Arkansas' Davalan deserves empathy, praise despite ninth-inning moment

It wasn’t. LSU will play Coastal Carolina for a national title starting Friday while Arkansas and its fanbase, once again, has been relegated to watching from their couch without a horse in the race.

That moment joins a long Rolodex of what-if moments that Hog fans could probably recite by heart. Adding one just reopens another the wound of all that has come before. 

LSU will play for its eighth national title. Coastal will play for its second.

Jay Johnson already has a national title with LSU. Kevin Schnall got one in 2016 with the Chanticleers as an assistant and could get his first title in his inaugral season as head coach.

The wait for Dave Van Horn and Arkansas reaches its 24th season. Cruel. 

For Davalan, it’s especially cruel. Johnson said postgame that the game should be played on ESPN Classic for a week, or whatever the equivalent of it is in 2025.

The play will live on video forever, but so will this. 

Davalan, understandably inconsolable after the game, was comforted by his teammates. 

“It sucks to say goodbye to everybody,” catcher Ryan Helfrick said. “Charles, he told me, ‘I'm sorry.‘ I said, 'Why are you sorry?' We wouldn't be where we are today without him, the way he competes. He's one of the best hitters and people and just all-around best baseball players I've ever been around. For him to say sorry, it kind of pissed me off because the game's not on him.”

Without Davalan, there is no Maxwell grand slam and there is no Wood no-hitter. One of the many shortcomings of the 2024 team was the lack of a true lead-off hitter. Six players did it in 2024 until it all came tumbling down like a house of cards in the regional. 

Davalan was that guy for Arkansas, leading off in 64 of the 65 games, and he did it incredibly well. He could finish as high as second in the SEC with 93 hits, just one behind Wehiwa Aloy for the team lead. 

He played a solid left field for most of the season. Davalan is the only player with over 100 chances not to commit an error the entire season. 

“He's pretty distraught,” Van Horn said.  “But I just told him — I started telling him how much I appreciated him and we would never have made it here without him.”

Van Horn put a number on just how many wins he thought Davalan was worth to the team. 

“Guy got so much clutch hits,” Van Horn said. “[He] started so many rallies. You can probably take 10 wins off our SEC. He was unbelievable.”

I wrote the first feature on Davalan when he got to Arkansas before the season started. It was before he got any of his 93 hits for the Razorbacks. 

When Charles' mom Paula, spoke to me on the phone in February, she was days away from making the 27-hour drive from Montreal, Quebec, to Fayetteville for opening day. 

Dad, Lucien, had just flown all the way back from Paris on what was to be his final business trip to come watch Charles play.

Every parent says they're incredibly proud, but she was so excited about it, you could hear her voice go up a few octaves whenever she started to talk about it.

“Charles was like ‘What if I’m not in the starting line-up’,” Paula Davalan said in February. “We're coming down anyway. We'll cheer on your buddies.”

If only she knew just how important Charles would be to the starting line-up. For all the fanfare that has surrounded other members of the team, Davalan may have been the consummate teammate.

A family that left what they knew behind in Canada for Davalan to become one of the most prolific lead-off hitters in school history.

In his darkest moment on the field as a Hog, his coaches and teammates had empathy for him. 

“You don't have to tell me you're sorry,” Van Horn said. “And he said it again. It's tough. That kid doesn't have to be sorry for anything. He was our glue, man. He held it together.”

In due course, the fans should too. The play wasn’t made, that’s unchangeable, but without it, so many other things would have been impossible.

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