Zach Wilt: Looking at Chris Davis' approach at the plate

Thoughout 2017, Orioles fans have spent the majority of the season waiting for Chris Davis to look like Chris Davis. The slugger has played in 91 of the team's 121 games this season, slashing .221/.316/.426 with just 18 home runs and 46 runs batted in. We keep anticipating that surge, the stretch of games where Davis reels off homers in bunches, but so far it hasn't happened like we all became used to in the past.

Davis hit 38 homers a season ago and a major league-leading 47 in 2015. He is four years removed from stunning the world with a 53-homer season that earned him a Silver Slugger, his first All-Star appearance and third place in American League MVP. We all know that the guy is capable of destroying baseballs, but for whatever reason, he just doesn't seem to be doing it in 2017.

Instead, Davis appears to be more careful at the plate. He seems to have taken a more patient approach, but as a result is looking at a lot of called third strikes. According to Jeff Sullivan's research for FanGraphs.com, Davis has taken eight called third strikes down the middle of the plate, the most of any hitter this season. For a guy with his power, this number is baffling. He rarely hits anything soft, with an 11.9 percent soft contact percentage over his career. Davis has belted highlight-reel homers with the flick of his wrist and muscled pitches out of ballparks that had no business leaving. Where is the confidence in those abilities?

This season, Davis ranks 15th overall in looking strike percentage (32.2 percent). The list of names ahead of him is curious, it includes some solid hitters like Joe Mauer, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts. The difference between Davis and those guys is that he pairs is high looking strike percentage with a 23.7 swinging strike percentage. Mauer, on the other hand, leads baseball with a 40.2 percent looking strike percentage, but couples it with a 8 percent swinging strike percentage.

When Davis took the baseball world by storm in 2013, he swung at 74.5 percent of the pitches that he saw inside the strike zone and made contact with 79.6 percent of them. This season, he has swung at 58.2 percent of pitches in the zone, but still connecting with them 79.3 percent of the time. Davis' overall strike percentage comparison between 2013 and 2017 remained basically the same (61.8 percent and 62.1 percent respectively). However, he has gone from 18.6 percent strikes looking in 2013 to 32.2 percent this season.

The knock on Davis over the course of his entire career is that he strikes out too much. The argument that I always made against it was that he was doing his fair share with the longball. Does anyone care that Davis struck out 199 times in 2013 when he led baseball in homers (53), RBIs (138), and total bases (370)? You wouldn't want to construct an entire team of Chris Davises, but having guys that get in base ahead of him while he's homering them in makes for a team that can score a lot of runs. But no one can hit homers or drive guys in if they don't swing the bat ,and that's what Davis is struggling with in 2017.

Is this an issue of not identifying strikes? Is Davis getting fooled more often at the plate in 2017 than he did in the four years prior? Or has he tried to take a more patient approach at the plate that is actually resulting in leading the league in strikeouts looking? Whatever is happening, it has to turn around for Davis to get back to his homering ways. The power is there, the approach is different. The strikeout totals will remain high, but the long balls will only increase if Davis gets back to a more aggressive approach at the dish.

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.