I can't prove it, but I think Chris Davis is a steroid cheat.

"No amount of money shortens the distance from the batter’s box to the dugout. No amount of money covers the hard right at first base to the far dugout stairs, not after a while. No house is big enough to soften the looping and hopeless left turn to the dugout on the other side of the field. No fancy car is so smart it would refuse to deliver him to the ballpark, or quite dumb enough to leave him there."

I'm not quite sure I'm in total agreement, but, OK.


"He is oh-fer-ever, has gotten rich for it, and this is the oh-fer-ever part of the story, that he stinks, and extra stinks because he’s paid to be great and isn’t, isn’t close, refuses to be, has no pride, and I don’t believe it. This is what it looks like to fall, to have it all go wrong, to endure it publicly and personally. Who knows why."

I have my suspicions.


"Not him, clearly. The money is not the soft landing, however. It is – or can be – the burden, which almost no one would view as the burden, which doesn’t make it not so."

I don't think Chris Davis is having fun. I don't think he stopped caring. I think he stopped taking steroids.

I also don't feel particularly sorry for the chumps who have to pay him.

"So then it wouldn’t much matter anymore, right? Then it would go back to being a slump, a horrible, unthinkable slump, and a guy caught between swings, between pitches, between routines. Then maybe he can start again, restart the career that brought all that attention, all that responsibility and, sure, all that money.

So, be disappointed he isn’t the player you thought or hoped he would continue to be. It’d also be OK to feel for the person – Chris Davis – who isn’t the player he thought he would continue to be.

Because then he came to the plate in the seventh inning and struck out."

All things considered, I think a disinterested fan base in Baltimore is mostly letting him off the hook.

Same goes for the press, who have ignored one of the worst contracts ever until he set a hitless record. 

I mean, sure: Money does not buy happiness. Neither does being poor.

We all look and this guy and think we'd be fired if we were this bad at our jobs.