Davey Lopes, the quiet kid who left the streets and parks of South Providence for bigger playgrounds, say Dodger Stadium and Wrigley Field, would have celebrated his 81st birthday last Sunday. After several years of failing health due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, however, he died on April 8 in Providence, a quiet end to a remarkable life.
For Davey Lopes, all 5 feet, 9 inches and 170 pounds of him, was the best baseball player from Rhode Island in the last 75 years. Here’s why.
He spent 16 years in the big leagues, 10 with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
He was the second baseman on an infield that started 833 games together during an 8.5-year span from 1973 to 1981, a major-league record. Today, 8.5 days is a long time for infield togetherness.
He was a base stealer extraordinaire, finishing with 557 swipes in 671 attempts, an 83% success rate that was better than the major league record holder Rickey Henderson’s 81%.
He was a four-time All-Star and a Gold Glove winner. He played in the World Series four times and won once, in 1981 against the Yankees. He played 1,812 games, batted .263, hit 155 home runs, drove in 614.
No other ball player from Little Rhody put up such numbers in the major leagues.
“The era that he and I played in (1970s and ‘80s), as far as Rhode Islanders are concerned, he far and away had the best career, had wonderful longevity, great numbers,” Bill Almon, a Rhode Island contemporary of Lopes told me last week from his winter home in Fort Myers, Fla.
A star shortstop at Warwick Veterans Memorial High School and at Brown University, Almon was the first overall pick in the 1974 amateur draft and played for seven major-league teams between 1974 and 1988. He finished with a career batting average of .254 with 36 home runs and 296 RBI.
“You get second basemen like Ryne Sandberg and Jeff Kent, who are ‘Hall of Famers’, and Davey didn’t get that recognition level when he probably should have. He threw up some pretty good power numbers over the years, but the stolen bases – I mean he was consistent there year after year. At the beginning of his career he was up against Lou Brock, and in the second half of his career he’s up against Rickey Henderson, two of the best of all time.”
One of 10 children raised by his mother Mary on her meager wages as a domestic worker, Lopes played basketball and baseball at La Salle Academy in the early 1960s. He caught the eye of Mike Sarkesian, a Hope High School grad and coach who became a father figure. Lopes followed him, first to Iowa Wesleyan University and then to Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., when Sarkesian was the athletics director at each. Lopes was a guard in basketball and an outfielder in baseball.
San Francisco drafted Lopes in 1967, but he remained in school. The Dodgers selected him in 1968, and he signed. He did his obligatory tour of the minor leagues as an outfielder until Tommy Lasorda, his manager in Spokane, Wash., in 1970, convinced him to try second base.
The experiment succeeded, and late in 1972, the Dodgers summoned the kid from South Providence. He became a starter in 1973 with Steve Garvey at first base, Bill Russell at shortstop and Ron Cey at third base. They began their streak on June 23, 1973. Lopes also batted first and set the table for the rest of the lineup to clean up.
“They had some guys who must have been real happy to have Davey on second base because he’s going to score on probably 80% of the singles,” Almon said with a soft chuckle.
Lopes stole five bases in a game in 1974, led all of baseball with 77 steals in 1975 and led the National League with 63 in 1976.
Quiet and reserved early in his career, Lopes gained confidence the more he played, and with Lasorda’s encouragement developed his voice as a leader. His teammates listened to him. In 1978, Lasorda named him captain, the fifth in Dodgers history after Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Maury Wills and Willie Davis.
“Davey kind of fit in well with that group because there was nobody that was front and center in your face or anything like that,” Almon said. “And pretty much all of them had played for Tommy in the minor leagues so they were pretty confident knowing he was the manager and he had faith in them. It really gave them a chance in the beginning to establish themselves. And, of course, they all did a good job. They did the work, got the numbers.”
Cey paid tribute to Lopes on the Bleed LOS podcast.
“He was a very important part of our success. His contributions were enormous. He was the table-setter, much like Maury Wills was,” Cey told Adam Lopez. Wills, the Dodgers shortstop in the 1960s, was the premier base stealer in the game during his career.
Lopes, Cey added, was the “greatest second baseman in Dodgers history. He would steal you a run. When he was at his best, he created havoc on the basepaths. You had to defend us.”
The old third baseman could not describe his teammate and friend in one word.
“I don’t know if one word would be fair,” he said. “Davey was a guy who knew what his responsibilities were. He worked incredibly hard, much like the rest of us did. He was a leader. He was a guy that came to play every day…a guy that laced ‘em up. I was proud to stand with him and next to him, and we were able to accomplish a great deal which we were all very very proud of.”
Rhode Islander Bill Almon started his big-league career with the San Diego Padres and played against Lopes and the Dodgers regularly.
“Davey was a quiet guy. He quietly went about his work on the field. He was quiet in the clubhouse. He was a really nice guy,” Almon said. “I liked Davey a lot. At first I got to play against him when I was with the Padres, and he was nice and talkative with me, another player, but in general he was just a quiet guy who went about his business.”
Lopes and Almon were teammates in Oakland in 1983. The Dodgers had traded Lopes after the 1981 championship season, and Almon had signed as a free agent.
“Davey was pretty much playing second base. I played a bunch of shortstop that year so we got to play as a double play combination. Davey could still run. He could still play. We talked a little bit in the clubhouse about Rhode Island baseball. He played for Carl Toti at La Salle, the cold weather up there in the spring, and the fun times we had up there. He enjoyed it so much, just like I did,” Almon told me.
“Plus, we talked a lot about how he played, how he did things. I learned a lot from him, especially about his base stealing. I was always interested in great base running, and Davey was a great base stealer and base runner.”
Lopes stole his last base in August of 1987 as a pinch runner for the Houston Astros. He was 42 years old. He retired as a player after that season but remained in the game for the next three decades as a coach for seven teams and manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, beginning in 2000 and into the 2002 season. He retired for good after the 2017 season. He was 72.
Why is Lopes not better known or remembered here on his home turf? The only recognition I can think of is Providence’s Davey Lopes Recreation Center, which is being renovated on Dudley Street in South Providence.
For starters, Lopes played on the West Coast, 3,000 miles from home and 25 years before interleague play brought National League teams to Boston. He was a hero in Los Angeles 45 years ago — the leading vote-getter for the 1980 All-Star Game — but still years before cable and streaming brought games from everywhere to everyone, day and night. And he played second base, exceeded only by right field as the least glamorous position in baseball.
Also, once established in Los Angeles, he did not return regularly to Rhode Island.
“Davey didn’t keep much of a presence here. He never really came back much,” Almon said. “He was living in L.A. full time. After a few years, that team was being kept together and they were so good I’m sure he felt pretty confident making (L.A.) his home, that he wasn’t going to be moved around too much.”
When the two infielders were with the A’s and the team made its annual visit to Boston, Lopes arranged for tickets for his family and friends, Almon said. That was about it.
That explains why we are more familiar with Jerry Remy, the Somerset second baseman for the California Angels, 1975-77 and the Red Sox, 1978-1984, who morphed into the folksy and beloved color guy on Red Sox telecasts for 30 years.
And Rocco Baldelli from Woonsocket, an excellent student and athlete, a multi-sport star at Bishop Hendricken who opened the 2003 season in center field for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, but whose promising career was cut short by channelopathy, a rare metabolic muscular disorder causing soft tissue damage and chronic fatigue. He retired after the 2010 season with a .278 lifetime batting average and 60 home runs. After managing the Minnesota Twins from 2019 to 2025, he works in baseball operations for the Dodgers now.
Excellent players, certainly, but not in Davey Lopes’s league. Bill Almon said it best:
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a better candidate, or somebody you could make an argument for, who was better, as a Rhode Islander in the big leagues, than Davey Lopes at that time.”
