Late Bloomers: Davey Lopes

Davey Lopes almost didn’t play baseball at all.

One of 10 kids growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, he played a lot of sports through high school but the seasons there aren’t as long, and the talent base is small, so Lopez didn’t noticed by scouts for either colleges or big league teams. When he graduated he went to work in a clothing store as a box boy, and figured he’d join the military at the height of the Vietnam War and try to make a career out of it.

But that wasn’t the path his mom, Mary Rose, had in mind for him. She literally slapped his face when he told her his plans, and insisted that he should go to college as the only way to break of the life he once described as “socioeconomically deprived.” Lopes had no way of affording college at the time, leading right back to thoughts of joining the military and using the G.I. Bill to pay for it, but that’s when he got a break.

A former basketball coach whose teams Lopes used to play against was hired as the athletic director at tiny Iowa Wesleyan College. Michael Sarkesian remembered Lopes as a good player, and offered him a scholarship to follow him out to Iowa and play both basketball and baseball. It was the only offer Lopes got that would allow him to fulfill his mother’s wishes right away, so he took it.

Lopes excelled on the baseball field at Iowa Wesleyan and was named and NAIA All-American, but two years later Sarkesian, who he viewed as a father figure, took the athletic director job at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. Given the option of finishing his degree at Iowa Wesleyan or transferring to Washburn, Lopes chose to follow Sarkesian south.

In 1967, Lopes batted .380 for the Ichabods and was drafted by the Giants in the 8th round of that June’s amateur draft. He decided not to sign, though, because he hadn’t finished his degree in elementary education yet and wanted to do that as a more stable career option than playing professional baseball. He returned to Washburn that Fall and played on the basketball team again, inching a bit closer to that degree he promised his mother. Before baseball season even started, though, the Dodgers drafted Lopes in the second round of the supplemental draft in January, 1968. This time he agreed to sign, but only after he was assured by the Dodgers that they would pay for him to finish his degree and give him the time to do it.