Oakland A's Khris Davis lets Make-A-Wish kid sign jersey, slugs long HR

OAKLAND, Calif. (KTVU, AP) - It may have sprinkled in some extra good fortune to an already magical season: On Monday night, Oakland Athletics slugger Khris Davis asked a young fan from the Make-A-Wish Foundation to sign his jersey. What later happened on the field has moved both avid basball fans and non-fans alike.  

With the ink hardly dry from 10-year-old Tony Slocumb's signature on his jersey, Davis smashed his 37th home run in the third inning, for the game that ended in a 9-0 win against the Texas Rangers.

Before the game, Slocumb was among a group of Bay Area children from the Make-A-Wish Foundation to meet with A's players. The Oakland sixth-grader is in remission from a cancer called Langerhans cell histiocytosis.  

Video posted by the team shows Davis crouched down while Slocumb signs his name with blue ink on the back of the player's white jersey.

The post is captioned, "This time, Khris gets the souvenir."

Davis never even considered switching uniform shirts, and when he hit that powerful home run, with an estimated flight of 438 feet, he had his young fan on his mind. 

"I thought about him around the bases. There's not a better feeling than hitting a home run, so hopefully he got some excitement and joy from watching that," Davis said. 

And he gave Slocumb and others brave kids like him the spotlight. "They're really the stars. ... He was excited. I could tell that he was just happy to be here and wanted to have some fun. It was amazing, the look on his face," Davis said. 

"I wanted to rock that. I wanted him to know that I was thinking about him," he continued. "He just told me I was his favorite and he was here to watch me play."

For Slocumb, the whole night was full of excitement.

"I was down there with the other kids and then two other players came down and then he came down," an overjoyed Slocumb later recounted in an interview with The Associated Press outside the Oakland Coliseum. 

"So, I was like, 'You're my favorite player' and he was like, 'Cool.' I said, 'Can you sign my jersey?' and then he said, 'Sure, do you want to sign mine, too?' And I was like, 'Sure,' so we basically signed each other's jerseys. That's what happened."

It was well worth being out late on a school night for Slocumb, who is in his second week of sixth grade at Claremont Middle School.

While the memorable events from Monday's game will be with the young A's fan for years to come, it was clear that for Davis, his meeting with Slocumb and the other kids left an impression on him and that he really hoped to make the young fans feel special. 

"There was a lot of emotion with those kids' situations," Davis said. "It's the worst situation you can be in probably. I just wanted to put a smile on his face and thought maybe it would mean something if I had my jersey signed by him, so just to know what that feels like to be in my shoes for a split second. I'm just kind of at a loss for words really."