Zach Wilt: How has Chris Davis rebounded?

As the Orioles entered the 2015 season, one of the major questions they faced centered around Chris Davis. Following his MVP-caliber 2013 season, in which he led baseball with 53 homers and 138 RBIs, Davis hit just 26 homers and drove in 72 in 2014. He played in 127 games while dealing with an oblique injury and finished the season with a 25-game suspension for a positive Adderall test.

The offseason brought a number of questions as free agency loomed. Who is the real Chris Davis? Was he the guy that dominated the league in 2013? The guy who put up 33 homers in 2012? Or had the league adjusted to him, forcing his power numbers to decline while increasing his strikeout total?

If you had any doubts about what Davis is capable of, they should have been eliminated by his performance in Oakland. The power hitting lefty mashed a go-ahead grand slam on Wednesday afternoon in the roomy O.co Coliseum after belting a 404-foot homer in Game 1 against the A's just two days prior. He's now passed his home run and RBI total from a season ago, playing in 20+ less games, and continues to be the Orioles' leader in both categories. Davis is on pace for 42 homers and 120 RBIs in 2015, which would outperform Nelson Cruz's totals from a season ago in Baltimore (40, 108) and would edge 2014's MLB leaders in both of those categories.

So that answers that, but how's he doing it?

When Davis broke out in 2013, he mashed right handed pitching with a .316/.415/.728 slash line. Forty of his 53 homers were hit against righties while lefties kept him in check with a .235/.289/.475 line and 13 homers. Two years later, he's developed into a more well-rounded power hitter. Against left handed pitching, he's slashing .290/.342/.514 with six home runs, and against righties he's shown more pop with 21 homers and 56 RBI, but has been limited to a .228/.322/.507 line.

This season, Davis has had more success pulling the ball to right field than he's shown in previous seasons. Fifty-five percent of balls off the bat have been pulled, according to FanGraphs.com's batted ball data. That's up from 50.9 percent last year and 46.2 percent in 2013. When Davis led the league in homers two seasons ago, he did so with a tremendous amount of opposite-field power. Twenty-three percent of balls in play were hit the other way, that's down to just 17.8 percent in 2015. The difference this season though is that Davis' hard hit percentage, a stat that classifies hit speed according to data from Baseball Info Solutions, is up to 39.3 percent, his highest since 2013. Perhaps that decline last season had to due with lingering effects of the oblique injury he suffered in April of last season.

It should also come as no surprise that Davis has seen fewer and fewer fastballs over the years. Three seasons ago, he saw nearly 60 percent heaters from pitchers, which has gradually declined to 53.6 percent this season. To keep up with the offspeed pitches, Davis has had to adjust his plate discipline. In 2013 he swung at 35.7 percent of the pitches he saw outside of the strike zone; he's dipped that to a career low 29.8 percent this season. Despite the record-high strikeouts, Davis is actually swinging and missing just 14.7 percent of the time, his lowest total since 2010 with the Rangers.

2015 has been an impressive performance for the big fella. The league has made it more challenging for him to go deep, and he's found a way to do it at a very high rate. Since the Orioles score nearly 44 percent of the runs from the homer (fifth-highest percentage in MLB), the Birds' success is certainly dependent on Davis' ability to go yard.

Zach Wilt blogs about the Orioles at Baltimore Sports Report. Follow him on Twitter: @zach_wilt. 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.