It’s been a long time since Chris Davis was considered a good baseball player. You have to go back to 2017 to find his last non-disastrous season, when both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference listed his Wins Above Replacement total at exactly 0.0. His last useful season came in 2016 (113 wRC+, 2.9 fWAR), which just so happened to be the first year of his massive seven-year, $161 million contract. Yes, it was signed in 2016, and yes, it only feels like it happened a lifetime ago.
There’s no reason to wade through Davis’ appalling 2018 and 2019 numbers once again. In 2018, he put up one of the very worst offensive seasons in baseball history. Last season, Davis was better only in the sense that it would have been virtually impossible for him to be worse. He stepped to the plate about two-thirds as much as he did in 2018, but to his credit, he made a marginal improvement. Still, he tied for the fifth-worst fWAR among position players.
Since general manager Mike Elias joined the Orioles, he’s been consistent in his messaging that Davis isn’t going anywhere — yet. He’s said nice things about Davis. O’s manager Brandon Hyde has also said nice things about Davis, and he continues to do so even after Davis had to be restrained last August from going after Hyde in the O’s dugout.
