Chris Davis, Hyde talk it out, make amends

BALTIMORE -- Two days after a dugout altercation between Chris Davis and Brandon Hyde, the two men met for over an hour in the manager’s office in an effort to move on from the incident. The Orioles did not issue discipline or fine Davis, who remained on the active roster despite not starting Friday night against Astros left-hander Wade Miley.

General manager and executive vice president Mike Elias said before the game that the incident, which made national headlines and reopened questions about Davis’ standing on the team, would not affect the first baseman’s future in the near or long term.

Davis came on to pinch-hit in the seventh inning in Friday night's 3-2 loss to the Astros, and he stayed in at first base. Davis walked up to a show of mostly positive reactions from the 19,407 in attendance before striking out and returning to a smattering of boos. He came up again in the ninth, lining out to Jose Altuve to end the game.

“This is not something where they’ve got a poor relationship or where this had any kind of ill effects on the team,” said Elias prior to the game, when he said he’d spoken with Orioles ownership regarding the incident. “I do think what is reflected was the frustration that a guy like Chris goes through when his statistics are the way they are, and when the team is losing as many games as it’s losing. Even though we all kind of understand where this team is organizationally, these are red-blooded guys, these are professional athletes, and we’re out here playing the New York Yankees and they’re dropping home runs on us left and right and we’re down 10 runs. That’s not fun to go through and these things happen.”

Addressing the altercation for the first time, Davis spent much of his nearly 10-minute session with reporters explaining what led to his blowup with Hyde, when Davis had to be restrained after lunging at the Orioles’ first-year skipper. Davis said he reached a “breaking point” after he was unable to scoop a low throw from shortstop Jonathan Villar to open the top of the fifth inning. That error (which was charged to Villar) allowed Aaron Judge to reach base, and he then scored on a homer from Gio Urshela to extend the Yankees’ lead to 6-1.

“I think it’s pretty obvious the offensive struggles I’ve had for quite some time. I feel like night in and night out, I’ve done a real good job of still being there on defense and trying to pick guys up,” Davis said. “It’s going to happen when you have that much frustration, when you’re constantly having to deal with failure, you’re going to have episodes where you just have to let it out. Unfortunately, it was in the dugout. I wish it hadn’t been. I wish it had been underneath, but it happened, and I can’t go back and change that.”

In between innings, TV cameras then caught Hyde and Davis barking at one another in the Orioles’ dugout. At one point, Davis lunged at Hyde and had to be restrained by hitting coach Don Long and Mark Trumbo, who was with the team but has yet to play this season while rehabbing from right knee surgery. Davis was due up second in the bottom of the fifth but was pinch-hit for by Jace Peterson. The O’s would go on to lose 14-2 to complete the series sweep at the hands of New York, after which Trumbo spoke for the team with Davis having left the ballpark.

Davis said his decision to leave came from a desire “to be respectful” to his teammates, saying “I just thought it was best to be out of there by the time guys started coming off the field.”

Elias said there are “aspects of that we’re handling internally,” adding it’s “not something you want to be commonplace on a Major League team, but this was a pretty unique incident and I think that colors it a little differently.”

Hyde and Davis both declined to reveal the nature of the conversation that led to their dustup, and both sidestepped questions about whether any apologies were issued during their private session on Friday afternoon. To a man, Hyde, Davis and Elias all expressed the desire to move past the incident, with Hyde and Davis stressing not only that their relationship would recover, but that it was never severed in the first place.

“He and I, from Day One, have sat down and talked about what it's going to look like, what challenges we might face, and agreed that as long as we were open and honest with each other, that it was something that we were going to be able to tackle together, and that hasn't changed,” said Davis, who called his relationship with Hyde “awesome.”

Said Hyde: “We have a lot of respect for each other and we have a really strong relationship. It’s an incident that neither one of us feel good about, but after talking through it with him, and we talked at length about a bunch of things, feel really good about how it went and think we are going to be stronger because of it.”

Most disappointing, Hyde and Elias both said, was how the incident shed negative light on a clubhouse culture they feel has thrived despite the Orioles’ poor record. Davis echoed Hyde and Elias in saying that’s where tempers should flare, if they are going to. All three characterized such arguments as relatively common behind closed doors; all three called it “unfortunate” how this one played out in public view.

When asked if those incidents typically feature the intensity of Wednesday’s, when Davis charged Hyde and the two had to be held apart, Elias said that “this is not something that’s out of the norm.”

“I wish I would have handled it a little bit differently,” Hyde said. “I would have taken him down in the tunnel so nobody would have seen what’s going on.”

As for Davis, he is now hitting .182 with a .589 OPS, nine homers and 111 strikeouts in 84 games this year, the fourth in the seven-year, $161 million contract that ties Davis to Baltimore through at least 2022. Financially, he will be on the payroll until 2037 due to deferred payments.

“I hope he starts playing better,” Elias said. “We’ll continue to revisit our plan there. But I’ve said it before -- he’s on the team. We don’t have any plans to alter that fact. He’s under contract and it’s not something I take lightly. And he has a lot of talent. We’re not going to walk away from the fact that he’s here for a while.”