Zach Wilt: Digging inside Chris Davis' numbers

Chris Davis was the hero on Monday night after crushing a three-run walk-off home run against the Chicago White Sox. The moment was so great that Davis decided to rejoin Twitter the next morning. Talk about a win-win for Orioles fans. Prior to that longball, however, Davis had been scuffling at the plate. Coming into that game, he had hit just .130 over his previous 54 at-bats. You know the rest of the story: Orioles manager Buck Showalter gave Davis the night off against White Sox ace Chris Sale, then called upon him when the game mattered most. The big fella, as Joe Angel refers to him, delivered in a huge way.

After hitting a league-leading 53 home runs in 2013, Davis has hit just 13 this season and is on pace to finish with 27. Naturally, the "What's wrong with Chris Davis?" columns are already being published with many scribes and fans searching for answers. No matter what Davis does this season, if he isn't able to repeat his career year, there will still be those wondering what went wrong. Maybe the answer isn't so simple.

Statistically, the biggest difference between 2013 and 2014 for Davis has been his success against right-handed pitching. Last year, he posted a .316/.415/.728 slashline with a home run every 9.2 at-bats against righties. This season, those numbers have dipped to .210/.347/.427 with a homer every 15.9 at-bats.

One cause for this has been Davis' struggles in two-strike situations. A season ago, Davis was striking out 55 percent of the time with two strikes. This year, that number has gone up to 62 percent after he went 1-for-21 in two-strike situations against righties heading into Monday. Interestingly, he struck out 199 times in 2013 (29.6 percent of his plate appearances) and is on pace for 168 (30.5 percent) this season after missing time with an oblique strain.

So if the strikeouts are just about the same, what's causing the 60-point difference in his batting average?

In digging through the splits, I can't help but notice Davis' dramatically low batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Remember that .130 average over 54 at-bats that I mentioned earlier? Davis had a .138 BABIP during that span. In 2013, he posted a .336 BABIP for the season. The same trend is noticeable in his numbers against right-handed pitchers - 2013, .371 BABIP against righties; 2014, .256.

Some of that can be blamed on hitting ground balls into the shift, while some can be blamed on Davis simply hitting fly balls to the deepest part of the ballpark. Last season, 36 percent of the fly balls he hit were to center field. In 2014, he's hitting 47 percent of his fly balls there. We just haven't seen the opposite field power this season that we saw in 2013. A year ago, Davis hit 14 home runs to left field, he's hit just two this season.

While the overall numbers haven't lived up to the 2013 hype, the stats I examined indicate that 2013 Davis and 2014 Davis aren't all that different. Both guys are being pitched to the same way and appear to have the same approach at the plate. It's just the results that have been slightly different. I can certainly understand how that can be frustrating.

But a sub-.200 BABIP just isn't realistically sustainable. You have to think that when the baseball gods start favoring Davis once again, the average will pick up to what everyone else is expecting. Then watch out, American League East.

Zach Wilt blogs about the Orioles at Baltimore Sports Report. Follow him on Twitter: @zamwi. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.