Men on Base Put Fire in Chili’s Bat

Our attention has been diverted by fresher, more tantalizing subplots. The rise and fall of J.T. Snow. The white-knuckled search for a fourth and fifth starter. The guilt pangs over Bryan Harvey. The shin splints of Damion Easley.

But from his neglected corner of the Angel clubhouse, old man Chili Davis sits and counts RBIs, his RBIs, more RBIs on the morning of July 8 than Barry Bonds, Mark Grace, Carlos Baerga, David Justice, Juan Gonzalez and Ken Griffey Jr.

Chili has 63 of them. Sixty-three RBIs in half a season, including 49 in a relentless 54-game run that began on May 10, when Chili owned the batting average of an Angel catcher--.198--and was looking more and more like just another Angel free-agent mistake.

Maybe that’s when we lost interest. In mid-May, it was so easy to simply close the book on Chili, to end the story there, to rue the day the Angels let him get away and burn his last productive season while under the employ of the Minnesota Twins.

Beneath his Angel uniform, Chili wears the evidence--a sleeveless navy-blue T-shirt bearing the inscription WORLD BASEBALL CHAMPIONS 1991 on the back. For the first two months of this season, the shirt served as a nostalgia piece, a reminder of the days when Chili was a 29-homer, 93-RBI man, wielding the bat as if it were a machete, clearing a straight path to the World Series.

But those days are gone for good, right?

Chili’s 33 now, getting up there, and his 1992 RBI total was down to a near career-low 66. Hadn’t the Twins seen enough? Hadn’t they offered him a contract just measly enough for him to turn down, so they could clear out his locker and get it ready for Dave Winfield?

And hadn’t the Angels re-signed Chili merely as an attempt to appease the enraged masses who were calling for Whitey Herzog’s flattop last December, demanding at least one player in the lineup who didn’t require a “Hi, My Name Is . . . “ ID tag?

“There’s always going to be skepticism,” Chili reasons. “If you have a good year, you read these magazines and hear people talking about you, saying, ‘Oh, that was a career year for him, he’ll never do it again.’

“The people who write that don’t know me. They don’t know what makes me tick.”

OK then. So what makes Chili Davis tick?

“You won’t ever know,” he replies, laughing. “Hell, sometimes I don’t know.”

He pauses.

“Here, I guess I appreciate the effort the young guys put out. They started off real hot, then cooled off quite a bit. They could have rolled over and said, ‘Wait till the All-Star break, then we’ll get something going,’ but they didn’t.

“They kept hustling and finding ways to get on base. It would be unfair for me, then, not to do my job. And my job is to drive them in.”

With Chili, it is Job 1 and then some. With runners in scoring position this season, he is Tommy Davis--hitting .322 in such situations. But with no RBIs on the pond, he becomes Mac Davis--a scant .208.

“Chili goes into a different mode with men on base,” Angel Manager Buck Rodgers says. “You can almost feel the wave come over him, see the vise tighten. He just focuses . . .

“On the other hand, with nobody on base, you have all this other stuff going on.” Rodgers waves his arms above his head as if he trying to brush away a hornet. “But that’s the way he’s always been. That’s his life--driving in runs.”

Rodgers believes Davis belongs in the All-Star Game, but acknowledges that “he’s a borderline guy, and there’s a fistful of borderline guys like that.”

Argument for Chili: Already has more RBIs than all 1992 Angel designated hitters combined.

Argument against: Just a .242 average, plus his wallflower act during the Angels’ initial 17-11 sprint. The bulk of Chili’s RBIs came once the team began to head south--49 RBIs in 54 games, yes, but only 23 victories, too.

Chili admits that during the season’s first month-and-a-half he “basically wasn’t there. It’s only been in the last three, four weeks that I’ve started feeling comfortable.”

And if he has been unable to help the Angels help themselves, is that his fault? At the very least, Chili’s swing from has-been to RBI machine is a study in resiliency that ought to be made required reading for Snow and Tim Salmon.

“I kept telling Tim and J.T., ‘Stay hot, eventually I’m going to get my hits, too,’ ” Chili says. “I told them it’ll be nice to have three guys in the middle of the order raking the ball.”

And someday, sure, it will be nice. Hasn’t happened in 1993, though. At the moment, J.T. is MIA, leaving the balance of the raking to Salmon and the old guy with the shaved head and the shiny diamond ring.

Except don’t call Chili “old.”

“I’m not old,” he sneers. “I’m 33 years old. Carlton Fisk is 45 and still playing. Andre Dawson and guys like Charlie Hough are still playing.

“I’m not old.”

Besides, at 33, Chili is on pace to do something he was unable to accomplish at 23 or 25 or 29: Drive in 100 runs. He has cleared the 90 barrier three times in his career, but hit the wall twice at 93.

“Why stop at 100?” Chili wants to know. “If I get to 100, I’m going for more. Just drive in as many as I can.”

And if the Angels care to hitch a ride, Chili wouldn’t mind. As the man’s T-shirt says, he knows the way.