Chris Davis retires!

[Can_of_corn]

4 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

Agree on that point, Davis treated his contract like hitting the lottery. I don't remember which year exactly, but in one of the seasons following signing the contract Davis looked noticeably smaller. The bulky muscular Chris Davis was gone. 

I liked the part when he lied about working with the hitting coach in the offseason.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

I know this isn't completely scientific, but Davis' arms look like toothpicks compared to a photo of him before signed the contract.

[Roll Tide]

2 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The 2012-2015 Orioles payroll plus the $23M Chris Davis got per year were each lower than the 2017 Orioles' payroll, and they still won.

The Orioles were hamstrung by a long series of decisions that led to a very inefficient payroll and an insufficient stream of cheap, young talent.  Most teams have dead money, many a lot more than $23M.  Davis' contract didn't help, but it wasn't even the primary thing keeping them from winning. If anything it was a symptom of an organization's poor decision making.

But, Angelos’ overcompensated for his mistakes. He got cheap for quite a while after the Albert Belle debacle. Listening to Chris talk the last few seasons sounded like a pompous ass that didn’t give a crap about the city, fans, or the team.

Davis’ negative negative performance killed the Orioles. That’s something that’s fair and reasonable to hold against him.

But, we can agree to disagree 

[Roll Tide]

13 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

I know this isn't completely scientific, but Davis' arms look like toothpicks compared to a photo of him before signed the contract.

He got lazy! He never looked like a guy on roids.

[Il BuonO]

Is there some evidence I’ve missed as to PA’s mental capacity at the time he authorized the contract for Davis? I know he’s been in declining health since 2019, but suggesting that the master negotiator was in fact at a disadvantage is farcical. 
 

Angelos meddled in team affairs for years. The Davis contract wasn’t the first time he’d screwed up a decision regarding the Orioles. 

[Roll Tide]

2 hours ago, jabba72 said:

Yeah, I think he owed it to the Orioles to be in the best possible shape he could be. Now if he was doing it illegally, he wasnt caught, so I dont know how he got so big and powerful in his earlier years. But he was never the same player once the contract was signed. 

He clearly stopped working out and lifting. He claimed to be working one offseason and an Oriole coach basically called him a liar.

[Roll Tide]

2 hours ago, LA2 said:

More than being upset with Crush, the signing was the final proof to me that there was a dysfunctional relationship between the O's ownership and its front office. I think that mainly falls on Peter Angelos and/or whoever he was consulting with (Buck?). Duquette had signed Trumbo assuming Davis would be gone and it was a great signing for that purpose. He had a plan. Angelos, on the other hand, either got suckered or had lost his ability to make sound judgements--on such a stupendous amount of money impacting the team on such a very long timescale. My friends who are fans of other teams, whether the gyro grill guy Mets fan on Queens Blvd or the Cardinals fan filmmaker from Philly: they could see that right away. Still SMH.

I agree

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

1 minute ago, Roll Tide said:

He clearly stopped working out and lifting. He claimed to be working one offseason and an Oriole coach basically called him a liar.

In looking at Davis the past couple years compared to his 2012 to 2016 prime, it looks like he lost 15 to 20 pounds of muscle from his body. 

[Jagwar]

I can't believe Davis never hit the warehouse in his good years. 

[25 Nuggets]

So, it's finally over.  Now we can talk for years to come about where his contract ranks among the worst in baseball history.

 

And I was dumb enough to think the signing wasn't that bad at the time.

[Frobby]

3 minutes ago, 25 Nuggets said:

So, it's finally over.  Now we can talk for years to come about where his contract ranks among the worst in baseball history.

 

And I was dumb enough to think the signing wasn't that bad at the time.

It’s among the three worst, and depending how you want to measure it, quite possibly the worst.   Pujols and Cabrera are the other two.   They generated positive WAR during their contracts but they also were paid a lot more than Davis so the gap between what they’ve been paid and what they produced is larger than for Davis.   Davis is certainly the highest paid player ever to produce negative WAR over the life of his contract.   

[Barnaby Graves]

3 minutes ago, Frobby said:

It’s among the three worst, and depending how you want to measure it, quite possibly the worst.   Pujols and Cabrera are the other two.   They generated positive WAR during their contracts but they also were paid a lot more than Davis so the gap between what they’ve been paid and what they produced is larger than for Davis.   Davis is certainly the highest paid player ever to produce negative WAR over the life of his contract.   

Prince Fielder's was also really bad.  I'm sure there's ten different Fangraphs articles on this subject and that I've forgotten a bunch of other duds.

Cabrera's was especially egregious because if I recall it was an extension and he was under control for 2 more years anyway, so it was a totally unforced error.

[waroriole]

3 minutes ago, Barnaby Graves said:

Prince Fielder's was also really bad.  I'm sure there's ten different Fangraphs articles on this subject and that I've forgotten a bunch of other duds.

Cabrera's was especially egregious because if I recall it was an extension and he was under control for 2 more years anyway, so it was a totally unforced error.

Other than 14 and 16, when he was injured, Fielder was always an above average hitter. His lowest OPS, except the injured years, was .819. 
 

Davis hasn’t had an OBP of over .276 since 2017. 

[Hallas]

6 minutes ago, Barnaby Graves said:

Prince Fielder's was also really bad.  I'm sure there's ten different Fangraphs articles on this subject and that I've forgotten a bunch of other duds.

Cabrera's was especially egregious because if I recall it was an extension and he was under control for 2 more years anyway, so it was a totally unforced error.

Ryan Howard produced negative WAR during his last contract (5/125 + 10 million buyout,) and arguably was worse, because he didn't produce a single season over 1 WAR for the duration of the contract.  Davis was at least serviceable for the first year of his contract (3 WAR from BB-ref.)

[LA2]

26 minutes ago, Frobby said:

It’s among the three worst, and depending how you want to measure it, quite possibly the worst.   Pujols and Cabrera are the other two.   They generated positive WAR during their contracts but they also were paid a lot more than Davis so the gap between what they’ve been paid and what they produced is larger than for Davis.   Davis is certainly the highest paid player ever to produce negative WAR over the life of his contract.   

That's still sinking in. And all the wasted time on deliberations and maneuvers over how to keep up the facade of Davis being potentially a plus to the team.

As Drungo points out, the Davis fiasco was just one in a series of poor decisions and dysfunctional situations that broke the team into the mess that Elias inherited. And in these, there were more culprits than just PA, who probably had not perceived that the requirements for running a successful baseball team had changed since he first acquired the Os. But among personnel management issues, this was the one that just wouldn't go away--we had to deal with it season after season and it became the public symbol of our team's ludicrousness, e.g. during the hitless streak. One could argue it was, in fact, not as important as how we maneuvered our way into getting almost nothing, as it seems to be turning out, in trades for our best players, giving away very good pitching prospects, re-signing easily injured players in decline, and failing to develop talented players that had made it to the club, but were performing poorly. But all of those losses were packaged and forgotten quickly compared to the endless miasma we stumbled through for Davis.