Chris Davis, 2019

[Frobby]

10 hours ago, maybenxtyr said:

Cal Ripken would tinker with his swing in the middle of an AB if necessary. I really wish they would drop Davis and move on to whatever is next.

I don’t think comparing Davis to Ripken is really apt.    First, Ripken was really rare in the degree to which he changed his stance and his swing over the course of a season or between seasons.   And I’m not sure it’s a good thing for most players.    Did Eddie Murray change a single thing from the day he debuted to the day he retired 20 years later?

Second, I’m not sure most players have the athletic skill to make the kind of frequent adjustments Cal did and have any success.    
 

At the same time, Davis seems to meet Einstein’s definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    
 

I need to go back and read some of the articles, because although the quote that has everyone stirred up suggests Davis is not going to do anything this offseason to address his problems, I’ve read other quotes suggesting that he is doing some things Elias suggested.   To date, I’ve only read the quotes people posted here, without the context of everything else he said.   

[DrungoHazewood]

10 hours ago, maybenxtyr said:

Cal Ripken would tinker with his swing in the middle of an AB if necessary. I really wish they would drop Davis and move on to whatever is next.

I don't know if Cal's tinkering (which was often rumored to be driven or aided by Cal Sr.) helped or hindered.  Cal wasn't the most consistent hitter (cue Drungo chiding people for citing (in)consistency without any definition or metrics or evidence) and I often thought that he'd be better off just picking a reasonable, balanced stance and sticking with it rather than completely altering his baseline hitting setup every 45 seconds.

[maybenxtyr]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

I don’t think comparing Davis to Ripken is really apt.    First, Ripken was really rare in the degree to which he changed his stance and his swing over the course of a season or between seasons.   And I’m not sure it’s a good thing for most players.    Did Eddie Murray change a single thing from the day he debuted to the day he retired 20 years later?

Second, I’m not sure most players have the athletic skill to make the kind of frequent adjustments Cal did and have any success.    
 

At the same time, Davis seems to meet Einstein’s definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    
 

I need to go back and read some of the articles, because although the quote that has everyone stirred up suggests Davis is not going to do anything this offseason to address his problems, I’ve read other quotes suggesting that he is doing some things Elias suggested.   To date, I’ve only read the quotes people posted here, without the context of everything else he said.   

I was kinda joking. Cal was one of the only hitters that I can remember that changed up a stance as often as he did. I was just implying that if Cal could be so fluid with his stance, then I don't think it's unreasonable to ask Davis to rework his in the off season in hopes that it would change up the miserable outcome of each of his AB's.

[thezeroes]

1 minute ago, maybenxtyr said:

Cal was one of the only hitters that I can remember that changed up a stance as often as he did.

Rod Carew changed his with every pitch at times during a game.  He was a pretyy good hitter.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/carewro01.shtml

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

4 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I don't know if Cal's tinkering (which was often rumored to be driven or aided by Cal Sr.) helped or hindered.  Cal wasn't the most consistent hitter (cue Drungo chiding people for citing (in)consistency without any definition or metrics or evidence) and I often thought that he'd be better off just picking a reasonable, balanced stance and sticking with it rather than completely altering his baseline hitting setup every 45 seconds.

The problem is Davis hasn’t changed a thing. He doesn’t need to be Cal Ripken and alter his batting stance each swing.

Davis is still staring at called strike three and doesn’t seem the least bit interested in changing his approach in the last three years. 

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

4 hours ago, maybenxtyr said:

I was kinda joking. Cal was one of the only hitters that I can remember that changed up a stance as often as he did. I was just implying that if Cal could be so fluid with his stance, then I don't think it's unreasonable to ask Davis to rework his in the off season in hopes that it would change up the miserable outcome of each of his AB's.

Well Davis has lost about 20 pounds of muscle since 2015. So there is that. 

[DrungoHazewood]

22 hours ago, thezeroes said:

Rod Carew changed his with every pitch at times during a game.  He was a pretyy good hitter.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/carewro01.shtml

Carew also had a totally different approach than pretty much any modern hitter.  He was vaguely like Ichiro, but not exactly.  A modern hitting coach schooled on max bat speed, loft angles, balanced stances, etc, would look at Carew and say "I'm not sure what that's supposed to be.  Cricket?  Jai Alai?  Huh?"

[DrungoHazewood]

18 hours ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

The problem is Davis hasn’t changed a thing. He doesn’t need to be Cal Ripken and alter his batting stance each swing.

Davis is still staring at called strike three and doesn’t seem the least bit interested in changing his approach in the last three years. 

I think it goes back to the bunting thing.  He's completely out of his element if he's trying to do something wildly different than what made him successful. For 20 years every rep has been to do this one thing. Now at 33 different stuff does not compute, and it probably won't work anyway.

Not unlike the occasional college QB who clearly isn't going to cut it as a D-I QB, and the coaching staff asks him to move to safety.  A lot of guys are like "uhh... safety?  I think I'll just transfer to JMU or something."

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

6 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I think it goes back to the bunting thing.  He's completely out of his element if he's trying to do something wildly different than what made him successful. For 20 years every rep has been to do this one thing. Now at 33 different stuff does not compute, and it probably won't work anyway.

Not unlike the occasional college QB who clearly isn't going to cut it as a D-I QB, and the coaching staff asks him to move to safety.  A lot of guys are like "uhh... safety?  I think I'll just transfer to JMU or something."

There is definitely some truth here. You would like to think a professional baseball player like Chris Davis could adjust his approach. But he has put in thousands of reps doing what he does, and that programming is hard to override. Other players can do it, but you can't just assume that all of them can. 

Davis had a nice run and it's not his fault that the Orioles gave him that contract. 

[weams]

On 11/9/2019 at 1:51 PM, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

Well Davis has lost about 20 pounds of muscle since 2015. So there is that. 

40

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

2 minutes ago, weams said:

40

I'd believe that.

[Can_of_corn]

23 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

There is definitely some truth here. You would like to think a professional baseball player like Chris Davis could adjust his approach. But he has put in thousands of reps doing what he does, and that programming is hard to override. Other players can do it, but you can't just assume that all of them can. 

Davis had a nice run and it's not his fault that the Orioles gave him that contract. 

I can't assume he can but it isn't a good look when he stops trying.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

19 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

I can't assume he can but it isn't a good look when he stops trying.

I’m not cool with that either. Has Davis even tried switching to a lighter bat? He’s lost a lot of bulk and it doesn’t make sense to use the same size bat he was hitting home runs with in 2015.

Davis approach seems to be that he is in a one month slump and it will turnaround. It’s frustrating how stubborn he is at the plate. 

[interloper]

Withholding judgment until we hear about who he's working with over the winter and all that. He's been working on a plan since the end of the season, he said, and cleared that with Elias. 

Nothing he does will work anyway, probably. 

[wildbillhiccup]

On 11/9/2019 at 8:31 AM, Frobby said:

I don’t think comparing Davis to Ripken is really apt.    First, Ripken was really rare in the degree to which he changed his stance and his swing over the course of a season or between seasons.   And I’m not sure it’s a good thing for most players.    Did Eddie Murray change a single thing from the day he debuted to the day he retired 20 years later?

Second, I’m not sure most players have the athletic skill to make the kind of frequent adjustments Cal did and have any success.    
 

At the same time, Davis seems to meet Einstein’s definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    
 

I need to go back and read some of the articles, because although the quote that has everyone stirred up suggests Davis is not going to do anything this offseason to address his problems, I’ve read other quotes suggesting that he is doing some things Elias suggested.   To date, I’ve only read the quotes people posted here, without the context of everything else he said.   

My point is / was Ripken , bonafide HOFer ,was willing to mix things up to try and get better whereas Chris Davis, a player coming off the worst two collective seasons ever in the modern era is not. And in terms of the quote does it really matter? Have you seem anything, over the last two years, that suggests Chris Davis is significantly trying to change his approach to hitting? I sure haven't.