if he used drugs, even recreationally.

“That made me so mad, that I got up and walked out,” Davis said. “Because if you are using drugs recreationally, then you are having a problem because you still are having to use them.

“All it takes is one person to say something negative, and it will last for five years.”

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It has been five years since that happened, and rumors still follow Davis, albeit not as often. He laughed at a recent one that had him in a rehabilitation center during the winter. The rumor hadn’t specified why he was there.

Now, at 30, Davis and his wife, Sherrie, are trying to bring up their two daughters as he was reared.

“I’m trying to give them what they need, but not everything they want,” he said. “I want to teach them that they have to do things maybe they don’t want to do to get things they want. And when they do, they are rewarded with the things they like, such as going to Grandma’s house for the weekend.”

Davis is also working hard, hoping his reward will be to stay in the lineup and become the hitter he used to be. He has worked overtime in the batting cage, trying to take the hitch out of his swing, which developed while he was trying to compensate for his kidney injury.

In 12 games this spring, Davis is hitting the ball hard, batting .300 with two home runs, three doubles and 10 runs batted in. He has scored eight runs, walked eight times and stolen one base. His bat speed is returning.

“He’s one of the few guys I did not want to see come up in a game because he hit the ball so hard and he swung so hard,” said Kevin Elster, who played shortstop for the Mets and is trying to make the Dodger roster.

“He is head and shoulders above the other guys, and you don’t see too many right-handed hitters with his kind of bat speed.

“When I would see Eric come to the plate, I would back up two or three steps, and I don’t back up very often.”

Before his kidney injury, Davis averaged 30 home runs and 90 RBIs in his first five seasons. In 1986, he stole 80 bases and the next season hit 37 home runs, drove in 100 runs and stole 50 bases. All in 129 games.

Rose said last spring that, somewhere along the line, “Eric realized he could put up numbers in 135 games that other guys put up in 162 games. Eric wants to be just right when he plays, so he’ll take days off to get healthy.”

Davis has acknowledged times he could have played in Cincinnati, but believed that he wouldn’t be of value to the team if he couldn’t run down a fly ball. He also says there were times he shouldn’t have played, such as the season after his kidney injury.

Now, with his body stronger and more padded, with his determination to play hard but in control and with his contract up at the end of the year, Davis knows the challenge he faces. He knows he has to stay ready to play.

On his arm is a tattoo of a panther, an animal, Davis says, who seeks and destroys.

“If a panther can’t find a way, he makes a way,” Davis said.