BALTIMORE _ It couldn't have been any more different from the cauldron that preceded it.
Chris Davis wasn't surrounded by the passion of an opening-weekend series against the hated New York Yankees, but playing the Oakland Athletics in front of hundreds on a muggy Monday night at Camden Yards. He wasn't booed, but instead warmly cheered by a crowd who at this point just wanted him to get a hit as badly as he does.
None of it mattered.
On a night when Davis' teammates broke out for an early offensive torrent against a familiar foe in Athletics starter Marco Estrada, his three hitless at-bats to start the game gave him 26 for the season and 47 dating to the end of 2018, the latter breaking a major league record for consecutive at-bats without a hit by a position player set by Eugenio Velez in the 2010 and 2011 seasons.
The first was a lineout to right field, on a center-cut fastball that was tamely hit at right fielder Stephen Piscotty. In the second inning, he had an 0-2 pop-up just into foul territory in right field dropped by Jurickson Profar, but lined out to left field on the next pitch to tie the record.
The third was a 103.5-mph line drive to left field on an 0-1 pitch, this one to the warning track.
It made official an aspect of the 2019 Orioles that, if not unforeseen, has certainly consumed everything about the team, good and bad, and reached a crescendo when they arrived home Thursday from a winning road trip through New York and Toronto.
With every hitless at-bat over the weekend, Davis was booed more, even if that changed Monday. Every day, Hyde, a manager hired for his player development acumen, was made to answer for the only veteran hitter on his roster.
"I was hoping he'd get off to a good start, and was hoping that we'd have a good relationship and that he would play well early and hit, and just he got off to a slow start," Hyde said. "That's the nature of the game. That's the nature of this, so that's why it's talked about a lot."
Hyde said it's been difficult to see Davis jeered the way he was over the first home series of the season, though he's encouraging Davis to face that all as part of overcoming.
"I don't want to hide anything, and I don't want to try to mask his struggles and what he went through last year," Hyde said. "We're taking this thing head-on, and I appreciate that from him too and that he's open to talk about things with me. Now we are where we are, and we're still talking about it a little bit. So, hope we can turn it around."
"Any time your players have struggles, it's not easy to watch," Hyde added. "I want to see him have success. I want to see all our guys have success. You do your best as a coach to try to put guys in the right situation to help out mentally, physically, whatever you can so when you see guys struggle, that's hard. It's not easy. One thing about Chris is I feel that inside our clubhouse, he's taking this head-on and that he is making every effort to ride this ship of tough times and trying to take good ABs every day. It just hasn't happened, and so I'm pulling for him, but this is a results business. I understand how the fans feel, and I want to see him do well, too."
