Chris Davis retires after 13 MLB seasons, two home run titles and one massive contract

“If there’s one theme we heard consistently from our fans, it was: ‘Sign Chris Davis. We like the work that he’s done. We want you to bring him back,’ ” Dan Duquette, then the team’s general manager, said in March 2016. “He’s a good athlete. He’s a good teammate, and he has good values, a hard worker. And he emerged as a top player with the Orioles. This is where he did his best work as a big leaguer. It made sense.”

And so, the mammoth deal Davis signed in January 2016 — seven years, $161 million, every penny guaranteed — was framed as a gift to Baltimore’s long-suffering fans, who in hindsight will remember it as anything but.

On Thursday, Davis announced his retirement after 13 major league seasons, two home run titles, two strikeout titles, late-career injuries and that millstone of a contract, yet another misstep on the perpetually misguided Oriole Way. (Davis, 35, will still be paid the remainder of his contract.)

Though the Orioles won eight more games than they did the year before and earned an American League wild-card spot in 2016, Davis’s production fell off almost immediately after he signed that new deal. He hit nine fewer homers — slipping from a league-leading 47 to 38 — increased his MLB-worst strikeout total from 208 to 219 and saw his already middling batting average fall 41 points.

And that 2016 season would be the high point of Davis’s post-extension career, as he soon began to compile offensive statistics so calamitous that they became the subject of morbid curiosity more than anything else. In 2018, he hit just .168, the lowest batting average for a player who had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title in baseball history, with a .539 on-base-plus-slugging percentage to boot. The Orioles won only 47 games, compiling one of the worst records in major league history and returning to their usual place in the AL East cellar.

Davis had become, in the 2019 words of The Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin, “a $161 million hitter who can no longer hit, a franchise-cornerstone slugger who can no longer slug — a player who is too unproductive to trade, too expensive to release, too tenured to send to the minors without his consent and too healthy, prideful and accustomed to guaranteed yearly salaries of $23 million to walk away.”

When Sheinin wrote that passage, Davis was in the midst of a particularly dire stretch: From September 2018 through his first 12 games of the 2019 season, Davis went 0 for 54, setting the major league record for the most consecutive at-bats by a position player without a hit. He played in only 105 games in that 2019 season. During an August game against the Yankees, Davis had to be restrained from going after Baltimore Manager Brandon Hyde in the dugout.

The next year, a season shortened by the coronavirus pandemic, Davis played in only 16 of 60 games because of a knee injury. And he was slated to miss the entire 2021 season after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on his left hip in May.

Davis will be remembered for all of that but also for his 159 homers from 2012 to 2015, the most in the game over that span, and for helping the Orioles to three postseason appearances in five seasons between 2012 and 2016 after they had gone 14 straight without even coming close. He also became an ambassador for the Casey Cares Foundation, which supports critically ill children, and in 2019 he donated $3 million to University of Maryland Children’s Hospital to help treat children with congenital heart defects after his daughter was born with one the year before.

“Athletes have the power to change lives and better their communities, and Chris and his family have done just that,” the Orioles said in a statement Thursday. “We admire their dedication to those most in need, with hundreds of hours of community work completed, millions of dollars donated, and countless other charitable efforts performed, often without fanfare.

“For every inning played and home run hit, hour of service completed and amount donated, the Davis family has made an immeasurable impact on our city and on Orioles baseball. We send our best wishes to Chris, his wife Jill, and their daughters Ella, Evie, and Grace, each of whom will forever be part of our Orioles family.”