As if I'd pass up a shot at one last Chris Davis contract anniversary story

For the same reason as the last five years, a look at the contract that changed the course of Orioles history. The reason? It's January. What else is there to write?

Chris Davis probably had a lot of people in his life reach out to him in August when he retired and eased the financial burden the remainder of his club-record contract was putting on the Orioles. I had substantially fewer messages that day, but they came from people who knew what a fraught morning that must have been.

His signing to the richest free agent contract the Orioles ever gave out was essentially my first week on the beat. I’d come straight out of a nightmare of a Ravens season in 2015 to cover minicamp in Sarasota on a “tryout” basis, and that responsibility carried through the rest of that week. With it came the scarring Saturday-morning tweets about his signing, and it took six years for the unease over being unprepared for breaking news and not the least bit relieved when such storms to subside. (It only did once that stopped being my job.)

Over the ensuing years, I had a surface-level relationship with Davis himself. But having not experienced first-hand the extreme highs and lows of the preceding seasons, he was mostly just the player I saw in front of me. My skepticism of him was reflected back on me, though he was by and large accommodating when I needed him.

I can say I was there for his last swings in an Orioles uniform, when he came up sore in the first home spring training game of 2021, but the media wasn’t around last year and neither was he. That became official in August.

The only thing I’d truly spent all of my six years on the Orioles’ beat writing about was gone, and the staple of that – the January anniversary take of his contract – was gone with it.

Or so I thought. 

It’s not like there’s anything unique to say about it anymore. There are a variety of ways to quantify the most unproductive contracts in baseball, and by any measure, his is one of them. But tracking those anniversary write-ups gives a much more fair glimpse at where Davis was at the time of each writing.

One year out, he’d been an above-average and productive hitter with standout defense and 2.9 wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs. (Note: Davis’ fWAR is now different on his player page than it’s listed in these articles. It’s just as possible I made a mistake as the calculations changed, but impossible to know now. Banking on the latter.)

As noted then, given one WAR in free agency cost around $8 million at the time, he at least delivered on that value in 2016. It was just going to be really hard to keep that up.

Year Two wiped away any real chance of that, with Davis being exactly replacement level with 0 fWAR as he hit 26 home runs while striking out 37.2 percent of the time in 2017. That year’s anniversary piece noted the impacts on Mark Trumbo and Trey Mancini not having first base as potential positions and the optics of having an unproductive Davis around when Manny Machado was about to walk. 

The trades that sent him, Zack Britton, Brad Brach, Kevin Gausman, and Jonathan Schoop out of town a few months later had more to do with the on-field consequences of the organization’s dysfunction as anything else. One, or some, of those players could have stuck around if they weren’t traded. But Davis’ contract was used as a reason to not spend after the fact, so the deals made sense in that way.

Davis’ own miserable 2018 almost got lost in the fact that the team he helped bring back to life was sold for scrap. His contribution to the death of that Orioles era was one of the worst statistical seasons in baseball history. Davis struck out 39.4 percent of the time and had a .539 OPS with -3.1 fWAR and a wRC+ of 46. 

Looking back, I totally mailed in that three-year contract anniversary story. Using it as an example of teams not giving out those deals anymore was kind of true, but Davis wouldn’t have gotten this deal anywhere else even in 2016, so that was already in motion.

The questions about how a team with too many outfield prospects to play at once, plus a first baseman in Mancini in the outfield, were premature, though new manager Brandon Hyde had no problem sitting him for a better option.

That new reality was steeped in the indifference of the year-four review: not necessarily a mail-in, but as worn-out by it all as the player and team. By then, Davis was just kind of there. It was well-established that with or without his salary in the mix, the Orioles under executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias were going to invest in infrastructure and player development and not the major league team, so Davis’ salary wasn’t making the team any worse. 

The prospect crunch that was expected for 2019 didn’t really happen, so Davis played for most of the year. His hitless streak to begin the season endeared him to a new group of teammates, and he rode that goodwill internally all year. But his Orioles teams were gone, and he wasn’t. 

Last January, the fifth-anniversary post looked to the inevitable end that he and the team arrived at last summer. He was an afterthought on the 2020 Orioles, hardly playing even when he was healthy. The circumstances that forced their separation in the form of Davis’ degenerative hip condition couldn’t have been known then, but it aided an outcome that seemed fated for years.

Eventually, perhaps soon but probably not for two or three more years, there will be an offseason splash the Orioles make that adds another meaningful date to the look-back calendar. There’s a not-so-small element of how they hope to rebuild to prevent the need for signing such contracts in the future, with the ability to develop their own stars or otherwise trade for them the priority. The way the game is trending, that would be the hope even if the Davis contract didn’t color a decade of Orioles baseball.

It has, though, and like so many other unpleasant realities that have been confronted and slowly moved on from during this rebuild, the day is growing near where it won’t matter anymore. 

So what if the Orioles are paying him for another 15 years? If the elite talent pipeline Elias promised starts producing star-level players on league-minimum salaries, they’ll be getting so much value on the field compared to what they’re paying that the checks due Davis every July 1 shouldn’t impact baseball operations at all. If revenue sharing remains in place for the new CBA, and all the other avenues teams have to make money do as well, it would be hard to see how it could. 

That none of this has a lot to do with Davis is kind of the point. He is, hopefully, healthy and enjoying time with his family. Whether his deferred contract payments impact the Orioles going forward is not his problem, just like none of the hand-wringing around what they should do with him the last few years was either.

The only thing that was his to bear was the weight of a $161 million contract and the scrutiny that came with it. He has mostly escaped that now that he’s left the game. Maybe next January I will let this lay. Maybe.