While we wait for substantive news on the Brewers this season, we’ve reached the point where I thought it would be fun to take a look back. How many of these articles get written depends on Milwaukee’s front office, but we’ll get started with this one, a somewhat forgotten figure who was one of the team’s very first All-Stars.
Dave May is a bit of a rarity, a Major League talent coming out of Delaware – only six Delawareans in baseball history have more career WAR. * May signed with the Giants out of high school and impressed in his first year in the minor leagues, but was drafted by the Orioles a year later (the rules surrounding amateur signings and drafts were much more complicated back then). May spent most of the 1963 and 1964 seasons at Single-A Fox Cities in Appleton, where he hit – in 1964, at just 20 years old, May hit .368/.456/.554 and stole 36 bases.
Despite his success, May’s rise through the Orioles system was slow. He spent all of 1965 with Tri-City, another Single-A team, and then played two full years with Triple-A Rochester in 1966 and 1967. The Orioles were one of the best teams in baseball in the 1960s, which likely contributed to his slow rise; During May’s first season in Rochester, the major league club won the pennant and then swept the World Series behind an MVP performance from their new trade acquisition Frank Robinson, and center field – May’s position – was covered by young Paul Blair, one of the best defensive outfielders in the history of the game.
Finally, late in the summer of the 1967 season, May got his first success in the major leagues. He was only 23, but he had already played nearly 700 games in the minors and hit over .320 in his minor league career. He appeared sporadically with the Orioles in ’67, which foreshadowed the rest of his career in Baltimore. From 1967-1970, May played in 223 games as an Oriole, but only got 430 plate appearances, and the sporadic nature of his role made it difficult for him to find any success. He hit just .216/.291/.314, and although he won a World Series as a bench player for the 1969 Orioles, May found himself struggling to maintain his big-league career as a 26-year-old in 1970.
*If you can name those six, I’m very impressed. In order from most WAR to least: Paul Goldschmidt, Sadie McMahon, Chris Short, DeLino DeShields, Hans Lobert and Webster McDonald.
May’s lack of a role in Baltimore led to an opportunity for the Brewers, who played in their first season in Milwaukee in 1970 after their only season as an expansion team as the Seattle Pilots. The 1970 Brewers weren’t good, as you’d expect from a brand new team; despite a shockingly good season from third baseman Tommy Harper, the team went just 65-97-1, second to last in the American League.
The early Brewers had holes everywhere, but they were particularly shallow in the outfield, so on June 15, 1970, they made a move and sent two pitchers, Dick Baney and Buzz Stephens, to Baltimore for May. They didn’t know it at the time, but this turned out to be a membrane job by the Brewers. Baney, 23, had thrown 18 2/3 innings for the Pilots in 1969, but had not appeared for the Brewers in 1970. He never pitched for the Orioles and made only 33 more Major League appearances, all for the Reds in 1973 and 1974. Stephens was 25 at the time of the trade and had not pitched in the Majors since making two starts for the Twins in 1968; as it turned out, these two appearances would be the only Major League appearances of his career, and he was out of organized ball after pitching to a 9.62 ERA in 29 innings for the Orioles’ Double-A team the rest of the season.
May found exactly what he needed in 1970: a consistent role. The Brewers stuck him in center field and didn’t look back, and in 100 games with Milwaukee in 1970, May didn’t hit very well (.240/.329/.330, an 83 OPS+), but he played excellent defense in center field and gave the Brewers value that way. In 1971, he was the team’s starting center fielder, and after 562 plate appearances, he finally fulfilled the offensive promise he had shown as a minor leaguer. May hit .277/.343/.425 (a 119 OPS+ and 125 Rbat+) and flashed some power, with 16 home runs and 20 doubles. He moved around the basepaths with 15 steals, and while his defense didn’t score particularly well, he earned 3.1 WAR, behind only first baseman Johnny Briggs among the team’s position players.
1972 was somewhat disappointing – his batting numbers dipped a bit, but he was still one of the more valuable Brewers with 2.5 WAR – but May reached his peak as a 29-year-old in 1973. The 1973 team finished just 74-88, but that was the most successful team in the franchise’s five-year history, and May was a big part of the reason why.
But it didn’t always look like 1973 would be a good season. May got very cold in the second half of April and on May 6 he was only hitting .213/.250/.404. But suddenly, in the second week of May, his bat not only woke up, but caught fire. From May 8 through May 31, May played 22 games and hit .360/.411/.570 with five home runs and three doubles, and increased his OPS by more than 150 points. July was even better: From June 28, when he homered off Detroit’s Mickey Lolich, May hit .402/.440/.591 in 31 games through the end of July.
May’s hot summer earned him his first and only All-Star appearance, where he and the man who blocked him from regular playing time in Baltimore, Blair, served as the team’s backup midfielders behind starter Amos Otis. May entered the game, but went 0-for-2 and hit pop-outs on Wayne Twitchell and Jim Brewer.
Although unable to maintain his pace in July, May finished the season strongly. By year’s end, he had posted a .303/.352/.473 batting line, good for a 134 OPS+, and had 23 doubles, four triples, 25 home runs and 93 RBI. May’s total bases of 295 led the American League (tied with his teammate, George Scott, and a future Brewer, Sal Bando), and he finished with a career-high 4.7 WAR.
May’s big season earned him MVP votes, and he finished eighth in the voting, ahead of Scott (who led the Brewers with 6.7 WAR and finished 14th) and Briggs (who finished 23rd), all of whom were behind the unanimous MVP choice, Oakland’s Reggie Jackson.
Unfortunately, the 1973 season in May was the beginning of the end. The 1974 season was disappointing. In 135 games, he couldn’t get his bat going and hit just .226/.273/.325, which marked a shocking 61-point drop in OPS+ from 134 in ’73 to 73 in ’74. After the season, the Brewers had a chance to make a major relevance impression, which was an important move, even if it wasn’t a particularly good baseball move: On November 2, May (along with a player to be named later) was traded to Atlanta for the soon-to-be 41-year-old Hank Aaron.
Aaron’s move did what it was supposed to do for Milwaukee; he served as their DH in 1975 and 1976 and added 22 more home runs to his record total before retiring, a retirement that allowed the Brewers to claim his 755th and final home run in perpetuity.
The move to Atlanta initially worked for May as well. He played only 82 games in 1975, but found his form again at the plate, hitting .276/.361/.493 with 12 home runs in those 82 games (a 133 OPS+). But in a career of ups and downs, 1976 was another bad year, and after the season, May was sent to Texas in a major trade that netted the Braves 1974 MVP Jeff Burroughs. Burroughs had a few big seasons in Atlanta, but May was almost over; he struggled at the plate and played decent defense at Texas in 1977, and Texas sold his rights after the season – back to the Brewers.
The move may have been made for nostalgic reasons, but it did not work out. May played 31 games for the Brewers in 1978, batting under .200, and his rights were sold again to the Pirates, for whom he made five appearances as a pinch hitter. He was released after the season and did not play in the Majors again – he spent the 1979 season playing in the Dominican Republic for the Santo Domingo Azucareros, retiring after the season at the age of 35.
After a slow start, May’s big league career spanned twelve years, the best of which came from 1971-73 in Milwaukee. He earned 10.3 WAR in that three-year span, which is the fourth-best three-year streak for a Brewer midfielder behind Robin Yount (1987-89, 14.8 WAR), Carlos Gómez (2012-14, 14.5 WAR) and Gorman Thomas (1978-80, 11.1 WAR). (It should be noted that Lorenzo Cain would also likely have had a better three-year run had it not been for the 2020 COVID season.) In his 12 years, May collected 920 hits, 96 home runs, 60 stolen bases and 130 doubles. He earned 13.5 total WAR.
May and teammate Jim Colborn were the sixth and seventh All-Stars in franchise history, the fourth and fifth if you don’t count Mike Hegan and Don Mincher as Pilots in 1969. May was the first Brewer outfielder to make the Midsummer Classic, again excluding Hegan as Pilot. He was the first midfielder with any kind of consistency in franchise history.
After his playing career, May spent a few seasons as a minor league instructor in the Braves system before hanging it up for good after the 1982 season. But his legacy didn’t end there: May’s eldest son, David Jr., became a scout in the early 2000s, and his middle child, Derrick, had a 10-year big league career, including a 32-game stint with the Brewers in 1995. Derrick finished his career with 52 home runs and 103 doubles in 797 games between 1990 and 1999.
Dave May Sr. died in October 2012, at the age of 68. He was inducted into the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Delaware Afro-American Sports Hall of Fame in 2004.
A shout out to the Association for American Baseball Research for some of the information in this article.
#brewer #Dave