Coolbaugh on Davis ... before the home runs

Timing is everything, as they say, and I chose yesterday afternoon to ask hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh about first baseman Chris Davis' struggles at the plate.

The shrinking average, the growing strikeout total, the perception that he's lost at the plate. We covered all of it.

Of course, Davis hit a two-run homer in the fourth inning last night, his first since May 11, and broke a 4-4 tie with a solo homer in the eighth. I'm not sure whether that qualifies as a reverse jinx, pure coincidence or irony, but it happened.

Davis was in a 4-for-42 slump. He leads the team with 64 strikeouts in 43 games, though he didn't whiff last night.

He was too busy knocking the wind out of the Astros.

Coolbaugh worked with Davis in the Rangers organization and with him over the winter in Dallas after the Orioles hired him as Jim Presley's replacement. Who knows the slugger better than him (family not included)?

"The problem is that he's not able to focus on staying with one pitch," Coolbaugh said before batting practice. "When he was going pretty well in April as far as hitting around .270, he was able to stay on the fastball. And right now it seems like the fastball is speeding him up to be vulnerable to some other pitches.

"That happens to every hitter. That happens throughout the course of the season. Right now it's just a matter of the trust factor of getting back to that. And sometimes when you're not getting some results and you're not having the at-bats that you'd like to have, that kind of continues to snowball on you. And the first thing that comes to mind when you go out there is, 'Oh, what was going on in that at-bat?' There was no plan. The player didn't really want to swing at those pitches, but he ends up commiting to those pitches because he's caught in between."

Davis saw six pitches from Astros starter Collin McHugh in the fourth inning - curveball, slider, fastball, curveball, fastball, slider. McHugh got ahead 1-2, but the count was full when Davis launched the last slider onto the flag court in right field.

Left-hander Tony Sipp threw one pitch to Davis in the eighth, a 92 mph fastball. Davis crushed it, giving him eight career multi-homer games.

"We're just trying to get him to slow back down and be able to feed off one pitch, and everything in this game is based off the fastball," Coolbaugh said. "If we can get him to just constantly get a good pitch, and it's usually off the fastball, then he'll come back around. But right now it's just been one of those things where he's kind of feeling his way through it."

This could explain all the called third strikes.

"Yeah, you get caught in between and then you're worried about not swinging at a bad breaking ball and then they throw the fastball out over the plate, in the corner, and you think it's a ball. Then you become too cautious and you get caught in between," Coolbaugh said.

"The at-bats from that standpoint I know look frustrating, but that's even more frustrating for the hitter because he feels like he doesn't have any kind of judgment because he's caught in between. In other words, the pitchers are speeding him up and slowing him down and he's not staying with one gear all the time."

Later today, Tyler Wilson and Mike Wright will become the first Orioles rookies to start a doubleheader since Steve Johnson and Wei-Yin Chen in 2012. Wilson will return to Triple-A Norfolk following Game 2.