The yin and yang of Daves

January 30, 2024

There’s a lot that can be said about Dave Johnson (or Davey, as most people probably know him) on this, his 81st birthday. I should start off by saying that even though this card depicts him in a (non-airbrushed) Cubs cap and uniform while apparently standing inside Wrigley Field, he doesn’t qualify as one of my baseball droids. He played a handful of games with the Cubs in 1978, after a trade with the Philadelphia Phillies, but he never played in 1979 or any point thereafter. This means the back of this card is one of the relatively rare ones that shows the entirety of a player’s major league stats.

But does it, really? This card indicates that he batted 1.000 in his only at bat of the season in 1975, and didn’t play again until 1977. What happened in the meantime, one might ask? The Braves released Johnson at the start of the season, a little more than a year after hitting a still-astonishing 43 home runs in 1973, and Johnson made his way to Japan, where he played in 1975 and 1976 alongside all-time home run leader Sadaharu Oh. After being effectively shut out of the Japanese game, Johnson returned to the States with the Phillies, before ending his career with the Cubs. But that career detail was apparently not worth mentioning on the back of this Topps card from 1979.

Johnson found great success, both as a player (two championships and four pennants with the Baltimore Orioles) and a manager (a 1986 championship with the New York Mets). But what really makes him a visionary was his early grasp of the application of computers to the statistical aspects of baseball. He was a sabermetrician before Bill James came along and revolutionized how the game was understood.

Billy Beane and Moneyball are what many people probably think of as the advent of computer-aided analysis, but imagine Dave Johnson trying to use computers to convince Earl Weaver why he should bat second in the Orioles’ lineup back in the early 1970s. The sudden surge in Johnson’s home run output—from 5 in 1972 all the way up to 43 in 1973—can’t exclusively be tied to Atlanta’s reputation as the “launching pad.” He had to know more in that season than anybody else knew at the time, and the computer certainly helps to explain why.

One of the more enlightening books I’ve ever read is Gordon Bell’s The Tao of Baseball. I’m going to grossly oversimplify the concept here, but there are light and dark forces, as represented by the terms yin and yang, which exist everywhere and cannot exist without each other. And it is possible that Dave Moates, who is celebrating his 76th birthday today, is the yin to Dave Johnson’s yang. That sounds strange, and even a little bit gross, but let’s give it a try here.

For starters, what’s shown above is Dave Moates’ first baseball card in 1976, one of only two that he would ever have. The Dave Johnson card above, on the yang side of the ledger, is the last one of his long playing career.

Secondly, while I briefly described the successful career of Dave Johnson as a player and a manager above, Dave Moates was definitely on the yin end of baseball success. He played for two losing Texas Rangers teams, and never served as a professional coach or a manager after his career was over.

Finally—and most compellingly of all, in my view—is the dates of their major league service as a player. Dave Moates played in one single game during the 1974 season, when he was sent in as a pinch runner in the ninth inning of the first game of a doubleheader against the Kansas City Royals in Arlington, Texas. He was forced out at third to end the game, at a little past 8:30 PM local time.

While that game was going on, starting at 7:37 PM local time in Houston, Dave Johnson’s Atlanta Braves were playing against the Astros. Johnson went 0-for-4 in that game, with a walk and a strikeout. As Dave Moates was running the bases for maybe five minutes before the end of his game in Arlington, it’s possible that Dave Johnson was either sitting in the Braves’ dugout waiting for his turn to hit, or playing the field at first base. But baseball’s yin and yang forces then ensured that these two Daves would never again grace a major league field at the same time.

Dave Johnson was released by Atlanta on April 11, just after the 1975 season had begun. Date Moates was with the Spokane Indians at that time, the Rangers’ triple A affiliate in the Pacific Coast League. After Dave Johnson was safely in Japan and learning about the culture of the Japanese League, Dave Moates was called up to the Rangers on July 17. And during the 1976 season—as Dave Johnson was completing his playing days overseas—Dave Moates played what turned out to be his final season in the Major Leagues.

When Dave Johnson returned to play for the Phillies in 1977, yin forces kept Dave Moates down in the minor leagues, first with the Rangers and then in the Yankees’ farm system. After Dave Moates was finished as a professional ballplayer, yang forces then allowed Dave Johnson to have one final year, split between the Phillies and Cubs, in 1978.

On a personal note, and speaking of the 1978 season, it was announced today that Jimy Williams passed away at the age of 80. I still don’t know how this happened, but my hometown of Springfield, Illinois was the home of St. Louis’ Triple A affiliate, the Springfield Redbirds, from 1978 until 1981. Jimy Williams was the first manager the team had in 1978, as he worked his way up toward managing in the majors. He’s proof that a successful playing career is not at all a prerequisite for either becoming a manager, or achieving success in that position.

Until tomorrow….