Dave Kingman “Kong”
1912 was quite a year for Ty Cobb. On May 15th of that year, a season in which he hit a gaudy .409 and led the league in slugging percentage, he marched into the stands and knocked out a heckling fan—a heckler who, as it happens, had just two fingers on one hand and zero on the other. The brutal pummeling, however, did little to soothe The Georgia Peach’s bloodlust. Later that summer, having been accosted and stabbed by three would be robbers, Cobb fought off two of the assailants and then beat the third to death. Or at least that’s what he said. On the one hand, Cobb’s telling, recounted to author Al Stump, is not corroborated by any reporting from the day. On the other hand, Ty Cobb was a savage, vengeful son of a bitch. He was, by many accounts, the greatest to ever play the game. And he was, by many more accounts, the meanest to ever do it.
The list of baseball’s greatest villains shares quite a few names with the list of its greatest players. Boston fans despise Jeter and A-Rod. Yankee fans despise Pedro and Manny. Albert Belle may have been the most complete hitter of the Nineties but he was definitely the biggest asshole. Rogers Hornsby was famously, aggressively racist, even by the standards of a sport that was profoundly, institutionally racist. Barry Bonds had countless admirers but maybe not a single friend in the game. And while there was to love about Charlie Hustle, his flaws range from dark to criminal. For as long as there’s been baseball, there have been baseball heroes who were also baseball villains.
Obviously not every Hall of Famer was a piece of shit. And, conversely, not every villain was an MVP. A.J. Pierzynski was a world class irritant. John Rocker was a legendary imbecile. And Milton Bradley was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. But, in each of these cases—even in the most irredeemable instances—there is another side. There’s a teammate who explains how the bastard was misunderstood. A doctor with a sympathetic diagnosis. A story about the player’s quiet charity. No matter how half hearted, there’s almost always a defense to be offered.
Except in the case of David Arthur Kingman. For most of his sixteen big league seasons, “King Kong” Kingman was universally disliked. Reporters hated him on account of his surly nature. But, Kingman was not so exceptional in that department. The same could be said for Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, Steve Carlton and Eddie Murray. Fans were generally, briefly wowed by Kingman’s prodigious power, only to turn on him for his complete lack of interest in every other aspect of the game. Managers, GMs and owners resented having to pay so much for his one dimension. Even Mets and Cubs fans, who like to share that story about that time they saw Kong hit the ball a mile—even they caveat it with something like: “He was a massive asshole, but…” There are countless anecdotes about Dave Kingman—the person—floating around the internet. Some are curious. Others are derisive. But having read most of them, I can officially confirm—none are sympathetic.
The story of Dave Kingman—the ballplayer—is less one sided, if still one dimensional. Kingman hit home runs. High. Mammoth. Home runs. He hit four hundred forty-two of them. On May 17th, 1979, he hit a ball out of Wrigley Field, into the third house across Waveland Avenue—measured to be over five hundred and thirty feet from home plate. During his long, strange trip around baseball, Kong hit several balls estimated to have traveled closer to six hundred feet. He hit three home runs in a game on five (5) different occasions, placing him in a tie for second place on list full of Hall of Famers. His sixteen career grand slams tie him with Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron for eighth place. Nearly thirty percent of Kingman’s hits were home runs. He was a mainstay in the annual home run race, leading the NL twice, including in 1979, when he hit forty-eight and topped the league in slugging percentage and OPS.
In the history of the game, there’s never really been another slugger like Dave Kingman. He was extraordinarily tall—six feet, six inches—but equally lanky. He was all limbs and—compared to modern giants like Frank Thomas or Adam Dunn—no girth. He struck out three times for every one time he walked. He could not adequately field any single position on the diamond. But he had a strong arm, long strides and lightning quick wrists. In 1982, across one hundred and forty-nine games, he blasted thirty-seven home runs but mustered only nine doubles. Nine! It is the most home runs ever hit in a single season for a player with less than ten doubles. His Baseball Reference page is full of “how the heck” peculiarities. And yet, the statistics are barely half the story.
Only twelve players have ever played for four major league teams in one season. Ten of them are people you’ve never heard of. One of them was Jose Bautista—a rookie at the time—who had less than one hundred at bats and hit .205 for the season. The other was—you guessed it—Dave Kingman, who, in 1977, hit twenty-six home runs in one hundred and thirty-two games for the Mets, Padres, Angels and Yankees. While other journeymen have played for more clubs than Kingman, very few wore out their welcome so quickly. In a 1979 piece for Sports Illustrated, written during the height of Kong-mania, Kingman’s former teammate, John Stearns, backhandedly offered, “Dave has the personality of a tree trunk. He's not a bad guy, but if you try to talk to him, about all he does is grunt.” For his own part, Kingman did not help himself much, once saying, “I'm paid to hit, not to play defense. If I was paid for my defense I'd go hungry."
As much as he disdained the press, it’s possible that they disliked Kingman even more. The mutual contempt reached its peak (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in 1986 when he sent writer Susan Fornoff a live rat, packed in a corsage box, with a tag affixed that read, “my name is Sue.” Kingman, who doubly resented women in the press, thought the gag was hysterically funny. Literally nobody else seemed to agree. Which is one of many reasons why 1986 was Kingman’s last season in Major League Baseball. That year, he hit thirty-five home runs, the most ever by a player in his final season. Two years earlier, he also hit thirty-five, drove in one hundred and eighteen runs and was named “Comeback Player of the Year.” During his final three seasons—all with The A’s—Kong hit one hundred and five home runs—the most he’d ever hit during a three year span. In fact it was the most homers hit by anyone in the American League during that period.
But that was it. Without a single offer to play in the Majors, Kingman whiffed his way through twenty games for the Giants’ AAA affiliate, before finally hanging it up in early 1987 with four hundred forty-two career home runs. It has been suggested, even tacitly confirmed, that Major League teams colluded to keep Kingman out of baseball in fear that he might make a run at five hundred home runs. Sabermetricians simply point to Kingman’s horrid advanced stats to justify his ousting. But, in 1987, front offices were largely ignorant on matters of W.A.R. They all passed on Kong for the simplest and least quantitative of reasons—they did not like the man.
On July 31, 1971, in the second game of his career, Dave Kingman hit a grand slam. Two games later, he hit two more bombs of Doc Ellis. Four games into his career, he was batting .400 and slugging 1.200. Expectations were sky high. His potential seemed unlimited. Despite his eventual, formidable accomplishments, however, Kingman’s career is widely considered a failure. He survives as a name on all-time home run lists or as a tall, gangly slugger in grainy Youtube highlight videos. But, mostly, he has become the archetype of a one dimensional player whose actual value was much lower than the perceived value of that one dimension. If sports writers were ever asked to inscribe his headstone, it would read something like: “Jerk who hit some long home runs.”
So how did that happen? How did a giant man, who could run, throw and hit—who in college as a Junior, won eleven games and boasted a 1.38 ERA and who, as a Senior hit .355 and led USC to a National Championship, and who had the quickest wrists the Giants’ scouts had ever seen, and who tore up the minors, and who was the heir apparent to Willie McCovey, and who could always hit baseballs farther than anyone else—how did he become the player that nobody wanted? Was his talent a mirage? Was he, like Ty Cobb, a murderous S.O.B.? Did he have a screw loose like Milton Bradley? The answers, I think, are no, no and no.
Major League Baseball—the players, fans, writers and especially the front offices—hated Dave Kingman for his betrayal of talent. Kong was naturally gifted—supremely so at one particular thing. But he could not be bothered to exert himself, much less improve himself. Kingman was the preternatural athlete who could have accomplished anything had he the desire to focus and practice. Or, at least that’s how the story went. And while there might be some truth to that portrait, there is, of course, another side, which is thus: Dave Kingman’s talent was never developed. Because of his natural gifts, no one ever took the time to nurture him. He arrived to the Giants a raw, positionless power hitter. Meanwhile, the Giants of 1971 and 1972 were loaded with old legends—Mays and McCovey—as well as young talent—Bobby Bonds, George Foster, Garry Maddox and Gary Matthews. If Kingman was going to prevail, it was going to have to be quick. And by himself.
For a brief moment, he did. In 1971, and aside from Bonds, Kingman seemed like the surest of those young Giants’ bets. Except for that one thing—he had no position to play. And so, because the Giants had too much talent and too little patience, Kingman played less than three seasons in San Francisco. In 1975 his contract was purchased by the Mets, where his power improved but where he was also asked to play first base, third base and all three outfield positions (none of which he excelled at). After less than three years, he was gone again, first to San Diego for fifty-six games, then to California for ten and then to The Yanks for eight.
Dave Kingman’s entire career—but especially his 1977 season—suggests a dour, underperforming athlete who soiled each nest he landed in. But, beneath the surface of that framing is very different and equally viable narrative: Kong was rushed and then forsaken. Over and over again. His development wasn’t arrested so much as his talent was never developed in the first place. He was a grown man—a superstar—every fifteen times at the plate and a helpless child the other fourteen times. Like Kingman, young George Foster, Garry Maddox, Gary Matthews and Bobby Bonds all struck out much more than they walked. But none of them could destroy baseballs quite like Dave Kingman. And as a result, they were given time to practice, fail, practice, fail less, practice and—eventually—succeed. But not Dave Kingman. Everybody is awed by King Kong. But nobody roots for him.