‘It meant a lot to me’
Davis ends record skid with 3 hits in victory
BOSTON — Only a 12-year major league veteran — one who has lived and died at the plate over 5,000 times in his career and seen everything the game has to offer — would take the time amid the worst hitless streak in baseball history to think of how to comport himself if he ever snapped out of it.
So on Saturday morning, after days of positive but fruitless at-bats that extended his major league record to 54 consecutive at-bats and 62 plate appearances without a hit over two seasons, Chris Davis asked if it would be bush league to keep the ball when he finally got a hit.
No one begrudged him doing so. When a first-inning, two-run single with the bases loaded comes against a backdrop like this, why act like you’ve done it before? No position player had ever gone longer than he had.
“It meant a lot to me,” Davis said. “That’s a long time without getting a hit.”
Davis’ hit — the first of three on his breakout day in which he drove in four runs in a 9-5 win over the Boston Red Sox — was a moment that built for weeks. He started poorly at the New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays, and he was jeered by his team’s own fans the first home series against the Yankees.
But something changed in both Davis and the Baltimore crowds starting Monday. His at-bats got better, and as he walked from the dugout to the plate and back after he didn’t break through with a hit, Davis was cheered.
He didn’t start in the first game of this road trip in Boston, though he came off the bench for another at-bat in the ninth inning Friday. There’s never a bad time to get your first hit of the season, but the bases-loaded, two-out opportunity in the first inning certainly seemed a meaningful time for Davis to slap a ball into right field.
As he stood on first, Davis grabbed the bill of his helmet and nodded toward the visiting dugout down the third base line. Jonathan Villar had hopped the railing and was running around the warning track dirt. Miguel Castro was waving his cap in the air. Davis motioned in the air for the ball, on the pregame assurance from a coach that it’d be