Davis at ease on big-league mound
Ex-Little League World Series sensation pitches at Reds stadium for youth team
Mo’ne Davis climbed onto the Great American Ball Park pitcher’s mound Tuesday and was more pleasantly surprised than nervous.
“I felt pretty good,” the 2014 Little League World Series sensation said about pitching from a major league mound in an actual game for the first time. “I thought it would be a lot farther to the plate. It wasn’t as far as I thought it would be.”
Davis is in town with her hometown Philadelphia team participating in the 2017 Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) World Series. Her Phillies opened pool play Tuesday against the Chicago White Sox team that included many of the same players from the Jackie Robinson West team that beat her Taney (Pa.) team in the 2014 Little League World Series semifinals.
Chicago came back from a tworun deficit Tuesday to advance with a 4-3 walk-off win. The White Sox scored two runs off Davis in her second of two innings, one of them unearned after she made a throwing error, hitting Pierce Jones as he ran out a bunt, which allowed Darius Little to score the tying run all the way from first base.
“We’ll be fine,” said the slender, 5-4 high school junior, who allowed one hit and two walks with no strikeouts in two innings of relief. “We made some errors that cost us.”
Davis had a difficult time getting her fastball down and relied mostly on changeups and curves. She got the first two batters in the fourth inning, the second on second baseman Jahli Hendricks’ twisting backhand grab of a popup in short right-center field. She walked the next batter, who stole second but was fooled by her pickoff move and trapped off second.
She issued a one-out walk in the fifth to Ed Howard, who stole second and scored on Aiden Stewart’s single. Little’s sharp grounder glanced off Davis’ glove to shortstop Jared Sprague-Lott, who fielded it and, after realizing he couldn’t get the batter at first, whirled and alertly caught Stewart too far around second base.
The game was one of eight scheduled to be played on the Cincinnati Reds home field Tuesday and Wednesday. The Reds are the only major league franchise to allow each RBI Series team to play at least one game on the major league field. Other host franchises limit RBI appearances to the tournament championship games.
Sixteen teams in two divisions, Senior and Junior, are participating in this year’s tournament. Besides Great American, games are scheduled for the P&G Cincinnati MLB Youth Academy, Xavier University’s Hayden Field and Withrow High School.
Cincinnati is the East representative in the Senior Division. The championship games are scheduled to be played Saturday at 8 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. at the Youth Academy.
Tuesday’s Great American Ball Park visit was Davis’ third but her first on the field, she said.
Davis can’t believe that three years have passed since she burst onto the baseball scene by becoming the first girl to win a game and pitch a shutout in Little League World Series history. She also became the first African-American girl to play in the Little League World Series.
“It’s crazy,” she said while standing in the visitors dugout, surrounded by media members, with a camera crew hovering on the field. “It doesn’t seem like it. It went by too fast.
“I was cleaning out my room, and I found a lot of stuff from 2014 and 2015. There were some awards, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe I won this award.’ I had to sit down and remind myself to be grateful for what I have.”
Despite Tuesday’s media attention, the spotlight doesn’t shine nearly as intensely on Davis as it did a few years ago, but it’s still there.
“It was crazy, but it’s calmed down,” she said, waist-length braids tucked behind her left, non-throwing shoulder. “At tournaments, kids still come up to me and get their picture taken.”
Davis, who played shortstop on her high school fast-pitch softball team, plans to play baseball as long as she can, she said, but her main interest continues to be basketball, which she hopes to play in college.