Baltimore Orioles: Chris Davis wants to give it one more shot

From big bopper to big slumper, Baltimore Orioles 1B Chris Davis considered retiring this off-season. But he’s bent on giving it just one more chance.

For 210 days from September 14, 2018, through April 13, 2019, Baltimore Orioles first baseman  Chris Davis lived without a single safe hit on his jacket. Already struggling to come to terms with his jolting power drop, Davis and Oriole fans were reminded cruelly that baseball is played by human men who aren’t supermen no matter how high their achievements.

A batter is the second loneliest man on a baseball field next to the pitcher on the mound against whom he starts a game’s combat. At that moment he’s isolated from his team with opponents spread around the field. Baseball’s image as the game of seventy percent failure (it really isn’t, but that’s another story) doesn’t comfort him when he swings, misses, or hits into another out, another time, another baseball death.

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Bravery was simple in the halcyon days when the man once known as “Crush” Davis led the American League in home runs in two out of a particular three seasons. It was far less so when he led the American League in strikeouts in two straight seasons. It was impossible, in theory, when Davis had a lower OPS in 2018 than the worst such team in the league. (Davis: .539; the Detroit Tigers: .697.)

By the time Chris Davis faced Boston Red Sox right-hander Rick Porcello with the bases loaded in the bottom of the first, he probably pushed all the foregoing out of his mind, like the professional he is, and reminded himself that now was an entirely singular moment. On 1-0 Davis caught hold of an inside fastball and pulled it on a slash into right-field, sending Trey Mancini and Rio Ruiz home to open the scoring.

The Fenway Park audience was well enough aware of Davis’s September-April slump to give him a standing ovation after that hit. And it must have done something else to Davis, because—after grounding out to first unassisted in the third, and the Orioles opened the fifth with back-to-back singles in a now 2-2 tie—Davis was the first man to face incoming Red Sox reliever Heath Hembree. And he ripped a double to the back of right-center field to break the tie, sending Renato Nunez home.

An inning later, the Orioles hung two more runs up on back-to-back bases-loaded singles, bringing up Davis to push a third run of the inning home on a grounder to short that turned into an unassisted force at second base. In a game the Orioles hung in to win, Davis accounted for a full third of the Oriole runs.

“Going through the struggles that he has, he kept his chin up no matter what,” said Orioles outfielder Cedric Mullins. “To witness that in person, it’ll help me maintain my composure when I go through the same thing.”

For his own part, Davis showed a fine sense of humor about the temporarily-broken slump. After that first-inning two-run single, he called for the ball and got it. “I don’t know, but I’m going to get it authenticated,” he cracked. “You have to embrace it at some point.”

You’d love to say that that was the night the sleeping giant awoke, but it didn’t happen quite that way