Chris Davis, 2019

[Ruzious]

8 hours ago, atomic said:

 

In baseball there is no place to hide. If you don’t pull your weight the world knows it.  

And it's rare that a player doesn't hit their weight - especially when that weight's probably decreased by about 30 pounds from his prime.  No red flag there.  

[wildbillhiccup]

8 hours ago, atomic said:

When I was an intern in college I worked for the state.  I was shocked that half of the civil engineers did nothing all day.  I would see them reading novels each day.  I chalked it up to government workers. 
 
But as I went into the private workforce I have seen the pattern among professional employees.  Half the employees do all the work while the rest effectively do nothing.  They aren’t reading novels these days but it comes down to zero real work being done.  I am not sure why this occurs but it seems to be the norm wherever I have worked.  It used to bother me the first few years but then I realized it is just easier to do things myself and ignore them.  
 

In baseball there is no place to hide. If you don’t pull your weight the world knows it.  

I think it's MUCH harder to get fired from a state job than it is a private sector job. A private sector company can fire you with little or no cause with no recourse. I'm not willing to say there's no work being done on the state side, but in general they seem to work at a much slower pace (again, just based on my observations). 

[Carllamy]

Chris Davis did a phone-in interview today on the Hot Stove radio show on 105.7 The Fan here in Baltimore. Jim Hunter and Steve Melewski straight out asked Davis about hitting, and what he was doing to improve his hitting in this offseason.

Nothing Davis said supplied hope. He flat out said he wasn't going to drastically alter his swing because he is now in his 30s, and because he has had sustained success in the past with his swing.

He said he talked a lot with the O's staff (didn't he say that last year?) and the O's mentioned that he was successful when he was stronger, and since he has purposefully done less work with the weights the last few years, he was going to try to get stronger this offseason. He also said he would try to be more aggressive in order to not take so many called third strikes, and to let the ball travel, so as to not try to hit it out in front of the plate so much.

He also said some stuff about his mind being in a better place, etcetera. Which would be nice if he was hitting baseballs with his mind instead of a bat.

So, he basically said he was doing nothing special this offseason to improve his hitting, he is just going to take a better approach into the upcoming year.

[24fps]

Isn't CD getting paid enough to lie through his teeth when he's asked questions on Hot Stove radio programs?  Would it hurt to make up a bunch of complete crap about his "punishing" work ethic just for public consumption?  Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

[atomic]

10 minutes ago, 24fps said:

Isn't CD getting paid enough to lie through his teeth when he's asked questions on Hot Stove radio programs?  Would it hurt to make up a bunch of complete crap about his "punishing" work ethic just for public consumption?  Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

He lied before and was called out by Palmer.  

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

I was hoping to see news on a surprise retirement announcement after seeing this thread bumped up. 

[sportsfan8703]

Who told him to be lose strength?  We paid for a hulking 1B, not some Doug mientkiewicz type. 

He wants to be more aggressive but let the ball travel more?  Those two things sound counter productive. He was letting the ball travel so far it was going into the catcher’s mit. 

Chris Davis at his best could drive pitches out of the park to CF and LCF. So if he’s adding the strength back to do that then great. 

Its pretty hilarious that he didn’t just spew cliches. Instead he’s like “I’m not really in the best shape of my career. I’m not really retooling anything.”  

[wildcard]

Sounds like there is a reason that Dwight Smith Jr is still on this team.    I thought that the O's would give Davis  the first month of the season to see if the changes he made over the winter would help him.   But he made no changes.  Just worked on strength.   

ST will be enough time to see how Davis is doing.   By Opening Day it looks like Mancini will be at 1B most of the time.   Santander in right and Smith in left.   Davis on the bench most of the time. 

When Mountcastle is promoted then Smith can be optioned. 

[mdbdotcom]

7 hours ago, 24fps said:

Isn't CD getting paid enough to lie through his teeth when he's asked questions on Hot Stove radio programs?  Would it hurt to make up a bunch of complete crap about his "punishing" work ethic just for public consumption?  Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

He lied previously (saying he'd worked with the ass't hitting coach) and got called out for it during the season.

[Can_of_corn]

7 hours ago, 24fps said:

Isn't CD getting paid enough to lie through his teeth when he's asked questions on Hot Stove radio programs?  Would it hurt to make up a bunch of complete crap about his "punishing" work ethic just for public consumption?  Is that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

I find his honesty more amusing.

[Chuck A]

To paraphrase, I'm making this money no what I do and you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so ... I'm gonna enjoy collecting my paycheck with as little effort as possible on my part.

[Win Column]

2 hours ago, sportsfan8703 said:

Who told him to be lose strength?  We paid for a hulking 1B, not some Doug mientkiewicz type. 

Wow, there’s a name from the past. I remember, in elementary school, using his name as something of a practice word to prep for our annual spelling bee. (I know it doesn’t make sense, but it always gave me confidence if I spelled it right.) Oddly, I didn’t quite learn how to correctly pronounce it ‘til later...he’d been “me-EN-key-wits” to me for some time. Oh, anyway.

[Moose Milligan]

[atomic]

3 hours ago, sportsfan8703 said:

Who told him to be lose strength?  We paid for a hulking 1B, not some Doug mientkiewicz type. 

Probably Boras told him "You got your big contract now Chris, so do us both a favor and lay off the juice".  

[MurphDogg]

Melewski recaps yesterday's show. Apparently he is trying to "add bulk".

As I mentioned in this post above, Davis actually had a couple stretches of productivity last year. Unfortunately he had other stretches where he hit worse than a pitcher. That makes me think that at least some of the issue is mental.