Davis ‘Khrushes’ pair of homers
He moves within one of AL home run lead and ties A’s mark by left fielder
OAKLAND >> For three days, Major League Baseball decided to give players the chance to wear special uniforms with nicknames on the back instead of last names as part of its Players Weekend. Khris Davis decided to go with “Khrush” and it could not be more fitting.
“I better live up to that name,” Davis said.
The A’s slugger certainly did, providing all the offense that was needed by mashing two home runs in Friday’s 3-1 win over the Texas Rangers in front of 14,499 fans at the Coliseum.
They were Davis’ 35th and 36th home runs of the season. He now has 28 home runs while playing left field, tying Ben Grieve’s 1999 total for most homers hit as an A’s left fielder in a season.
Davis now has the second-most home runs in the American League, one behind New York’s Aaron Judge.
While Davis has hit the most home runs of any player over the past two seasons, his quiet personality and presence on one of baseball’s least popular teams keeps him under the radar. A’s manager Bob Melvin would like to see Davis get a little more recognition.
“He’s not really a spotlight type of guy. He just likes to do his thing and go home and stay away from the fanfare but when you’re that good, you’re gonna get some acknowledgement for it and he should,” Melvin said. “When you look at how many home runs he’s hit over the past couple of years, he’s right up there with some of the best in the game. And he does it in a ballpark, especially at night, where it’s difficult to hit home runs.”
Both homers came off Nick Martinez. He blasted a solo homer to left in the fourth to tie the score at 1-1 and then put the A’s ahead 2-1 in the seventh with another solo shot to straightaway center.
After going 2 for 26 in his previous six games, Davis broke out of his slump in a big way by registering his fourth multihomer game of the season and 15th of his career.
“Part of our job is to have short-term memory. All we can control is what we have right now and I’m getting better at that,” Davis said. “They come and go in bunches and as long as I can make those streaks last longer than the bad streaks, I’ll be all right.”
Although his average remains at a low .236, Melvin never thinks twice about keeping Davis in the lineup every day because of the potential for a performance similar to the one witnessed on Friday night.
“Power hitters will go through some funks but he’s always one swing away from doing what he does best,” Melvin said. “For a while there we had one hit. It was a home run by him to tie the game and then he hits another one, that’s a pretty impactful bat.”
Kendall Graveman has slowly been returning to the form he displayed at the beginning of the season, and he had his best stuff on Friday night. In what was his fifth start back from the disabled list, Graveman allowed a run in the first and managed to shut down the Rangers the rest of the way as he allowed just the one run on nine hits with six strikeouts in seven innings.
“There was a little bit of an argument for him to go back out (for the eighth),” Melvin said. “He used a little bit better mix of his pitches and this was the best we’ve seen him. It’s been kind of incremental to this point, where today it all came together for him.”
One key moment that gave Graveman confidence that his pitching is back up to par came early. After allowing the first-inning run, Graveman got Nomar Mazara to ground into an inning-ending double play to set the tone for the rest of the night.
“I felt great, even the last pitch of the game,” Graveman said. “There’s something to it when you’re going out there wondering if you’re gonna feel OK for the fifth, sixth, seventh inning but the last couple of outings I have. That’s a good sign moving forward.”
After the A’s added an insurance run in the seventh in the form of a Matt Chapman RBI single, Blake Treinen came on in the ninth and pitched a clean inning with two strikeouts for his fifth consecutive save.
• Paul Blackburn was placed on the 10-day disabled list retroactive to Aug. 23 with a contusion that was sustained on a comebacker by Baltimore’s Trey Mancini that struck his right hand in Tuesday’s game. The A’s recalled Michael Brady from TripleA Nashville to take Blackburn’s spot on the roster.
• Mark Canha was also recalled from Triple-A Nashville to fill the spot vacated after Rajai Davis was traded to the Boston Red Sox.