The Orioles have placed first baseman Chris Davis on the 60-day injured list with a lower back strain, Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com was among those to report. The team also made the re-signing of left-hander Wade LeBlanc official. LeBlanc is in the mix for the Orioles’ rotation/long man role, while that is no longer the case for lefty Keegan Akin. The O’s optioned Akin, outfielder Jahmai Jones and infielder Richie Martin, per Steve Melewski of MASNsports.com, and they reassigned lefty Fernando Abad and first baseman/outfielder Chris Shaw.
Manager Brandon Hyde implied earlier this week that Davis could be headed for the long-term IL, so this news doesn’t come as any kind of surprise. Nevertheless, it’s the latest unfortunate development for the 35-year-old Davis, whose career has been an abject disaster since the Orioles re-signed him to a seven-year, $161MM contract before 2016.
When Davis received his deal, he had established himself as one of the game’s fiercest sluggers, as he smashed 53 home runs in 2013 – his lone All-Star season – and added another 47 in 2015. Davis was a 38-HR hitter in the first year of his deal, though he has totaled a mere 28 (none during an injury-limited 2020) with a .169/251/.299 in 929 trips to the plate since 2018. The Orioles have stuck with Davis during his massive on-field decline, and he still has another year on his contract after this one.
Didn’t expect them to send down Akin.
Even after his disastrous spring training?
A guy with a 2.44 WHIP isn’t good.
A month ago I’d have agreed with you. After his latest few outings, you actually should have seen it coming.
Chris Davis should be placed on the 162 day injured list. He’s been done for a few years now injured or not.
definitely the worst baseball contract I can think of in the last decade. Any thoughts on a worse one?
Ellsbury? Not as bad but still terrible
Josh Hamilton? Puljos? Severino? Sandoval?
Hamilton. At least Davis tried.
I think Davis pretended to try.
That’s still more than you can say for Hamilton.
Severino???
I don’t think it gets any worse than the Bobby Bonilla deal honestly but yeah the Davis contract is pretty awful.
The Bonilla deal made sense for the Wilpons at the time and I don’t think anyone else in their position wouldn’t have done the same. That’s not even close to one of the worst contracts.
Do not knock Bobby Bonilla. He was clearly a genius ahead of his time. Collecting $1.2 million dollars every year til 2035, brilliant!
Cespedes
Rusney Castillo says “Howdy”.
None worse, Not just the dollars and time, but the blocking effect on youngsters. It was derided at the time, but it was far worse than expected. Choosing Davis and Trumbo for high dollars blocked Yastrzemski and Walker and who knows who else and took money from team that is now just looking to trim debt for quick sale.
Nice revisionist history there greenjoel.
2016 AAA stats
Walker OPS 0.757
Yastrzemski OPS 0.680
Not exactly forcing their way onto a MLB roster
Funny how the O’s get trashed for Yaz getting sent packing. Nothing he had done up until that point, showed promise. Same and Jayson Worth and Justin Turner. It just happens.
It does happen, but it seems to happen to the O’s a lot. I think it speaks to their lousy record of player development over the years.
Ryan Howard?
Ryan Howard had his career ruined by Achilles injury. Not even close to the worst
Another Davis…
As in Glen Davis…
Albert Belle
Davis getting Pedroia’d!
The right call on Keegan. He needs some more development time to improve his command. Can’t expect him to do that in the AL East.
Wow. That means the O’s won’t get any production from Chris Davis for two months……
Of course, if he had stayed active………
No production and freeing up a roster spot is better than no production and taking up a spot on the 40-man roster.
I’m guessing the O’s rotation to open the year will be John Means, Matt Harvey, Dean Kremer, Bruce Zimmerman, and Wade LeBlanc.
With Davis out they will probably rotate Franco, Ruiz, Mancini, Mountcastle, and Santander at DH. They could keep D.J. Stewart if they use a “regular” DH
The O’s are torturing Davis
Plus how does Davis stay healthy all off-season and then falls a part after one Spring Training game SMH
Methinks thou hast the tortur-er and the tortur-ee confused….
Let’s face it, the O’s aren’t releasing Davis with the faint hope that they’ll be a labor stoppage next year, and they’ll get out from under at least some of the deal. Otherwise, he’d probably be a Yankee or a Ray.
(And win the Triple Crown)
A lower back “strain” leads to an immediate move to the 60-day IL for Davis? Will be ever return?
Question to O’s fans. Was this mentioned as a serious injury prior?
Yeah…it’s called the hesucks injury.
I think that Davis might have already played his last game with the O’s. I doubt he comes off the IL this year and he probably gets released after the season
Contracts are generally insured against injury, right?
At least to a certain point. Any dollar saved off the sunk cost of Davis has to be nice for Angelos
Most contracts are not insured.
It’s very expensive to insure a player.
From what I understand, none of the contracts that are insured are for 100% of the salary.
Stop and think – a team having a player doing poorly one year (and many do) that is being radically overpaid, could be put on an injured list with the team then making a claim. That would result in expensive and potentially long-term litigation. Insurance companies don’t want to go through that. If they did allow for it, the already sky-high premiums to insure ballplayers would even be higher.
Gong one strep further, a player in his walk year could theoretically take out a policy against future earnings. I’ve never heard of that being done. It would be incredibly expensive for the player, and at todays rates even a decant player could claim he missed $200m in future earnings due to an injury in his walk year. Can’t see insurance companies looking to get into something that risky.
I don’t know about Davis’ contract, but it’s actually quite common for teams to insure large contracts like his. There is a really good article in the Washington Post from several years ago when Strasburg signed his big contract.
It mentioned that pitchers often were 2 to 3 times higher than position players. They gave numbers of about 3 percent and 7 percent respectively. Ironically, they mentioned at the end of the article that Washington does NOT have insurance on the several big contracts that were on the team at the time.
So sad about Davis.
I wonder what caused it?
He got a fat contract and quit trying because he doesn’t have to.
@ JerryBird;
Grow up.
Samuel before you call names you need to review what’s been written about Davis the last few years. Davis has continually said over those years that he was making changes to swing mechanics etc., but if you read between the lines about what staff said, it was apparent he wasn’t changing much at all and was in fact resistant to change. But this year he said he was making big changes. Why believe him? The O’s should have taken the hit and released him two years ago. They’d would just have replaced him with a guy making a million dollars a year, so the only real hit would be his salary, but he wasn’t contributing anyway and he was blocking young players simply by being on the roster. Now if you’re a relative of Davis or an Angelos employee none of this matters, but there is nothing rational about keeping him around ( other than using his contract as an excuse not to spend the money to be competitive).
His approach sure has looked thr same to me for the past 4-5 years. He is selfish. It was obvious when he was caught taking adderall twice despite the warnings.
He hasn’t hit since they took his adderall away
unwilling or unable to make adjustments. It’s the bigs, you have to adjust or be on your way to AAA.
Someone place Chris Davis into the Void
RIP Barry “Zodiac” Orton!
So Felix won’t make the club? Or is he on the injured list from that elbow thing?