Davis vs. Davis

[foxfield]

I think the answer is easily....Davis.  

Seriously, though, it's Chris.  Chris Davis is still here and while it might be easy to think that skewers the vote unfairly as he would tend to draw blame for the rebuild, that would be a mistake.   He maybe draws more than venom than deserved but...the Orioles will continue to pay him for years after he is gone.  I honestly think the Chris Davis legendary mistake will only grow in stature as we move on.

The Orioles were among the best teams in baseball in 1996 and 1997.  It is possible the Glenn Davis trade did as much to help as harm.  It was a mistake, but as SG notes above....it wasn't obvious.  Chris Davis' deal was so bad we actually had to outbid the Baltimore Orioles offer of 150MM to get it...

[Moose Milligan]

Deadlocked at 18.

[Aristotelian]

Very close call. Had to think about it for sure. I went with Glenn Davis trade. Chris Davis contract was a lot of money but at the end of the day it was just money. We lost a legit Ace, a plus-plus up the middle player, and a plus pitcher in the trade. IMO those players are worth more than the $20M. Schilling was putting up 6 WAR (averaging 4 or so) for Philly. He alone was worth Davis's contract dollars. 

[Can_of_corn]

1 minute ago, Moose Milligan said:

Deadlocked at 18.

No it isn't.

[Frobby]

45 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

Deadlocked at 18.

It deserves to be a close call.   I do agree with those who say that the Glenn Davis trade wasn’t obviously stupid at the time it was made, whereas the Chris Davis contract was very obviously an overpay.    However, it’s also true that Chris Davis has performed way, way worse than anyone reasonably would have expected at the time.

As I pointed out in the other thread, Chris Davis has about a -$120 mm deficit on his contract to date.  Convert that to WAR at today’s value and that’s about 15 WAR.   There are still two years to go, so maybe it ends up in the 21-22 WAR deficit range.

After the Glenn Davis trade, Schilling was worth 11.8 rWAR ($5.9 mm salary) while under team control, Harnisch 9.2 ($8.5 mm salary) and Finley 17.6 ($11.9 mm).   That’s 38.6 rWAR at a cost of $26.3 mm.   Davis was worth 0.7 rWAR at a cost of $10.5 mm.  So the net of the trade is -37.9 rWAR while saving $15.8 mm.    Dollars per WAR is hard to figure in that era (it was around $4 mm/WAR in 2002 but there aren’t handy figures before that.   Finger to the wind I’ll say it was roughly $1 mm per WAR in that period, based on Davis’ 3 year, $10.5 mm contract where he had produced 11.0 rWAR in the preceding 3 seasons.    If that’s fair, that means the O’s lost that trade by a net of about 22 WAR when salaries are considered.     

So, -22 WAR for the Chris Davis contract versus -22 for the Glenn Davis trade.   Pretty equal.

It factors into my thinking that the 1992-94 Orioles were pretty good teams and the addition of these three might have been enough to boost the team into the playoffs.    I think we would have been bad in 2017-20 with or without Chris Davis.

Now, I do appreciate the argument that these players might not have developed as well if they’d stayed with the Orioles.    Maybe yes and maybe no.    As I said, we had some good teams and some players developed pretty well in that era.    It wasn’t the debacle we saw in the late 90’s and 2000’s.   So, I don’t factor that in even though I’ll concede we don’t know how these players would have turned out.   

 

 

[fitzi22]

I voted for Chris.  Every team has had a Glen Davis situation where they traded young prospects for an established player that didn’t work out, look no further than Seattle with Bedard.  But really no team has ever paid top dollar for this many years for one of the worst players in mlb history.  I mean in addition to his many feats the last few years (mlb record hitless streak, 4th lowest WAR of all time....) Chris managed to tie JD Martinez for the lowest WAR last year in just 52 ABs.  Just think of what he could have done with a whole season.  We are watching history right before our eyes and need to appreciate it for what it is.

[Can_of_corn]

6 minutes ago, fitzi22 said:

I voted for Chris.  Every team has had a Glen Davis situation where they traded young prospects for an established player that didn’t work out, look no further than Seattle with Bedard.  But really no team has ever paid top dollar for this many years for one of the worst players in mlb history.  I mean in addition to his many feats the last few years (mlb record hitless streak, 4th lowest WAR of all time....) Chris managed to tie JD Martinez for the lowest WAR last year in just 52 ABs.  Just think of what he could have done with a whole season.  We are watching history right before our eyes and need to appreciate it for what it is.

That's because other teams jettison the player.

[Finisher]

No other team in baseball would trot out the corpse of a player for half a decade and torture their fans the way the O's have with Chris Davis. They'd simply release him and eat the money and move on. Think about all the bust contracts the Yankees and Red Sox have cut or salary dumped over the years. Sad and pathetic we have to waste even a second of our thoughts on Chris Davis.

[MCO'sFan]

I went with Glenn Davis only because we lost productive years of Finley and Harnish and the chance to develop Schilling. It is hard to tell how keeping them would impact the franchise going forward but we know how trading them impacted it. 

I don't see the Chris Davis contract as having that big of an affect on the wins/losses. I think even if they hadn't given him that money they would still be in pretty much the same boat. They weren't going to give Manny 300M regardless of the Davis deal. We still would have collapsed in 2017 (with Manny I might add) and we would be in the same place. Things may have even been worse because perhaps they use that money on two guys that help us stay near .500 and they don't to the teardown and we continue at mediocracy for 10 years or so. 

[jamalshw]

This is such a hard question because it has so many trickle down implications. Do the Orioles acquire Scott Erickson in 1995 or Jimmy Key ahead of the 1997 season if they had Pete Harnish and Curt Schilling? Assuming he develops the same, Schilling over Erickson in 1996 and 1997 makes sense, but while Harnish pitched alright for the Mets in 1996, he was a disaster in an abbreviated 1997.

It's hard to know what resulting moves would have been for the pitching staff throughout the 90s. Similarly, the OF make up may have been vastly different. Would Steve Finley as an OF in 1996 meant he was in place of Hammonds on the roster or would he had been moved in a different move to fill space? Or would Anderson have ultimately not been an OF mainstay?

In short, I really don't even know how to begin evaluating this question.

 

 

 

[Hallas]

On 12/5/2020 at 8:32 AM, Moose Milligan said:

Thinking about this in @Sports Guy's choose one thread:

There are two absolutely atrocious franchise altering deals that this franchise has made.  I'm probably missing another obvious one like the Eddie Murray deal.  While that deal was bad, I don't think it comes close to the Chris Davis contract and the Glenn Davis trade.

The Orioles traded Curt Schilling, Pete Harnisch and Steve Finley to the Astros for Glenn Davis before the 1991 season.  Davis was a tremendous flop, could never stay healthy while Curt Schilling went on to a borderline HoF career, Steve Finley hit 300 homers and stole 300 bases, won Gold Gloves and Harnisch ended up being a very solid pitcher.

I don't think anyone could have predicted back then that those three would go on to reach the heights that they did.  Now I was 9 when the Orioles traded for Glenn Davis, I remember being excited about it.  I'm not sure what older and more sophisticated fans were thinking.

I don't need to re-hash what a disaster the Chris Davis contract has been.  The issue here for me is that we can see what Schilling, Finley and Harnisch did over their careers and while they might not have been able to replicate those careers in Baltimore, it's easier to think that they could have done so.

With the Davis contract, the "what if's" become a lot more murkier.  If we let Davis walk, do we re-sign Machado?   What else could that money have been spent on?  What would the roster look like today?  It's a lot harder to say.

So Glenn Davis vs. Chris Davis.  Which was the worst in the history of this franchise?

You were excited for the Glenn Davis trade?  I remember my dad being pretty excited, but I was fairly nonplussed.  I was like, "Why did we trade for a first baseman when we have the Moose?"

I felt like his production was better than his actual stats when I was younger.  When I got older (and stats got better) and saw that Milligan's stat lines had aged quite well in the age of modern analysis, I felt vindicated in this belief.

To answer your question, the Orioles would have sucked by 2019 if Chris Davis wasn't signed, and the Orioles would have traded him if he were signed and productive.  Maybe we wouldn't lose 120 games, but we'd still suck.  So while the signing is still a disaster and is likely hampering our recovery efforts, it wasn't quite the unmitigated disaster that the Glenn Davis trade was, where we lost 3 productive players, including 2 perennial all-stars and 1 borderline hall of famer, with the primes of their careers coming up, for a player that broke his jaw in a bar fight.

[Moose Milligan]

8 minutes ago, Hallas said:

You were excited for the Glenn Davis trade?  I remember my dad being pretty excited, but I was fairly nonplussed.  I was like, "Why did we trade for a first baseman when we have the Moose?"

I felt like his production was better than his actual stats when I was younger.  When I got older (and stats got better) and saw that Milligan's stat lines had aged quite well in the age of modern analysis, I felt vindicated in this belief.

To answer your question, the Orioles would have sucked by 2019 if Chris Davis wasn't signed, and the Orioles would have traded him if he were signed and productive.  Maybe we wouldn't lose 120 games, but we'd still suck.  So while the signing is still a disaster and is likely hampering our recovery efforts, it wasn't quite the unmitigated disaster that the Glenn Davis trade was, where we lost 3 productive players, including 2 perennial all-stars and 1 borderline hall of famer, with the primes of their careers coming up, for a player that broke his jaw in a bar fight.

Randy Milligan was a top prospect, but IIRC he couldn't crack the Mets and Pirates big league teams despite some big minor league seasons.

He was a player ahead of his time.  If he played today, he'd be viewed much differently.  Might not have enough power to survive in today's game but for his time it was respectable.  But no one was paying attention to that .391 career on base percentage.  .130 point separation between his batting average and on base percentage, he walked more than he struck out for his career.  

Milligan was fine for the Orioles but they wanted a splash.  I also didn't realize this until I made this thread but Glenn Davis was hurt in 1990 and missed a bunch of time.  It was foreshadowing.

[hoosiers]

I voted early for Chris Davis and appreciate the points Frobby has made.

My reasoning from the beginning of this thread but not posted until now was the the Chris Davis contract was stupid from the moment it was signed.  It was a bad ownership decision the entire way - negotiations, signing, etc.  It was a bad contract the second it was executed.  We knew the production was unlikely to be there in the second half of the contract and it turns out the production was missing in the first half as well.  

The decision to make the G Davis trade is not steeped in any level of stupidity - it failed because the perceived best player in that trade became injured and never produced anywhere near the expected level.  That happens because, well, it obviously happened to us.

If we had the opportunity to invest into a top 10 major leaguer at 3B (currently a massive hole in the organization at the upper levels) by trading for such a player while keeping our top two SP prospects (Hall and GrayRod) and dealing Bauman, Kremer and Diaz (the Diaz ranked highly by national publications and not where Tony put him), that would be something to heavily consider.  Such analogies are not exact and the timing might be off a bit, but I think the general point is the same as in the GDavis deal - filling a massive organizational hole with a top 10 major leaguer at his position while keeping our top five prospects.  Add that 3B to Kjerstad, Westburg, Henderson, Hays, AR, Mountcastle and a well-above league average offense begins to appear on the horizon while we retain Means, Hall, GrayRod and others. 

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

21 hours ago, Finisher said:

No other team in baseball would trot out the corpse of a player for half a decade and torture their fans the way the O's have with Chris Davis. They'd simply release him and eat the money and move on. Think about all the bust contracts the Yankees and Red Sox have cut or salary dumped over the years. Sad and pathetic we have to waste even a second of our thoughts on Chris Davis.

If an intrepid author writes a book on the Orioles covering the time period of the Chris Davis contract, I'll buy a copy. I want to learn about the behind scenes conversations, what lengths the organization took at attempting to fix Davis, and was it as simple as ownership demanded Davis remain on the roster because the Orioles are paying him despite his historically bad offense. 

[owknows]

16 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

If an intrepid author writes a book on the Orioles covering the time period of the Chris Davis contract, I'll buy a copy. I want to learn about the behind scenes conversations, what lengths the organization took at attempting to fix Davis, and was it as simple as ownership demanded Davis remain on the roster because the Orioles are paying him despite his historically bad offense. 

The conversations with Peter Angelos went something like this:

"The big guy with the swollen cheek... yeah... the one who hits home runs... Sign him forever....

And pay him twice the going rate."

And later... when trying to fix Davis... they hired a medium to commune with the spirit of Babe Ruth.

Ruth Said: "The kid's too skinny, and he needs to drink more, and smoke cigars....  And who the hell told him to think about not striking out? It ruined him".