Kal Daniels

Kal Daniels had it all at the plate: patience, good sweet-spot contact, power, an ability to hit to all fields, and speed. In his first three seasons with the Cincinnati Reds, he averaged 17 home runs and 23 stolen bases. He was a natural hitter, one that Reds batting instructors were reluctant to tinker with for fear that they might change him. Enamored with Daniels’s left-handed swing, manager Pete Rose once saw the outfielder as a potential league MVP.1

Many of the Reds’ stars of the ’80s came up through the system largely because of Bob Howsam’s dim view of free agency. The former Reds general manager, convinced that big-market spending would ruin the game, clung fast to player development. Daniels, Eric Davis, Barry Larkin, and other homegrown players were “the nucleus of the Reds’ future,”2 the front office thought—but seven seasons and several knee surgeries later, Daniels’s playing career ended at age 29.

“He was one of the best hitters I had ever seen,” said Hubie Brooks, a teammate in 1990. “That was a surprise to a lot of people, [that Daniels’s major-league career] was only seven years. I know to me, it was a surprise.”3

***

Kalvoski Daniels4 was born on August 20, 1963, in Vienna (pronounced “vy-anna”), Georgia, to Roosevelt Daniels, an airman, and Della (née West) Daniels. Della’s maternity nurse suggested Kal’s uncommon given name, explaining to the new mother that Kalvoski means “the great one.”5

Often uprooted as a young boy by his father’s military assignments, Kal first played T-ball at Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho. When she and Roosevelt separated, Della raised middle child Kal and his two sisters on a waitress’s wages in Warner Robins, Georgia.

As a middle schooler Kal played baseball, basketball, and football as a halfback. At age 11, he hit four home runs and won three starts as a pitcher to help his Warner Robins Giants win their local A-league World Series.

Daniels, a right-handed thrower, pitched and played shortstop at Northside High School. As a senior in April 1981, he threw a no-hitter. He hit six home runs and batted a team-best .500 that season for the Northside Eagles. He was chosen as shortstop for the Macon Telegraph and News’s All–Middle Georgia team.

The New York Mets selected Daniels in the third round of the January draft in 1982. He didn’t sign, instead pressing on with his freshman studies at Middle Georgia College.6 A collegiate baseball powerhouse, Middle Georgia finished the season with a 53-3 record and won the Division I Junior College World Series on June 4 in Grand Junction, Colorado, the school’s third national championship in four years. Left fielder Daniels hit .476 with three homers in the seven-game series to be named MVP.

After impressing Reds scouts at a tryout camp in Macon, Georgia, Daniels was selected by Cincinnati in the first round of the June secondary draft. His experience with the semipro Warner Robins Jets had prepared him for the minors, and after signing with the Reds he immediately made a splash in rookie ball with the Billings Mustangs. There, he hit .367, and his stolen bases (27) outnumbered his strikeouts (26). Daniels led the Pioneer League in steals in 1982 and was selected as the team’s MVP.

However, changes to the prospect’s swing dropped his batting average to .251 at Single-A Cedar Rapids in 1983, the only minor-league season in which Daniels hit below the .300 mark. “Even though the year wasn’t what everyone expected, there was no doubt that he was going to play in the major leagues,” said former Cedar Rapids manager Bruce Kimm.7

By the time Daniels reached Double-A Vermont in 1984, his natural swing had been restored. He hit .313 with 17 home runs and 43 stolen bases, prompting Vermont manager Jack Lind to send word through the Cincinnati front office that Daniels was ready for the major-league roster expansions that September.8 However, he was not called up.

Twice that year, Daniels underwent arthroscopic surgery to fix chronic knee issues, which first emerged during his freshman year in college. “We were totally aware of his knee problems when we signed him,” said former Reds scouting director Larry Doughty.9 “We were willing to take the chance that he could play through it, kind of like Mickey Mantle did for a while.”

Doughty relied on medicine and people like Larry Starr, the Reds’ head trainer from 1971 to 1992. “What was somewhat unusual about [Daniels’s] knee problems is that they weren’t one-time acute episodes,” Starr recalled.10 Instead, recurring fluid buildup in Daniels’s knees was a sign that joint cartilage had calcified, Starr explained, and surgery was sometimes needed to remove the hardened deposits.

“There are certain injuries you can’t stop, and the one that’s the worst is a degenerative injury, where it will continue to progressively get worse,” Starr said.11 “[Daniels] was in that ballpark, because you’ve only got so much cartilage.”

In 1985 the effects of a Fourth of July bench-clearing brawl shortened Daniels’s Triple-A season with the Denver Zephyrs. A crowd of 52,645 was on hand at Mile High Stadium when brushbacks from both sides ignited the fight in the 11th inning. When teammates tugged on Daniels to extract him from a heap of players, he suffered a broken left ankle and ligament damage.

Reds minor-league hitting instructor Ted Kluszewski considered the 5-foot-11, 185-pound Daniels the organization’s best hitting prospect. As Opening Day 1986 drew near, a healthy Daniels was one of three rookie outfielders to make the major-league roster. Another was Paul O’Neill, also a converted high school pitcher. The third was right-handed batter Tracy Jones, a 6-foot-3, 210-pound Californian and number one draft choice who had bulked up in the weight room to hit for more of an average.12

On April 9, 1986, in the second game of the season, Daniels made his first major-league appearance. He drew an 11th-inning pinch-hit walk off the Phillies’ Steve Bedrosian in a game the Reds lost 5–3. Daniels singled off Eric Show for his first big-league hit two nights later in San Diego. He batted .344 in his next nine games to finish the month.

“When you talk about a pure hitter, Kal was that guy,” said Max Venable, who spent parts of six seasons as a utility outfielder for the San Francisco Giants and Montreal Expos before joining the Reds.13 “He could hit the ball with power to left field, center field, right field. It didn’t matter who was on the mound. The guy was going to hit the ball hard somewhere.”

“He was just so famous for going the opposite direction,” said Starr.14 Statistics show that throughout his career, Daniels hit to the opposite field almost as much as he pulled the ball.15

“There’s more to this game than just hitting,” Rose told Daniels, though—a lecture that came on May 11 at Shea Stadium.16 It followed a string of Reds losses that general manager Bill Bergesch pinned on the left fielder’s defense. Among the miscues was Daniels’s casual relay of a single that allowed Montreal’s Tim Raines to advance to second. In another game, against Atlanta, a misjudged fly ball at Riverfront Stadium became a two-run double. “It’s kind of hard to judge [flies] when the ball carries quite a bit, and Riverfront seemed to be that kind of a ballpark,” said Venable, who manned left field there in 45 career games for the Reds.17

The Reds’ 1986 season was off to a terrible 7-19 start. “They just had to have a scapegoat,” said an indignant Daniels after being demoted to Denver.18 In June he was diagnosed with astigmatism and fitted for eyeglasses, which he occasionally wore during games when experiencing eye fatigue. His ability to pick up the ball remained intact at the game’s top level. Doughty recalled that like Rose and Barry Bonds, Daniels could recognize pitches four feet from a pitcher’s release point. “Most hitters don’t see it till it’s seven or eight feet out of his hand,” he said.19 Recalled on June 29, Daniels hit .333 over the rest of the season while committing two errors in 73 chances.

Daniels figured into Bergesch’s core of players whom the general manager was unwilling to trade, despite the Reds’ pitching holes. As winter meetings got underway in Florida he said, “We won’t talk about our crown jewels,” which also included Davis, Jones, Larkin, O’Neill, and shortstop Kurt Stillwell.20

Batting .343 the following spring—Jones was close on his heels at .338—Daniels was awarded the Opening Day start in 1987 and seemed to be a lock as the Reds’ regular left fielder. Then Rose platooned the sluggers,21 who each believed had earned his chance to play every day, until a June injury to Davis put Jones in center field for three games. In one of them, Daniels and Jones combined for seven hits and five RBIs. Three days later, Rose moved right fielder Dave Parker to first base to open a spot in the outfield for Jones.22

The Parker experiment, however, lasted only nine games until Daniels and Jones were back to sharing left field. “Looking back at it, I wish we would have had the DH. You would have had a lot of happy players then,” Jones reflected in 2026.23 “I was very unhappy at times because I would only play against left-handers.” Southpaws made up only an estimated 22 percent of pitchers, which meant that for opposite-handed platooners with sparser at-bats, “that was tough, to come back and hit,” Jones said.24

In July 1987 Daniels crumpled to the dirt after sliding into second base on a double. Two days later, he had another surgery to remove loose calcified cartilage in his left knee. “There’s articular cartilage at the end of every bone so that it doesn’t wear away. He was only 24 years old, and he was already starting to wear away some of that cartilage,” Starr said.25 Daniels was sidelined until August 7 and then resumed platooning to rest the knee.

At the time of the injury Daniels was the Reds’ best hitter, owning a .316 batting average, but Davis was all anyone was talking about that year—his 37 homers, 100 RBIs, 50 steals, and the complete-player comparisons to Willie Mays. Daniels had to jostle for space in the clubhouse because of the throng of reporters huddled around Davis’s adjacent locker. Daniels dreamed of that kind of attention, of one day basking in the limelight.26

To begin the 1988 season, Daniels hit .600 and posted a 2.017 OPS in a homestand with the Cardinals and Houston Astros. In those five games he clubbed four homers, drove in 10 runs, and didn’t strike out once in 20 at-bats. “I never saw him really take a bad swing,” Jones recalled.27 “He had the best eye [of anyone] that I ever played with.” Daniels was selected as the NL Player of the Week for April 10.

He raked the box with his spikes, gliding each foot back and forth across the dirt before stepping into his left-handed batting stance: front shoulder turned slightly inward, left arm raised to a perfect 90 degrees with his elbow pointed like an arrow toward the screen as he waggled the bat. Daniels and his boyhood hero Reggie Jackson both “sort of exploded with their hips when they hit the ball,” remembered Kimm, an American League catcher during Jackson’s Orioles and Yankees years and, in 1988, the Reds’ third base coach. Daniels followed through one-handed. “His swing was just fluid and it was quick. It stayed in the strike zone just perfect, in my opinion,” Kimm said.28

After his impressive first week, Daniels then batted just .132 in his next 15 games to close out April. In June he and a struggling Davis were discussed in trade talks.29 The players previously deemed off-limits were now being dealt, after three straight second-place finishes had led to Bergesch’s firing in October 1987. New Reds general manager Murray Cook had traded Stillwell and Parker in offseason deals for starting pitchers. Jones was traded in July.

Daniels’s 87 walks tied with Boston’s Mike Greenwell for seventh-most in the majors in 1988, and his NL-best .397 on-base percentage ranked fifth in the game. Batting mostly third in the order, Daniels played in a career-high 140 games; by late August he was worn down without the usual respites from injuries or platooning.30 In the homestretch of the season, a bat-throwing incident in Chicago earned him a one-game suspension. Also, when a teammate questioned his defensive effort in a loss to Houston, he was “ready to fight,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.31

Cook found himself in the middle of one of baseball’s most unconventional contract negotiations in March 1989, when Daniels walked out of spring training camp over a $25,000 impasse. Daniels had rejected the Reds’ $300,000 offer after a few of his contemporaries—namely, Mets pitcher David Cone, Royals third baseman Kevin Seitzer, and Rangers outfielder Ruben Sierra—signed for more. “We all broke in together. So, every year we made the same amount,” Daniels explained in a 2017 interview.32 Those players had agreed to deals for 1989 that were worth between $32,500 and $50,000 more than what the Reds offered Daniels.33

Reds owner Marge Schott proposed a solution: to flip a half dollar in the parking lot of Plant City Stadium to decide whether Daniels, who was 37 days short of the three years’ service time required for arbitration, would be paid the additional $25,000. Schott called heads, the coin landed tails-up, and Daniels signed for $325,000. “[First baseman] Todd Benzinger’s agent really got upset with me for having done this, because we were also in negotiations for his contract,” Cook recalled.34 “If we’re going to do it with Daniels, why not for Benzinger?” NL president Bart Giamatti decried the coin toss as “demeaning.”35

After Daniels hit just .167 over his first 16 games of 1989, Rose moved him from third to leadoff in the batting order, and Daniels stood farther back in the batter’s box. The changes resulted in a .333 stretch for Daniels between April 25 and May 9. Then, the Reds lost him until June 21 to another surgery, a procedure to remove a bone spur from his right knee.

On July 18, 1989, Daniels was traded with shortstop Lenny Harris to the Los Angeles Dodgers for infielder Mariano Duncan and right-handed pitcher Tim Leary. The Reds needed a starting pitcher to replace José Rijo—sidelined with back spasms—and an experienced glove to solve the infield vacuum created by injuries to shortstop Larkin and third baseman Chris Sabo.

Daniels was hitting .218 at the time of the trade, and boobirds had descended on the left fielder at home for his shaky defense. Sportswriter Ritter Collett reported that any half-hearted effort was the result of Daniels, in the ballplayer’s own words, “playing it safe” to protect his knees.36 In comments made immediately after the trade, Daniels said he was leaving “with no happy memories of either the Reds or the community,” Collett wrote.37 Daniels later walked back the remarks.38

He looked forward to playing on grass in Los Angeles after three and a half years of joint impact from Riverfront Stadium’s artificial turf, which had been replaced in 1988 for a second time since the ballpark opened in 1970.39 Starr said that in the early days of Astroturf, trainers wrongly blamed players’ injuries on the material’s hardness. “The problem with Astroturf is it was too tacky,” he said.40 “When people planted and [their] foot didn’t move, the forces had to go somewhere and usually went to the knee, the hip, the back, and maybe the ankle.”

Although the Dodgers did not inspect Daniels’s knees prior to the trade, their team doctor conferred with the Reds’ physician.41 “At the time we traded him he was okay, but he had more knee issues after he left us,” Cook recalled.42 Daniels played in just 11 second-half games for the Dodgers before needing a fifth knee surgery on August 11 to remove cartilage fragments.

In Cincinnati Daniels had felt trapped in Davis’s and Parker’s shadows, but L.A. had stars of its own and more intense scrutiny. “A player like Kal Daniels—something like a big market, he thrived on that,” said Brooks, the Dodgers’ right fielder in 1990, Daniels’s first full season in Los Angeles.43 That year, Daniels battled through occasional back strains to hit .296, and reach career highs in home runs (27) and RBIs (94). He bashed three grand slams, one of which came on September 14 in Cincinnati. He was named the NL Player of the Month for September after hitting .354 with eight homers and 31 runs batted in, which was then the fourth-highest monthly RBI total in Dodger team history.

As Brooks observed, 1990 “was the year the Reds got off to that outstanding start.”44 By September 7, the Dodgers were six and a half games behind first-place Cincinnati and trying to gain ground in a crucial three-game series at home. L.A. won game one. In game two, Daniels—hitless the night before—lost his cool when the count was evened with a called second strike on the inside corner. After being ejected, he twice tried to rush home plate umpire Gary Darling,45 but was tackled to the ground by Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda and restrained by teammates. Speaking to reporters afterward in a dirt-stained uniform, Lasorda said, “Your number three hitter should never get thrown out in the first inning of a game like that.”46 Daniels said that following the ejection, he “wanted to get to [Darling] and break his neck a little bit.”47 Four of Daniels’s five career ejections came as a Dodger.

Daniels signed his first seven-figure contract in February 1991, re-upping with the Dodgers for one year at $2,025,000. On paper he made a formidable outfield along with two new left-handed acquisitions: Brett Butler, the previous season’s NL hits leader; and Darryl Strawberry, who had slugged 252 home runs in eight seasons with the Mets. In his first 22 games, however, Daniels amassed four errors in left field.

Although he committed just one error the rest of the season, his offensive output declined in a year rife with problems off the field. He missed nine games in July as he tended his ill mother, and hit .209 over the month of August after returning. Daniels finished the year with 17 homers and batted .249, the second-lowest average that season among Dodger hitters with a minimum of 250 at-bats. Simmering tension with Strawberry boiled over in the offseason, as the right fielder publicly questioned Daniels’s commitment and called for him to be traded.48

The Dodgers’ trade with the Reds for Eric Davis in November 1991 left Daniels as the odd man out in the L.A. outfield. General manager Fred Claire proposed that Daniels move to first base, but the slugger urged Claire to trade him to a team that needed an outfielder. Unable to move Daniels at the winter meetings, Claire re-signed him to a $2.5 million contract. Daniels played first base in eight games to begin the 1992 season, platooning with the right-handed-hitting Eric Karros and batting third in front of Strawberry.

After coming off the disabled list for a sore right knee, Daniels reclaimed his spot in left field on May 18, when Strawberry was hospitalized for a herniated disc in his lower back. Over his next 24 games Daniels racked up more strikeouts than hits; on June 19, he was designated for assignment to give the 24-year-old Karros more playing time.49 Karros made the most of the opportunity, winning Rookie of the Year honors that season.

Just before the All-Star break, the 35-37 Chicago Cubs added Daniels as a second-half rental to boost the team’s offense. The fit with the new team was uneasy; Daniels disliked day games,50 and the Cubs still played a lot of their home games in the afternoon. He shared the outfield with Andre Dawson, another slugger beset with bad knees. Though Daniels played error-free in left field for Chicago, he was unexceptional as a hitter. Overall in 1992, he hit into a double play every 21.2 at-bats, fourth-most often in the majors.51 The Cubs waived him on October 6.

Both the Expos and Cleveland Indians showed interest in Daniels in 1993, but a minor-league deal with Montreal fell through. Indians executives, who publicly expressed concern over Daniels’s knees, opted to sign another left-handed hitter, Sam Horn.52

In a 2020 interview, Daniels described the grind that led him to retire: “Sometimes I would have to ice to get on the field, ice after I came off the field, and ice in order to go to sleep.”53 Previously, he stated that his love for baseball had waned because “it became more of a business than a game.”54

Daniels finished with a .285 batting average across 727 games, with 104 home runs and 360 RBIs. His patience was reflected in a .382 on-base percentage. He was a .303 pinch-hitter in 76 tries. In 41 career at-bats with the bases loaded, he hit .390, including five grand slams.

After his time in the majors, Daniels served as president of a mortgage lender in North Miami. In 1996, his siblings spurred him to return to baseball. He worked out with Toronto’s Triple-A squad that spring but failed to earn a spot on the Blue Jays’ roster.

In 2000 Daniels was indicted for nonpayment of child support for a son born in 1991.55 The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Daniels had halted payments amid a disagreement with the boy’s mother over visitation.56 He made full restitution and received probation.

Daniels was named the hitting coach of the independent Macon Peaches57 in 2003. One month later, he was promoted to manager when the team’s original skipper left to join the league’s front office. After compiling a 6-13 managerial record, Daniels resigned to pursue other interests. He offered youth hitting instruction for ages eight to 18 that grew to include a travel team, the Kal Daniels Titans, which remains active in central Georgia.

As of 2026, Daniels still makes his home in Warner Robins, although little is known about his personal life. He was fiercely private as a player and often said in interviews, “The less people know about you, the less they can say about you.”58 His son Ryan lives in Cincinnati.

On February 20, 2026, Northside High School retired Daniels’s number 4 in an on-field ceremony he attended.

Last revised: May 5, 2026

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Hubie Brooks, Murray Cook, Larry Doughty, Tracy Jones, Bruce Kimm, Larry Starr, and Max Venable for their memories. Thanks also to Scott Crawford of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Shona Frese of the Iowa Baseball Museum of Norway, and David Haws of Play Deep Academy in Boise, Idaho, for their assistance.

This biography was reviewed by Rory Costello and Bill Lamb and fact-checked by Don Zminda.

Photo credit: Kal Daniels, Trading Card Database.

Sources

The author relied on Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for statistics, and the Sporting News Baseball Player Contract Cards Collection for information on transfers. All other sources are shown in the Notes.

Notes

1 “N.L. West Notebook: Reds,” The Sporting News, October 5, 1987: 17.

2 Greg Hoard, “Reds Hit Meetings with Pitchers on Mind,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 6, 1986: B4.

3 Brooks, interview with author, March 3, 2026.

4 Birth records maintained by the Dooly County Probate Court in Vienna list no middle name.

5 Bill Plaschke, “Need an Enigma? Go See Kal: Dodger Is Loved in Hometown, but Not by Some Teammates,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1991: C8.

6 Daniels attended Middle Georgia College from September 23, 1981 until March 1983.

7 Kimm, interview with author, February 18, 2026.

8 Kevin Iole, “Reds Recognized for Achievements,” Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, November 4, 1984: 8C.

9 Doughty, interview with author, March 9, 2026.

10 Starr, interview with author, February 17, 2026.

11 Starr interview.

12 Jones, interview with Bob Trumpy, “Sportstalk,” WLW-AM, Cincinnati, March 13, 1986. Jones was the Reds’ number one pick in the January 1983 secondary draft.

13 Venable, interview with author, February 27, 2026.

14 Starr interview.

15 Daniels’s batted-ball statistics, incomplete prior to 1988, list a 21.5 opposite-field percentage, compared to a 22.6 pull percentage. “Advanced Batting,” Baseball-Reference.com, https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/danieka01.shtml.

16 Greg Hoard, “Reds Send Down Daniels, Recall Runnells,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 12, 1986: D1.

17 Venable interview.

18 Fred Pietila, “Daniels Says He Was Scapegoat for Reds,” Rocky Mountain News, May 19, 1986: 5-S.

19 Doughty interview. Doughty became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1988 after spending 17 years in the Reds’ scouting department.

20 Hoard, “Reds Hit Meetings with Pitchers on Mind.” Also, “Young Outfielders View Denver Dimly,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 20, 1986: E3.

21 In 1986 Jones faced right-handed pitchers 23 times and batted .435 against them, while Daniels hit .188 versus lefties in 32 tries.

22 At the time, Reds first baseman Nick Esasky was mired in a 3-for-34 slump and batting .225 for the season in 24 games.

23 Jones, interview with author, March 17, 2026.

24 Jones interview.

25 Starr interview.

26 Hal McCoy, “Kal Ready for Chaos,” The Sporting News, March 28, 1988: 34.

27 Jones interview.

28 Kimm interview.

29 Michael Paolercio and Greg Hoard, “Cook Talks Trade,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 7, 1988: C1.

30 Mike Bass, “Don’t Get Sour Because Kal’s Dour,” Cincinnati Post, September 3, 1988: 1D.

31 Greg Hoard and John Erardi, “Jackson Downplays Tiff with Daniels,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 16, 1988: B4. Reds 21-game winner Danny Jackson confronted Daniels after his bungled handling of a fly ball and throw to home contributed to a three-run inning for Houston, the one team Jackson couldn’t muster a win against that year.

32 Daniels, interview by Jamie Ramsey, “Better Off Red” podcast, November 3, 2017, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cincinnati-reds-podcast/id902521604.

33 “Major League Baseball Salaries,” USA Today, March 30, 1989: 4C.

34 Cook, interview with author, February 20, 2026.

35 “Schott-Daniels Coin Flip Gets Giamatti Upset,” Newsday, March 5, 1989: Sports, 4.

36 Ritter Collett, “Daniels’ Trade Clouds Reds’ Plan for Future,” Dayton Daily News, July 20, 1989: 1B. Daniels wasn’t always an apathetic fielder. He ran into the left field wall in Cincinnati going for a catch in 1988 and missed a week’s worth of games with an injured neck, and continued to dive for balls with an added fervor when he returned. Later in his career he suffered a partially collapsed lung from crashing into the wall in San Francisco. Despite the boos in Cincinnati, his 1989 season was a spotless one statistically; Daniels played left field for the Reds and Dodgers over a combined 416 2/3 innings without committing an error.

37 Collett, “Daniels’ Trade Clouds Reds’ Plan for Future.”

38 Daniels, “Better Off Red” podcast.

39 The synthetic turf installed at Riverfront in 1988 was more cushioned and caused the foot to teeter, exposing weak legs to vulnerabilities. Michael Paolercio, “Is Riverfront Turf To Blame for Injuries?” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 1, 1989: C5.

40 Starr interview.

41 Chris Long, “Dodgers Find Offensive Help in Trade,” (San Pedro, CA) News-Pilot, July 19, 1989: B1.

42 Cook interview.

43 Brooks interview.

44 Brooks interview. The Dodgers acquired Brooks as a free agent in December 1989, after he had spent five seasons each with the Mets and Expos. A Los Angeles native, he was in search of a World Series championship with his hometown Dodgers. “You grow up here and you go to the games, and you finally get that opportunity—so, it was good on a personal level. I’d hoped we could have won,” he said.

45 Darling gave Daniels his first career ejection on June 28, 1988, for throwing equipment in protest of a called third strike.

46 Terry Johnson, “Dodgers Damage Chances,” (Torrance, CA) Daily Breeze, September 9, 1990: C5.

47 Jack Brennan, “Daniels: ‘I Wanted to Break His Neck,’” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 10, 1990: C5.

48 Chuck Johnson, “Strawberry Says Teammate Daniels Just a Complainer,” USA Today, November 21, 1991: 3C.

49 “Baseball Notes: Cost Cutting?” Arizona Republic, April 30, 1995: C8. Lasorda was naming some young Dodgers that were given playing time at the expense of veterans when he said, “The same with Eric Karros. We let Kal Daniels go.”

50 Daniels, interview by Bill Shanks, WXKO-AM, Fort Valley, Georgia, April 29, 2020, https://thesuperstations.com/the-bill-shanks-show-kal-daniels-interview-part-2-4-29-20.

51 “Rally Killers,” Sport, July 1993: 86.

52 Paul Hoynes, “Horn Signs Minor-League Contract,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 25, 1993: 5D.

53 Daniels, WXKO-AM interview.

54 Matt Michael, “One Strike and Former Big-Leaguer Is Out,” Syracuse Post-Standard, March 20, 1996: E1.

55 Dan Horn, “Ex-Red Indicted in Support Case,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 26, 2000: B1.

56 “Tristate A.M. Report: Ex-Red Kal Daniels Gets 2 Years Probation,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 13, 2000: B2.

57 The Peaches were not associated with the major-league affiliate of the same name that ceased play in 1967.

58 Tim Sullivan, “If He’s Lucky, Door Won’t Hit Kal on Way Out,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 19, 1989: B1.