An MLB pitching prospect in Charlotte is also an overqualified local sportswriter
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Duncan Davitt is a 26-year-old MLB prospect who plays for the Charlotte Knights.
- Davitt debuted in MLB in April, throwing 14 pitches in one scoreless inning.
- In offseasons Davitt works as a sports reporter for The Independent Advocate.
The tackle box and fishing rods were in the trunk. The bass they didn’t catch still swam in the remote pond. The son, Duncan Davitt, was 9 years old in the passenger seat, and the father, Mark, was steering their gray Chevy Impala away from Illinois Street and back toward their hometown of Indianola, Iowa, when a question flashed through his mind.
So the father asked it.
What do you wanna do when you grow up? Dad asked.
Play baseball, Duncan replied.
OK, well, it’s really hard, and you probably need a backup plan and—
Duncan had heard this before, and had an answer at the ready. It would be one that would stun his father.
You know, Duncan said, When you say stuff like that, it makes me think you don’t believe in me.
“I’m, like, 9,” Duncan Davitt said, a bit incredulously, recalling the events from 17 years prior. He laughed at his old self’s gall, and how coincidentally prescient it all was, in a recent interview with The Charlotte Observer.
“And my dad’s like, ‘Oh, OK,’” Duncan said, still laughing. “But from then on, I feel like he’s been more delusional about my baseball than I am. And I think you need a certain amount of delusion to be successful in this realm. He’s been all about it since.”
If it feels like a bit too tidy of a story, a convenient explanation for the origins of Davitt’s still-ascending baseball career, consider giving Davitt a break. He comes by it honestly. Stories are in his family’s blood. Storytelling is in his nature.
Davitt, today, is a 26-year-old Major League Baseball prospect, and has spent his spring and summer on the idyllic Truist Field in uptown playing for the Charlotte Knights. He’s the 30th-ranked prospect for the White Sox, according to MLB.com, and the organization’s seventh-ranked right-handed pitcher. Davitt made his MLB debut in April, where he threw 14 pitches in one inning and allowed zero runs. In Charlotte, he’s been steady. He’s mostly a reliever, but he’s also started 10 games, and he’s recorded a total of 48.1 innings pitched and notched 53 strikeouts while allowing 38 runs.
In the offseasons, however, Davitt is a writer. A storyteller. A proud helper of the family business. More specifically, he’s a sports reporter for The Independent Advocate — the newspaper based in his hometown of Indianola, Iowa, that is owned and operated by his parents, Mark and Amy.
He writes about the high-profile college prospects in the Des Moines area as well as the basketball players who “average 10 points a game for the 40-person high school.” He occasionally writes a first-person column about playing pro baseball. He believes, and has always believed, in the power of the local press, he said — not just in the oft-repeated “hold power to account” platitudes, but also in everything else.
“You get to write about this person, and give them an experience of, ‘I’m important,’” Davitt said.
“I’ve found that that’s kind of a way of giving back for me, too,” he added.
Which is an important detail.
Because Indianola, he said, has given him so much.
Duncan Davitt’s first newspaper assignment
How Duncan first got into writing for his parents’ newspaper has multiple beginnings.
If you ask Duncan himself, it started during his first offseason playing pro baseball. Minor league baseball is a livable wage during the season, no doubt, but in the offseason, it pays $250 a week. He was sitting in an apartment in Des Moines one night, trying to find a seasonal job, when his mom asked him if he could cover a football game between Des Moines North and Indianola High School. He said yes, sat in the stands and wrote every single thing that happened in the game in a little notebook. He didn’t get any quotes after the game; he had to calculate all sorts of stats by hand. But it was a start. (He’s since cultivated a “system” on his laptop and now sits in press boxes or stands on sidelines, to be clear.)
If you ask Amy, she’ll focus on the first time she asked him to go cover a high school volleyball state championship. He didn’t know anything about volleyball at the time, he said, but he asked a ton of questions and got a ton of great quotes from the coaches and players and “churned out a great story.” (He may be a “bit wordy” occasionally as a writer, Amy said, and his mom might cut him some slack on deadlines ... but “there’s always a good story there.”)
“I think it helps that he’s genuinely interested in people,” Amy said.
And that’s a trait he got from his parents.
Amy was born and raised in the Indianola area and got her start at her hometown newspaper, The Record Herald. Mark, too, has always lived in Iowa and had many professions that required a special interest in people. He grew up on a farm in Warren County, about 20 miles west of Indianola. He then became a photographer for The Record Herald, where he and Amy would later meet, and then also was a local politician — a state house representative, specifically.
When Duncan was young, starting when he was 4 or 5 years old, it wasn’t unusual for him and his sister, Liz, to be everywhere and anywhere in town by virtue of their parents’ jobs. They volunteered at fish dinners. They’d direct cars at Rotary Club meetings and the town’s balloon festival. Duncan would stand on floats and toss candy during his dad’s campaign rallies.
Duncan became a high-level baseball player around 9 years old, and even that was a community affair. His youth coaches for the “Lightning” were a smattering of people: an elementary school principal named Ed Johnson; a police officer named Chris Scott, a trophy shop owner named Eric Held. His youth team would plant trees when a teammates’ grandparent died, and would sponsor families at Christmas. The same town followed Duncan’s ascension from Little League All-Star to Iowa Hawkeye to Charlotte Knight — on the precipice of an MLB career.
One of Duncan’s teammates from his hometown would be the best man in his wedding; two of his youth league coaches were part of the 80 or so people from Indianola in Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City in April, when Duncan made his debut for the White Sox.
“This whole experience, since Little League, has touched a lot of people,” Mark said. “And we want people to feel free to have as much fun with this as we are.”
A 9-year-old’s dream coming true
There’s an epilogue to that fishing story, the one where a 9-year-old Duncan stunned his chatty father into speechlessness, and, eventually, wholehearted belief.
There’s maybe, even, a correction.
His father, Mark, specifically wanted to clarify that he was never “delusional” about his son’s dreams.
“I think he took some liberties with that,” Mark said. “But that’s fine.” He chuckled. “When you tell a story, have a good story. The second time you tell a story, you should make it better.”
Mark went on to say that from then on, from 9 years old to today, he would support his kids’ dreams. That there were enough people in the world to tell them that they can’t do what they set out to — that it’s the parents’ job to support, love and prepare.
“You can make a lot of plans, but you might change your mind just at that last moment to do something else,” Mark said. “But being ready doesn’t necessarily mean expertly trained to be that one thing. You can find a lot of ways to continue your life and be smart about it.”
For Mark, that meant going from farming to photography to local politics back into newspapers. For Amy, that meant working for newspapers, getting laid off, starting her own news site and then eventually buying back The Record Herald’s print properties — running the business in its current form today.
For both of them, that meant raising a kid with baseball dreams and seeing at least part of that come true — Mark standing up as Duncan headed off to his first Major League mound, Amy staying seated because she was so terrified, so overjoyed, so overwhelmed that she was unsure if her wobbly legs would hold her up.
“I’m at awe sometimes when I can find people who know from the earliest age what they want to do,” Mark said.
He then thought for a moment.
“I mean, Duncan’s kind of one of those guys,” he said. “He got to be lucky. He knew what he wanted to do.”
A tidy, but true, story.
Told by the patriarch of a newspaper family — one who knows that every story, by the end, should leave the reader wanting to read more.
“Now, he’s pursuing it,” Mark said of his son. “And we’ll see what happens next.”
