The Rangers need a Khris Davis type. But can he return to form?

It finally happened in the second inning of what would ultimately be a 12-9 comeback win over the Reds last Thursday: Khris Davis, who has spent the better part of the last five seasons haunting the dreams of Rangers’ pitchers, sent a 2-0 fastball just over the center-field wall and rounded the bases in Rangers blue. Later that night, he connected again, this time blasting the first pitch he saw from Noé Ramirez through the night sky and into a new life as a treasured (if slightly-damaged) souvenir.

If we’re being technical, Davis did hit one home run in a Rangers uniform before that, launching one in a B-game against Cleveland the day before. B-game stats don’t count toward Cactus League totals, but who cares, really? Cactus League totals don’t count toward the regular season either. Maybe every March home run is just baseball’s version of a non-fungible token — just because it’s not legal tender doesn’t mean there’s no value. In fact, if those two (or three) home runs were indeed a signal of Davis turning the corner just two weeks before Opening Day, they might be among the more valuable developments of spring training.

You see, the Rangers could really use a Davis-type hitter in their lineup.

In 2013, Nelson Cruz blasted 27 home runs in 109 games in a suspension-shortened season, his last as a Ranger. Since then, Cruz has hit 260 home runs as a member of the Orioles, Mariners and Twins. While his highest home run total as a Ranger was 33, he has never hit fewer than 37 home runs in any full season since departing (the lone exception: the 60-game 2020 season in which he hit 16).

Meanwhile, here is a list of every 20-homer season by a Ranger since Cruz’s departure:

That seems extremely left-handed, but if you look closer at the two switch-hitters on this list, it gets … even more left-handed. Profar hit 16 of his 20 home runs left-handed. Santana’s 2019 season was less skewed, but he still hit 19 of 28 from the left side.

Oh and we’re not done: See if you can guess the Rangers’ right-handed home run leader from the shortened 2020 season. OK, that’s a trick question — since three of Leody Taveras’ four home runs came from the left side, the right-handed home run lead was a three-way tie:

despair courtesy of baseball-reference.com

That’s right. Mathis, Andrus and Kiner-Falefa split the team lead in right-handed home runs with three.

Let me stop here and acknowledge this: you could cut-and-paste Davis’ 2020 stats onto the Rangers’ Baseball-Reference page, and he would still be below the cut here. He hit as many home runs in the regular season last year as he hit against the Reds on Thursday. He addressed those struggles when he was introduced to the Rangers media after the trade, acknowledging that the state of the world at large was a factor in his struggle to focus on baseball while insisting that there was a turnaround as the season wound down.

“At the end of the season last year, I felt like (I) settled down,” Davis said at the time. “By that time it was the end of the season … my adjustment could only last so long before the season ended. But at the plate, like I felt fine — at the beginning, yeah (I struggled). But I felt like I made the adjustment towards the end.”

Here’s a quick look at the numbers, all of which support Davis’ hypothesis.

Davis in July/August: .155/.269/.241 (.510 OPS)
Davis in September: .296/.375/.519 (.894)
Davis in the playoffs: .250/.294/.625 (.919)

Those postseason numbers also include two home runs in four games.

But until that outburst against Cincinnati, his Cactus League numbers were looking more like pre-adjustment 2020 than post. As of Thursday morning, he was hitting.091 with a .258 OPS, and while Davis has regularly been a slow starter in spring, those aren’t the sort of numbers you hope for from a guy who will make a salary of $16.75 million, whether or not he makes the team. Still, manager Chris Woodward has said all along that those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“He’s making good decisions, he’s just been late to a lot of fastballs — he’s been a little bit off,” said Woodward the day before Davis’ two-bomb breakout. “He’s taking good swings and good pitches, he just hasn’t impacted those pitches like he would want. So I think the next step is to continue to make good decisions, but there has to be a point where it’s like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna move that ball forward.’ Will it come? That’s what we’re hoping.”

Woodward has also said that Davis was leading the team in their internal swing-decision metrics. We don’t have access to those, but Woodward did us the favor of explaining them a little bit.

“The closer the pitch is to being a strike that you take for a ball, you get more (credit),” the manager explained. “The more middle of the plate that you take, the more penalized you get. Whereas the more you swing at it (down the middle), the more credit you get. So if you take a pitch that’s on the corner for a strike, it’s actually not that bad. And if you take that pitch that’s just off the plate for a ball, you get a lot of credit. But if you chase that pitch that’s a foot off the plate, you get heavily penalized. And then we put the heat map on top of that, so if you swing in your zone, you’re getting, ‘extra credit’, I guess.”

It’s encouraging that Davis is making good swing decisions, but you could argue that’s nothing new. Here’s a handy chart from his 2020 season.

chart via baseballsavant.mlb.com

Interpretation: he swung at heart-of-the-plate strikes 12 percent more often than the league, while chasing at exactly league average and slightly outperforming the league on waste pitches. Davis’ selectivity was worth +8 take runs, but the problem — then as it was earlier this spring — was that when Davis swung, he wasn’t doing much damage, worth -16 swing runs. Compare that to 2018, the year he hit 48 home runs and finished 8th in AL MVP voting:

This chart is full of fascinating information: +37 swing runs on pitches in the heart of the zone! -31 on shadow pitches! He only swung at one percent of chase pitches! +34 take runs!

Now that we have a general idea of how “Good Khris Davis” looks compared to “Bad Khris Davis,” let’s break that 2020 down a little further. Baseball Savant doesn’t have these exact charts for month-by-month results, but we can piece them together zone-by-zone and result-by-result. It would be tedious to show you all 16 images (you can tinker with the outcomes here if you want), but I’ll show you one pair and then tell you what I learned by parsing through all of them.

Here are all the pitches in the heart zone that Davis saw in July and August of 2020. The first image is all of his swings, and the second is all the times he let it go by.

That’s 63 swings and 13 takes on pitches in the heart of the zone in July and August, meaning Davis swung at 82.89 percent of pitches in the heart of the zone (compared to 86 percent in 2018). Let’s fast-forward through all the math and charts and get to the point:

Here are the numbers from last year, sorted by July/August vs. September. I added that 2018 season back in, just for comparison’s sake.

As with most metrics, it’s important to take this chart with a grain of salt. The sample sizes in each of the first two are much smaller than the full-season numbers for 2018. For instance: Davis swung at two of 27 “waste” pitches in July and August, and passed up 100 percent of the … five waste pitches he saw in September.

Still, there’s a theme. When Davis is succeeding, he’s swinging at pitches in the heart of the zone, chasing fewer of them (though his percentage of “chase” swings did jump a bit last September), and — perhaps more importantly, swinging at closer to 50 percent of “shadow” pitches. Remember Woodward’s explanation of the team’s in-house swing decision metrics? Swinging at a close ball is worse than taking a close strike.

We could dig a little deeper and try to compare not just swing decisions, but swing outcomes, but that would be a lot of work just to see what we can probably figure out from looking at strikeout rates and traditional stats. And besides — again — we don’t get to see those swing decision metrics for spring training anyway, so there wouldn’t be much to compare it to.

For now, we have to rely on what we hear from Woodward and what we can see on the field. Davis followed that two-homer outing with an 0-for-2 with two strikeouts and a walk against the Mariners, so it’s not like he broke through the sound barrier and will soar from here on out. There are still nine spring training games remaining, and it’s a safe bet that the Rangers will want to see Davis in as many at-bats as possible before they have to make a decision about whether or not he’ll make the team.

It would certainly be in their best interest if he could pull that off and be the right-handed masher they desperately need.

(Photo of Khris Davis: Kelly Gavin / Courtesy of the Texas Rangers)