Baltimore Orioles: Five Ways to Win the American League East
#1 – The Resurrection of Chris Davis
The 2016 season so far has not been the campaign that Chris Davis desired to start off his huge multi-year contract. It has to be killing him internally.
The numbers have been well-chronicled on this site and others. He is on the way to setting a new all-time strikeout record for a single season. The current record is 223 by Mark Reynolds in 2009, and Davis is on pace at this moment to tally 224. He could also become only the third player ever to have a higher strikeout number than batting average. Reynolds and Adam Dunn are the others. Davis is now batting .220.
In 34 games since July 3rd, Davis has gone 19-for-122 (.156), with 23 walks and 53 strikeouts in those 34 games. He has a double, three homes runs and six runs batted in. Oh my! All of that from the middle of the lineup.
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Somehow, the Orioles are 19-15 in those 34 games. Imagine what could happen if Chris Davis returned to even a career-average sort of production. He has traditionally been a good end-of-season performer, and it seems reasonable that he cannot go on forever in the malaise that had defined the past two months.
A resurrection of Chris Davis is the #1 thing that could happen, in conjunction with the schedule and all else written above, to vault the Baltimore Orioles to the American League East championship.