An anonymous backup for the Chicago Cubs enjoys a moment of glory that sounds almost fictional.
Chicago Cubs backup catcher Taylor Davis’ eight-year professional career has paralleled another famous catcher named Davis, first name Crash. Like the fictional catcher played by Kevin Kostner in Bull Durham, Taylor Davis has bounced between the majors and minors with a heavy emphasis on the latter.
Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field, however, Taylor Davis enjoyed a moment he’ll be able to recount in detail for all the prodigies he runs into on those future bus trips to Omaha, Oklahoma City, and Colorado Springs.
He hit a grand slam home run off Michel Wacha in the fourth inning of Chicago’s 6-5 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. Simply put, the win, which moved Chicago within a half-game of the front-running Cardinals in the NL Central, wouldn’t have happened if not for Davis.
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Until Saturday, Taylor Davis’ entire professional career consisted of 595 games, all but 16 of them played in minor league uniforms of the stripe of Eugene, Daytona, Peoria, and Iowa. Sadly for dramatic symmetry, he never played in Durham. The Cubs brought him up for eight games in 2017, and for five more last year.
Like Crash Davis, he experienced just enough major league life to be able to reminisce about it.
Entering 2019, those reminiscences seemed destined to continue indefinitely. The only reasons he has been collecting a major league paycheck this past couple of weeks was a fractured hand bone suffered by Victor Caratini, the backup to All-Star Cubs catcher Willson Contreras.
To date, Caratini’s injury has extended Davis’ major league service by parts seven games. When Caratini returns, probably around June 1, the 29-year-old Davis will resume his seat on the minor league bus.
Given Davis’ .217 major league average entering Saturday, it’s no wonder that Wacha – nursing a 5-1 lead with runners at second and third and one out – elected to issue an intentional walk to Kyle Schwarber in favor of facing him. It not only eliminated the prodigiously powerful Schwarber as a threat, but it also set up a potential inning-ending double play. By the way, Davis was hitless in seven 2019 plate appearances and had exactly one major league extra-base hit – a 2017 double — to his name when he entered the batter’s box.
Wacha’s first pitch was a 90 mph waist-high cutter on the inside part of the plate. Davis swung hard and watched the ball fly toward the upper reaches of Wrigley’s left field bleachers. The Chicago Cubs won when Javier Baez broke the 5-5 tie with an eighth-inning home run off Cardinal reliever John Brebbia.
In nine minor league seasons, this real-life Crash Davis has never been known as a power threat. His 2,100 minor league plate appearances produced just 31 homers and 264 RBIs, his best seasons being nine homers in 2015 and 62 RBIs in 2017. Both came for the Cubs’ AAA Iowa farm team.
As previously noted, Davis’ big league days are almost certainly numbered. Now when he goes back to Iowa, however, he can at least recount the afternoon he socked a real big league grand slam. That’s something the fictional Crash Davis is never known to have accomplished.