2B Blake Davis Struggles in Major League Debut

I feel so bad for this kid. Well, he’s not even a kid. He’s 27 years old and has been extremely patience in the minors waiting for his shot. There’s really two sides to this story and what happened.

In the fifth inning, the O’s were up 4-3 with Britton looking pretty good and the offense looking pretty good and a series win looking pretty good. All in all, life as an O’s fan was pretty good for those innings. Britton recorded 2 outs in the 5th but had a man on 2nd and 3rd. Josh Harrison then came to the plate and hit a typical ground ball to Davis; however, he misread it and allowed it to skip under his legs which also allowed both those men to score and the Pirates to take the 5-4 lead that they’d keep to win the game. After the game, Davis said “I thought it was going to skip up and bounce up a little higher, and it kind of stayed down on me. I need to make that play.” Like a good manager, Buck Showalter stood behind him after the game saying it was tough and that the team was compassionate for Davis. Britton also played nice saying he wasn’t mad and that Davis is one of the best defensive second basemen he’s ever played with. That may be going overboard but Britton said what he was supposed to and the team has moved on from it.

Fans, on the other hand, may not have. Why not? This is just another in a long list of recent defensive errors by the O’s that have cost runs AND games. Adam Jones missed a fly ball that allowed an inside-the-park-homerun by the Rays and we all know how Mark Reynolds has been performing as of late at the hot corner. Defense usually isn’t something I feel I have to worry about with the team with AJ and Nick solid in the outfield and Lee and Hardy solid around the diamond. But, now I do worry that what should be easy outs won’t be.

Then there’s the other side that the Orioles should have been able to do a lot more in the game to not let an error by Davis decide the outcome of the game. To be honest, I took the negative view first because there’s lots of negativity in being an Orioles fan but the more I think about it, I’m on this side (this side is actually negative too but towards the whole team, not just one poor guy in his first game in the majors). The O’s still had 3 innings to score one run to tie the game and two runs to win it but they only managed ONE hit over those 3 innings. The Orioles keep falling further and further back from .500 and right now they’re sitting 7 games back at 33-39. By the way, they’ve lost 4 straight series. Not good.