And now an exclusive interview with David Bassey for Dodger.
Talking from New York Dodgers Mets tomorrow night, Kershaw Day at City Fields, and our coverage begins at three o'clock with first pitch at four to ten. I wanted to reshare a great conversation I had with two LA Baseball legends. It was done in twenty twenty during the baseball shutdown due to the pandemic. Here was the great Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis together again, right here on a five seventy LA Sports See.
How you doing all right? Every day? What's up? D old timer? What do you do baby? How you coming along? You say, we're good? Were good?
We old timers now, so we call each other old timers. So it's good to be with you, David. Yeah, it's really good to be with you on the phone with my best friend growing up in California and playing a little lad together, Eric, the great Davis man.
Man, it is so great to hear your guys voice. And I know Los Angeles was really excited when we put this together. When you guys come back to LA, do you still feel the same love that you had when you grew up here.
It'll never leave, David, because that's kind of DNA. Even though we started somewhere. He started in New York. I started in Cincinnati, and then we went places, and he came to LA, and then I ended up coming to LA, and we went to other places. LA will always be home, and so the jubilation of recitement we get when we go is just as anticified when we see the La Dodger fans and the Laker fans and the rams enerators.
Was there when we were there. You know, we had a whole lot, but it was extraordinary and that'll be part of what we do for the rest our life.
Hey, Darryl, Yeah, it is remarkable, you know to sit back and think, you know, coming up and growing up in California and being a Laker fan and Dodger fan, myself and Erica, and you know, having our careers, you know, shout off somewhere else and then you know, have an opportunity to come back home and play, and like Gerrek said, it will always be homes.
I mean La. I mean he grew up.
On the free mind. I grew up in Prenshaw And there's so many great baseball players that come out of southern California and all of us got a chance to see each other and play against each other, and it's but there's nothing like home. There's nothing like Harvard Park. There's nothing like your program or who we were being eric and what we built around there for so many years in our old neighborhood when we became professional athletes.
You guys put together a documentary a few years back about Harvard Park down there in South Central and even me and the San Fernando Valley used to hear about how you guys would be working out down there right for spring training. What did that park mean to not only you two guys to reconnect every off season, but what did it mean to the community for you guys to be there every off season?
Well, it started for me, it was uh and it was great that I was able to hear it down in the San Fernando Velly. That means we have some good marketing people.
You know.
It was about the spread of news, but it was something that we really really took pride in because like the conversation me and Shaw would have and and it really consummated itself from the history of so many black baseball players from South Central Inner City and in our era, we heard about them and we didn't see them. And you know, some of them went on to do great
things and they moved away and the so forth. But we wanted to make sure that our voices and our face was seen in the same areas that we grew up in. And by us starting Harvard Park where we did,
it did two things. It created a culture gap because there's so many players coming from so many places in South Central and it reminded us of where we came from to always keep pushing, to keep wanting more and to keep doing better, and to keep letting the kids around that area see us to know that dreams do come true. So it was remarkable. It was something that we did from the bottom of my heart. That number one, it had ever been done before that, and it has
never been done prior to that. So having a good twelve to fifteen year run. And if you haven't seen the documentary, then you've missed something real special. But watch the documentary and watch how many different baseball executives and players and managers house came from. Just that was part of Povard Park. So for me, just being able to resonate everything around that for our community really gave us the worth all to want to be there, to let them know that we still care.
Darryl, for you, how much did Harvard Park mean to you? And to be able to go back and you get to La with the Dodgers a year before Eric did. Did that all of it bring it full circle?
Well, yeah, of course it brought it full circle. But Harbor Park was always Barbara Park for us, you know, because there was a community of us growing up in and we will always want to go back and be a part of that. We want to be a part of people. I think that was the most important thing for me and Eric. You know, yeah we were million dollar ball players, but here we were working out in the ghetto with trash cans. So we were making a statement.
Everybody was wondering, Yeah, everybody's wondering why these guys are not up at U c l A or USC were Like, we didn't grow up in Westwood, Yeah wherever U s LA is and we didn't grow up. And see, we didn't grow up and you know, we didn't go to
those schools. He went to Fremont, I went to Crenshaw and we played on parks like these, and the reminder for us going back there was to make people understand that these parks like this breed major League Baseball players like myself, Ic Davis, Chris Brown, you can go on along the list, Eddie and Ozzie and all the different guys that come from southern California played in some of the same places we played in out in Compton, you know, we played out there, But Harvard Park was very special
to us because it was a neighborhood full of trouble, full of crime, and we were the only guys that were and they had games in that area, and we were like the only guys nobody would ever touch think about touching coming in that neighborhood. They would walk around what we were doing there, and they thought it was just amazing that we would be a part of a community like this that we know so much about it
and know the trouble that was there. But at the same time, we realized that this is home for us, and we need to let young people and young athletes see that, you know, you can come out of here and be very successful.
Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry are joining us on Dodger talk. And the one thing that I said about you two guys before you came on, not only were you really great baseball players, you're great people. Number one and number two you made everything you did cool, from the high top shoes that you wore to working out at Harvard Park is do you feel like some of the swag in the style is missing from baseball these days the
way you guys used to do it. And like I mentioned Harvard Park, you guys made it cool to want to be there.
Oh David, let me just add some real quick man. Swag is not something you give yourself, Okay. This generation creates their own swag. That's why you have so many people that are branding themselves. Swag is something that someone else gives you.
Okay. If they saw dyl Strawberry, they was like, there he is, watched, They went to watch, they went to sit down. His name was ringing. When we were ten years old. That swag. When you went to Crenshaw to watch the the basketball team play, you was trying to figure out where was he? There? He is right there. That's your swag. When other people talk about you in that light, that's your swag. Now you have guys now that give themselves nicknames and doctor themselves up. They did
on Instagram. They show they do a lot of different things to create the attention, but their game don't highlight their swag. Swag is something that somebody else gives you. So what you saw was the natural essence of we was all about. Uh. Style and charisma is something that we was all about from a kid, and it wasn't something that transcended or turned into once we got to the major leagues. And so by us liking the things that we were doing and entertaining the people from a
young age, that created our swag. And then that just materialized over time because the better you performed, the better swag you got, you know what I'm saying. So him being an ultimate and me being an ultimate, we was driven by that. Swag just consumed us. And that's when people really know about you, is about how you performed, not what you say on Instagram or Facebook or whatever.
Daryl, you're on Instagram, you see all that. Yeah, I'm sure you agree with Eric.
Well yeah, yeah, but I understand that. And there it's clearly clear about that. You know, the swag, swagen is what you know. It's not something that we label ourselves to be. Is it what people make you out of because of they watch you and they see you, and and we didn't really have we had a different style about us.
Us.
Wag was like you know, from the ghetto. You know, we was we wasn't nobody gave us a spoon and gave us anything. We had to work for it. We had to work hard. We come from some very difficult times and situations, and you know, we had to build who we were. We had to we had to fight our way through neighborhoods and you know, the gangs and everything that was around us to play ball and stuff like that. So you know, we we developed, We developed who we were by stepping on the field and performing.
I mean, it just clearly showed that. You know, when we played Little league together and you know, and Eric was a short stop batting the leadoff and I was hitting third, Chris Brown was hitting for you imagine a lineup like that with guys in there, and you got to face those type of hitters like that. And then we get to the big leagues and we take it
to a whole other level. You know, it takes the game to a whole another levels as a player that you know, hits o thirty home runs, still eighty bags, you know, doing things like that, doing things that players was not doing in the air and the time that we came up with, players today are not even doing that the kind of players we were back in the day. So you know, that's what really gave us, you know, brought the attention of who we were because we were different.
You know, we come from a different place and we played the game a different way.
How much did you guys take from where you came onto the into the minor leagues and onto the major league stage. Do you feel like everything you guys went through off the field helped you be better players on the field when you got to this type of situations where there were a lot of attention and pressure gets a little bit higher, did you feel like all the pressure of trying to survive was bigger than anything you were going to face in the big leagues.
The pressure and how to survive is South Central was way harder than trying to make it to the major leagues. Yeah, just going to school, the towsand tribulations, I mean, uh, having a fight to have your letterm and jacket or your or your Walla Bees, or your biscuits, or or someone trying to take you another codes or your bomber jacket going here and there. I was more afraid of my mama than I was anybody on the street. And if I came home and I didn't have my bomber jacket,
I was going to deal with my mama. And so right on the street was second nature to me and the girl. The same way Ruby was that tough the rocks for all of his siblings and stuff. So knowing that going to play a game that that that you grew up playing on on on dirt with glass and different things of that nature. See, they give the guys from Latin America that create about where they came from and out they played. We did it the same way
in the parking recreations. That's why Straw was so intimate about us playing at Harvard Park, Ross Schnyder, Jackie Robinson all dirt in fields. We didn't have the grass and fields and all those types of things and stuff. So when you got to the point to where I'm gonna tell you a story, actually we had a County Mac team and like eighteen of our guys off our County mac team to got drafted right, and we won the Pacific Regionals at Compton and we went up to Seattle, Washington, right,
and so they put us on. After we landed, they took us to the field and we just started laughing because the guys was like, y'all laughing. We y'all laughing. We got were playing here, and they was like, yeah, the most home runs in the tournament was seven. We hit six the first night and we broke the record because we were used to playing in open spaces when guys to play all the way back to the swimming pool or something. So when you saw a nice beautiful field, they was gonna get it.
And they got it.
So knowing all of that and then taking that into the minor leagues, it wasn't if for us it was wooded.
Yeah, was that the same experience for you?
David Strong hit the ball in that ballpark that they still looking for they ain't found it almost, so you know, it was so it.
Was so incredible. I mean, it was so incredible for us to grow up, you know actually where we grew up in South Central and become you know, major league baseball players. I think, like Eric was saying, most people don't know. The challenges were more difficult for us, you know, walking to school and being challenged by people from different neighborhoods and things like that that we had to deal with.
Putting putting the uniform on was easy for us, you know, because think about it, we both played basketball a place for free mind. I played for Crenshaw. We played basketball. Then we go crossover and we go into baseball, and we get into baseball, and playing baseball was just really easy for us, you know. But we were so determined.
Me and Eric was different than everybody else because we saw guys get drafted before us, and we saw how they were when they responded when they came back, and we just used to say to ourselves, they have not seen nothing until we get into the league, because we're going to be totally different, different type of players because they didn't have Most people didn't have the ability that me and Eric had.
We had such a high level five two s ability to play the game and i Q for the i Q was so high for the game and understanding the game the way it should be played at such a different level.
And I think most people never really recognized that. They didn't recognize us until we actually entered into the big leagues and realized and started playing the way we started to play. And they was like, wow, I never seen anything like this. Would you know these two guys play at such a high level?
He did.
I could say this flat out. I mean, I'm not as old as you guys, but I watched you guys play, and I would say that you two guys were two of the best players I ever seen play baseball. But all I hear about is how good you guys were at basketball. So did you guys ever go head to head? Fremont Crenshaw? Did you guys ever play guard each other? I thought maybe d might want to switch. I thought maybe you might want to switch.
You want nothing I can do with him on the I was going to stay outside and and uh and was a quarterback at I got recruited play football and they didn't even know I played basketball or baseball. So the ability to be multi talented has left a whole lot of our black athletes because of it's such a high profile sports now that they're putting all their marbles
into basketball or all their marbles into football. We could our marbles into sports and then let our talents take us where we wanted to go, but it gave us options. Straw could have went to any school he wanted to. I could have went to almost any school that I wanted to, And so the options of being multi talented helped us. In baseball, I was able to jump over
the fence because I could dump backwards. It was so many different barrels that I took from the basketball court onto the baseball field, and Sear did the same time. I mean, he can run, jump, throw all the different outcreaks of them. Being a quarterback was why his mom
was so small. So you have to all to diversify and put things kind of around you to allow each sport to give you soultic and and knowing all the great athletes that came from South Centralinia, the ball was said even for baseball at the at UH, the purns or Ellis Valentine and the guys in Artis Johnson and wanted to chair. There was so many different players that you saw even from front with chet Lemon and Danny
Pallard and Barbie Tulla. You had UH the Dorsey and many in Washington and Jefferson, so you had West, So you had so much talent where you had to measure up where you was gonna get set there, so you
had to cover a place. So that was the competition at such a little at lower level for us Warner, and those things were so competitive that when we got to play against guys our age, because we always played against guys older than us, and so so when we got to play his guys our age, they was in trouble the right, right, That's so true because you make
that so clear. Because we grew up around so many different players and our coach, Earl Brown, who coached us in the Summer League, all he talked about is all these other players, Oh, you guys not better than Eddie and Ozzie, you know, And he just he just built us up inside to be better than guys like that because they came through the same place playing out the accounpident. Eddie and Ozzie they did this and they did that. We used to say nothing, yeah, willis so many chill There were so many.
Yeah, there was so many of my head of us and you know, and he kept always you know, putting it in our ears and me and Ed was like, well we only to stamp on this because when we when we get out of here and we get to the major League, it's gonna be a different ball game because they ain't gonna be a dude kind of things that we're gonna do. Like he said, you know we could jump, you can get over he going over the watch. See I would have had forty home runs. But everyone
I knew this war. I mean if he had to go over the wall and stay stadium and take one of my home runs and then the other day, then the next day he throws me out at third base trying to go from first to third. You know, it's like, oh, you're supposed joy right that David Star was hard hitted. I told him to pull the ball like before he get going over on the bus outside of the little stadium.
So I told him he was to be disrespectful by tagging up on me. Disrespectful. Wanted to when we was kids, but we was in the Apple. It was naturally televised fifty five IM and then he took me to dinner and we had a good time after the game. So in between the lines, our competitor jus.
Was just that, Yeah, that's the one thing I wondered about. You guys did you did you know Straw got his World Series before you did he d Was there any of that kind of trash talking between you guys, No, no.
Never, no never. It was always the best. It was a lot of after the best. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you how humble dryl was and still is. As I might add, is that even when he went Rookie of the Year, we went to the Laker games, and we would always go to Laker games and everybody was telling Daryl congratulations and was hanging around him. But all he could say was wait till my partner comes. Nothing. That's
how he was. Didn't good became. And that's how humble he was was that he was always saying, y'all think I'm good, wait till he comes. And so no matter where the situation we were, he always looked out for everybody that was around us, so they became turn I did the same. I look all the guys to bring and the guys. And that's how our program was was. It wasn't just about man Daryl. It was about every
one of us who came behind her. And that was one of the reasons why we started the program, was to give so many different guys the opportunity to see how it also when they made it, then they would do the same thing and the team would be going and going and going. So Strong was really the leader of that because they made it to the major league first, and he showed us the way and he helped us get there by how how hard he work. And it's
it's something that needs to be clarified. It's because when you have black athletes who are challenged, they think we don't work hard because we're so conscious. But if you would have watched the weights and the and the running and the things that we did every day, then you would have saw that. But he lied in that. He was the first one of us. I can remember that started lifting weights and stuff when he had a personal trainer first, and I'm like, what you doing with that? No, God,
we got to keep grunting. Okay. Then because she lied that. That's the kind of individual he was. That's why he was so successful.
Well that's too, I thanks he but that we were all like that together because we were like brothers. We were like the family. And the thing about it, David, is we cared about all our younger players coming underneath us, you know, like the Royce Clayton. You know, he come from underneath us, you know, learning out there with us, and we taught him to have the mentality to be strong and learn how to go through the adversities of sports. Is going to be there and you're gonna have to
learn to deal with it. So it was just it came from all of us, you know, it came from It really came from me and Eve because we were like the cornerstone and everything around there. When when it came to the program, because the program was about Harvard Park and it was a out where we come out of and where we never leave. And I think that's what really made us great because we never forgot where we came from. And there was no egos. You know,
it was all about It wasn't about being selfish. It was about us lifting each other up and encouraging each each other. And like Eric Sin, I wonder rookie here, but I was like, you guys, wait, my boy is coming. He is bad. You guys have never seen anything like this here. I'm telling you you just waiting until you see it. And once they got a chance to see it, they realized, like, wow, these are like true guys that come out of South Central that really built their own
legacy the way they wanted to build it. Now, some way somebody else should have said it should have been just the way we decided that it was going to be, and we was going to help all these younger players, like I said that were around us, because all the young players at the program, people need to go watch Harbor Park, they need.
To go see that it's and just how how much Girl and myself connect the two guys coming from South Central. We weren't put on an average pedestal. Girl was supposed to be the next Ted Williams, one of the greatest players that not one of the top three players of all time, and I was supposed to be the next one of the players has carried that type of baggage as eighteen to nineteen year old. We had to live with that and to move through the minor leagues and
to move through the major league. I can't recall a player up of my era, in Shaw's era that was dealt with that kind of pressure as it can. And did we get there. No, But it wasn't because of the talent and the way we played. It was because of injury and the way I played, and the way Daryl played, how he got hurt, we would have had so much fun and winning here in La He hurt
his back, I had triple surgery. But if you go back and look at our records on the game that we played together, we were we were tearing people up spots the way of changing the nerve behind something on the afternoon.
Uh.
People ask me all the time, they say, would you change something, And I'm like no, because of the way that I went about it, the people that I went through, what I went through with, and I wasn't to change how I played. I would have changed the people that I played with, wouldn't have changed our friendship. I would
have changed how we run. I wouldn't have placed all the bad things we went through, and I wouldn't changed men the good things because everything that we went through is the reason that we're the people that we are today at fifty eight years old. So me, that story is still going on. There's still more chesters. Look at what he's doing now. And it's ironic that we both now don't live in California and we go back because of how the chapters in our lives have taken us
other places. To do things with people that we never thought that we would do, not just in baseball, but away from baseball. That's what I'm thought of it. Girls kind of the same thing. I'm sorry, Jeryl, go ahead, no I am.
I'm really proud of me and Erica. And when I look back and I reflect back on what it was like, how we were growing up and who we were in LA and we came out. We came out of California with more hype than any any player I think in the history of baseball, being like Eric said, me being Ted Williams the next Ted Williams and him being Willie Mays. And I don't think anybody really understands what that's like, you know, to be able to carry that and have
to have that on us. And the way we played in the game, and we played the win all the time. It was lights out, you know. And we wasn't just a one demential player, you know, we were We were players where you know, we hit home runs, we steal bases, we played the field, we run scored and we I mean,
we did it all. And that took a grind on who we were physically, and then the body starts to break down, you start having the injuries, like their said, and you know, and of course you know, I come through the troubles of my life with the addiction part too, so that played another part of slowing me down even more. And it's a real reality. But like he like he was saying, who had made us today? When we look back at we were and when we see each other, we laughed because we had such a good time of
being who we were in California growing up there. Exactly, We'll never forget that. We'll never forget that what that's really like and what what it was like growing up there, because when you look at all the people that come through southern California and all the players. You know, I remember the players we played blanket ship them and I think that we beat them in the playoffs and they were supposed to be hot stuff. Yeah bull Yeah, we beat them. We beat them out of competent and stuff.
You know.
It was just you know, it was us, you know, us with me Eric and Chris Brown. And Chris Brown was a part of us too in those days, you know, when we were growing up. But me and Eric uh put ourselves in a position and I remember sitting there kind of you know, at the stadium, and Eric was drafted and and I was number one. I was still holding out. He said, Man, dog, I gotta go. I gotta get going. Man up in the side. You know, I didn't have much to hold out.
I didn't have any record. He didn't know.
Taking but he knew what the thing about it was what makes me so proud of ericas he knew where he was going. See like those players, I knew where I was going. He knew where he was going. We knew that we wasn't gonna fall shore. We knew that one day we would be on the show, and it was just a matter of time.
That is a bucket list childhood dream. Talking to Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry. Ronnie will podcast that interview again. It was from twenty twenty, but worth sharing again. Thanks to Hori a cast you, thanks to the straw and Ed for their help, and thank you to Ronnie Fossio. We will be back with you tomorrow at three o'clock for a pregame first pitch at four to ten between the Dodgers and Mets. Kershaw Day right here on AM five to seventy LA Sports. Thanks again, Ronnie Fossio and
thanks to you for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.
See ya,