David Michael Hollins, again hitless, looks down, scowls, and closes his fist around the wide burgundy stripe at the center of his right palm.
His brow furls, arms flex, dark fumes leak from his ears, and then . . . lo! The storm abruptly lifts. Hollins leans back in the folding chair before his locker and sips cold beer from a plastic cup.
“If you’d have told me back in spring training we’d be 11 games up in the last week of August, I’d have leaned over and kissed you,” he says. There’s a tight smile on the lower half of the face, but deep in the pale gray eyes there’s still a reflection of that scar.
A struggle is going on here. That upbeat comment-after all, the Philadelphia Phillies had just won their 80th game of the season-that was from Dave Hollins, the Phils’ All-Star third baseman, the good-natured charmer.
But the glowering gray eyes? Those belong to the other Hollins, the one his teammates call “Mikey,” the evil twin, the slumping evil twin, the one whose summer of promise was stunted by hand surgery, the one who just went 0 for 3, and who has watched, bound tight in the basement, seven points drop off his batting average over a week in which he has gone 3 for 23.
People who know Hollins tend to leave plenty of empty space around him during periods like these.
“Is your hand completely healed?” he’s asked.
“Completely healed is a funny expression,” Hollins answers, looking down and reopening his hand. “Nobody expects to have their hand cut wide open in the middle of the season and have a bone taken out, and have it sewed back up and for it to feel normal. So that’s a funny expression to me right now. I’m not sure I know what that means. It’s something I have to just deal with. Believe me, I’m working hard to get back to 100 percent, but you can’t rush it.”
Well, you can try. Doctors told Hollins his hand would be in a cast for up to four weeks. He took that cast off after three days. Jose Canseco missed a month after similar surgery. Hollins was back in the lineup in 16 days.
Then, on Aug. 13, he badly bruised the same hand. Hollins refuses to make excuses, but the struggle wears on him-“It’s a battle every day,” he says.
As hordes crowd the lockers of today’s heroes-backup catcher Todd Pratt, Lenny Dykstra and Mariano Duncan-Hollins sips his beer and asks: “You know the `Who’s Hot? Who’s Not?’ thing on ESPN? Well, this week I’m a `Who’s Not.’ “
Now normally, this situation would call for a dramatic visit (probably even a two- or three-day stay) from Mikey, the Hollins who used to rock his trailer home with tantrums after a bad game in the minor leagues, the Hollins who once locked himself in his room for two days (refusing food) after losing a big high school football game.
But while there isn’t much that passes for etiquette in a pro locker room-especially in the gut-scratching, tobacco-spitting, beer-swilling underground haunt of the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies-there is one thing that just “isn’t done.” A player does not place himself before the team. The rule mostly concerns players who might be inclined to gloat over a fine personal performance after a team loss, but it also-and here’s what keeps Mikey bound-frowns on theatrical venting of personal frustration when the team is on a roll.
It is with effort that Hollins now bows to the unwritten rule.
“It’s not easy,” he says. “I’m trying to block out the disappointment for myself personally. You always want to meet certain goals you’ve set, but the main thing is to win. I mean, you’ve got the whole city excited here, and they haven’t had a pennant here in 10 years, so who am I to worry about my numbers? . . . It’s really the only way I can look at it.”
Presently, Dave Hollins is hitting .278, which is 14 points better than his career average, and seven points better than last year’s, his first as a full-time big-leaguer. It’s true that he was on a pace to hit more than 100 RBIs this year, and might have dinged 30 homers and hit over .300 for the first time, but his surgery-shortened season hardly has been a flop.
He went to the All-Star Game for the first time this year, and is still within reach of a 20-home-run, 90-RBI season. Not to mention his team’s likely first trip to the National League Championship Series in a decade.
“This isn’t exactly a great time for me, personally,” he says, and this is the “good” twin speaking, poised, patient, in control. There isn’t a person who knows Dave Hollins who doesn’t think the guy is too hard on himself.
Phils manager Jim Fregosi hinted at it after a recent game: “He’s just struggling a little bit right now, and he’s fighting himself with the bat,” which is baseball talk for playing all balled up and angry.
“I’m trying, I really am,” Hollins says. “It’s been such a great year for the team, but for me, speaking individually, in the back of your mind you set certain personal goals, you always want to do better than you did the year before, or as well. But now, there’s really no goals of mine that I can achieve because of the setbacks with the hand, so I’ve had to try to put that personal stuff on the shelf and just try to chip in and do what I can for us to win, you know? At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”
He’s not entirely convinced about this yet, that much is clear, but for Hollins this state of mind represents a remarkable accomplishment.
“Dave has always had higher expectations for himself than ordinary people,” says his older brother Paul, a Buffalo stockbroker and former minor-league ballplayer (as were Dave’s father and younger brother, Steve). “He’s a terror . . . always has been. That high school loss where he locked himself in his room? Well, Dave played quarterback in that game with a broken index finger on his throwing hand. The trainer for the Buffalo Bills fixed a flexible cast for him, and Dave played great. His team lost by a field goal in overtime, I think, but Dave’s performance . . . it wasn’t just great, it was heroic. But he was just crushed.”
Paul says the family doesn’t try to talk Dave out of his funks any more.
“We’ve seen him go through it too many times,” he says. “Getting down on himself is just his way of working through it. He’s convinced that if he adopts a more easygoing attitude-you know, “So what if I went 0-4 today, I’ll get my hits tomorrow” – he’ll never come out of it. I’ve been telling him he could still get hot and come out of this year with some more impressive stats, but even if he doesn’t, gee whiz! The guy had hand surgery eight weeks ago! And he’s hitting over .270 and headed for postseason play!”
In fact, some of that message is getting through. Hollins says this might be an important breakthrough for him, at age 27, just getting started really on his major-league career. He admires Lenny Dykstra, who has suffered through a few injury-plagued seasons of his own, and he marvels at how many members of this team have stepped in to pick up the slack.
“We’ve got so many guys, I mean, the bottom of our order has been just awesome,” he says. “Last year, if the first four guys didn’t do anything, man, we lost. Now, we can get two, three, even four guys out of the first five can get shut down and we can still win, because we’ve got guys in the sixth, seventh and eighth hole who are picking us up.”
So Mikey is going to stay downstairs and “Dave” Hollins, the one with the pinched smile and broader perspective, is going to find a way to savor this.
“I’m not going to hit 30 home runs, but I might hit 20,” he says. “I still might get from 90 to 100 RBIs; I have 75, with 30 some games to go. I know I’ve pitched in. . . . Since I’ve been here, .260 to .280 is what I usually hit, anyways. I’m just in one of those swings right now, one of the wrong swings. Now I’ve got to come back.”
