Malvern Prep’s Tague Davis follows a similar path to his dad, a former big-league catcher

Tague Davis’ fingers were numb. Three hours of sweaty hitting could not warm him in the January cold. Still, Davis had a mischievous grin. He aptly maneuvered himself up a ladder onto the garage rooftop, discretely tiptoed to his open bedroom window, and pulled himself in. Another successful swinging mission.

Or so he thought.

Five hours later, Davis’s mother was grabbing a carton of eggs out of the garage fridge on a Saturday morning. A chilly wind nipped at her, causing her attention to steer to the back garage window.

Megan Davis’s first thought was: “What was that ladder doing out?”

Those who want to be great suffer from the insatiable curse that they think they are not working hard enough. It plagued Kobe Bryant, who would sneak into gyms and work out at 4 in the morning. It gnawed at Jerry West, who would shoot in the middle of the night, through rain, snow, or the middle of a tornado if he could. It haunted Ryan Howard to the point he would wake his neighbors, slamming balls off the basement concrete wall through the batting-cage netting.

Tague Davis’s penchant was sneaking out his bedroom window around midnight, heading to an indoor facility, and hitting until 3 in the morning. This time, it came with a problem: Tague left the ladder out. It led to his being caught by his mother and getting grounded for a week.

Not much grounds Tague today.

The son of former major league catcher and current Phillies broadcaster Ben Davis, Tague is considered one of the area’s top baseball prospects and has committed to Louisville. The Malvern Prep first baseman is hitting .375 with a team-high five home runs, 32 RBIs, a .694 slugging percentage, and 27 hits in 72 at-bats. The nationally ranked Friars are 28-2, 8-1 in the Inter-Ac League.

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As a pitcher, Tague has matured this season to merit the consideration of playing first base and pitching at Louisville, carrying a team-best 6-0 record in seven appearances, with 39 strikeouts over 34 innings and a 0.82 ERA. His Malvern Prep coaches and some MLB scouts feel Tague can be another Brendan McKay, the Louisville two-way star who pitched and played first base and was chosen with the fourth overall selection of the 2017 MLB draft by the Tampa Bay Rays.

The feedback that Tague and his family are getting is that he could go anywhere in the top five rounds of the draft in Texas (July 14-16). He has been invited to the MLB combine from June 17-22 in Phoenix.

One thing is for certain. Tague is his father’s son.

Ben Davis, 47, was the second overall pick in the 1995 draft by the San Diego Padres out of Malvern Prep, where he was Inter-Ac MVP in both baseball and basketball in his senior year (believed to be the only athlete to achieve that dual honor in the same year in Inter-Ac history). He was arguably the best baseball player to ever come out of Delaware County and played seven years in the majors as a catcher, during a time when catchers were allowed to block the plate. Davis admits he wakes each morning feeling every collision he had.

Father and son are both cut out of central casting with their square-jawed, squinty-eyed, movie-star looks. They love fishing and hunting and share a self-deprecating sense of humor and generally jovial disposition. They are also distinctly different. Primarily, Tague carries the curse of his Uncle Glenn, Ben’s older brother. He’s left-handed. Father and son playfully butt heads all the time. Ben is meticulous. Tague is not. If the Phillies ever want a show for their Phillies Friday Night Roundtable podcast, put Tague and Ben together. They are a riot.

“I am a better fisher than he is — well, I like to say so — and I am a better hunter than him, you can definitely quote that,” Tague said, laughing. “One of the great joys of my life was throwing to my dad. It’s been that way since I was 10. But occasionally, I would let one go where he had to reach up and get it. He would yell, ‘I’m too old for this!’ I loved it.”

The other big difference is that Tague has a major league body right now as a high school senior. Ben did not fully develop physically until after the Padres drafted him. Tague is 6-foot-4, 235 pounds — the size of a Division I linebacker. Ben graduated Malvern Prep at 6-2, 170. He grew two inches and gained 20 pounds after he was drafted.

Father and son also came up in different eras of baseball. That fact was not lost on the father. Ben made sure every coach Tague has had was someone Ben knew or someone who coached the same game Ben knew. Tague will widen his stance with two strikes. He does not pay attention to analytics or launch angles. He hits for average, carrying the approach to make contact first and hit homers second.

That is, until he is not hitting.

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“Yeah, the midnight hitting was not a good idea,” Tague said. “I should have thought it out better. I snuck out a lot of times. My mom had to do some coaxing. My cousin and my best friend came with me and I wasn’t about to give them up. So, I tried coming up with excuses, like I helped my dad cleaning the gutters. She knew. When she went to my dad about it, ‘This kid snuck out of the house last night!’ My dad’s first reaction was, ‘For what, what did he do?’ My mom told him I was hitting. My father told me, ‘Let your mom handle it.’ I took the bullet. I deserved it.

“But it goes through my head a lot. I may start nodding off before I go to bed, and then I will ask myself, ‘Did I lift hard enough today? Did I do anything to get better at all?’ If the answer is ‘No’ that day, I want to do something about it.”

Megan looks back and can laugh at her son’s nocturnal escapades. She trusts him.

“I thought it was really cool he was hitting at 3 in the morning, but as a mom you don’t want your teenage son on the road because of everyone else on the road that time of the morning,” she said. “He is a good kid and I like to say better than both myself and Ben.”

Tague still hits late at night. Only now, he will wait for his father to come home from broadcasting a Phillies game and they go together. He has found the hours are more conducive, and it beats climbing a ladder.

It looked like a Norman Rockwell piece: Little Tague sitting there watching baseball on the living room sofa next to his father. He just had no idea his dad played in the majors until he was 11. He would rummage through his father’s old stuff in boxes in the basement. It would drive his father up a wall, especially when Tague found one of Ben’s old catcher’s mitts to wear for a Little League game. Tague wedged the glove on his left hand and tried throwing right-handed. Ben watched from the stands. “What are you doing?” Tague ran over and tossed the glove over the fence to his father.

A week later, Tague found a new first baseman’s mitt on his bed.

Other than the basement, there is no evidence that Ben played in the majors anywhere in the family’s Delaware County home. No jerseys are hanging up. No memorabilia encased on a shelf.

If Ben brags about anything, it is about Megan (née McGonagle), a two-sport star at Aston’s Sun Valley High School and Rutgers in soccer and lacrosse. The couple are the proud parents of four: Tague, 18, Finley, 16, Riley, 15, and Mickey, 9. The family has that athletic gene. Tague’s cousins are Alex Hornibrook, the former Malvern Prep star who went on to play quarterback at Wisconsin and Florida State, and Jake Hornibrook, an offensive lineman at Stanford and Duke.

And the Davis DNA comes with drive.

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“I want Tague to be better than me,” Ben said. “Without a doubt, he is better than me. I tell him that. He has way more tools than I had. He has way more pop. He is a better runner. His instincts are greater. He is better in every area than me, except for maybe my arm. From the first time he picked anything up, it was with his left hand. When Tague was born, Rawlings made me a catcher’s mitt with ‘Tague Patrick Davis’ inscribed on it. Well, I could see he was not going to be a catcher. He earned the nickname ‘The Destroyer’ because everything he touched as a kid, he destroyed.

“I am very proud of him. But I wanted him to gravitate to baseball on his own. The speed comes from his mother. It certainly does not come from me. His best baseball is ahead of him. He has a higher ceiling than I did at the same age. ... The ball comes off his bat differently. I remember one time when he was 10, launching balls on a field designed for kids older than him. A friend of mine was watching and he came up and asked, ‘How does he do that?’ I told him, ‘I don’t know.’”

Tague has also dealt with the label of having been told he was great — outside the Davis home. It was not always idyllic. When he was 12, he went cross-country with his father to a national tournament in California and did not make the pool cut. Tague clammed up. He did not hit. For years, he carried that weekend with him.

He still has the towel from that tournament that says USA Baseball hanging on the side of his bed.

“It was the first time I got rejected, and what bothered me was I let the moment take me over,” Tague said. “I was not angry. It fueled the fire. I know what I could do. I needed to be stronger mentally. That tournament was a wake-up call. It showed me what other factors are involved with baseball. It’s not only home runs and throwing strikes. My grandfather [Bill Davis] gave me a book about how these pitchers mentally overcame their low points.”

It is why, Megan recalls, Tague would throw out every trophy that did not have first place on it.

Each game this spring, Tague has attracted major league scouts. They watch him take batting practice. They watch him pitch. They have their timers out clocking everything he does.

Friars coach Freddy Hilliard is in his 14th year and has been through this before. Under Hilliard, Malvern has had Lonnie White Jr. drafted in the second round in 2021 by the Pittsburgh Pirates, Billy Corcoran in the 36th round by the Texas Rangers in 2018, and former Phillie Phil Gosselin by the Atlanta Braves in the fifth round in 2010.

But Hilliard never has had someone like Tague — a two-way impact player.

» READ MORE: Malvern Prep’s Tague Davis trains with USA Baseball and showcases his two-way skills

If Tague had to make a choice, he would rather be a position player so he can hit every day. One other important intangible with Tague: When the Friars finished a recent workout, it was Tague gathering the loose balls and tossing them back in the bucket, a chore usually reserved for underclassmen or a team manager, not the star of the team.

“Tague is dominating on the mound and at the plate,” Hilliard said. “He’s a great leader, and that comes from his parents. The hardest part for Tague was everything came so easy to him. He dominated junior varsity as a freshman and thought it would still be easy on the varsity level.

“He has always worked hard. Tague had to find new uncomfortable areas. I never questioned his work ethic. He needed to fail to find new challenges, and over the past two years, his maturation process has been incredible. His failures ignited him.”

What happens in July is anyone’s guess. Tague said his goal is “to be in someone’s rookie camp this time next year.”

It is a win-win situation. If a major league team takes him, it would have to be a sound offer. If not, he goes to Louisville, which sees Tague as the next Brendan McKay.

Ben thinks about the times Tague used to fit in the palm of his hand. Very soon, his son will go on the same path he did.

“It is scary because I still think of him as my little baby boy,” Ben said. “These days are not going to be easy for me. Baseball has given me so much. Tague saw that and he still receives benefits from it. I may have a tough time ahead broadcasting one of Tague’s games in the majors. I hope I have that opportunity. I’m a puddle when it comes to my kids. I know all kids grow up. He is on the right path. But he’s always going to be my baby boy.”