The baseball story of Eugenio Vélez, a second baseman and utility guy who played five Major League seasons, for the Giants and the Dodgers, is one of those little tragedies in a sport full of hard luck. In 2011, he had a total of thirty-seven at-bats, mostly as a pinch-hitter, in which he failed to record a single hit. That, combined with an 0–9 stretch at the end of the previous season, gave him the record of most consecutive at-bats without a hit, forty-six, a mark that dated back to 1909. Adding a mean twist to the tale, in the early days of his streak, during the 2010 season, he was hit in the head by a line drive while sitting in the dugout, and spent a night in the hospital. He recovered well enough to go on not hitting. Vélez ended the 2011 season with a batting average of .000 and has never played another game in the majors.

Now Vélez has lost even his notoriety. On Monday night, Chris Davis, the first baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, went 0–5, extending his hitless streak, which began last season, to forty-nine at-bats and counting. Aside from an adjacency in the record books, the stories of Vélez and Davis could hardly be more different. Vélez was a backup player earning close to the league-minimum salary; Davis is the highest paid player on his team, in the midst of a seven-year, hundred-and-sixty-one-million-dollar contract, and the burly, eye-blacked face of the franchise. (As part of his deal, the Orioles are scheduled to continue making deferred-salary payments to Davis until 2037.) This isn’t a bad hitter leaving baseball with a whimper; it is a fall from great heights. Davis twice led the majors in home runs, and, despite never batting for average, was an immensely valuable player—a paragon of the three-true-outcome hitting, in which a batter most often strikes out, walks, or hits a home run. The strikeouts are only tolerable, however, when a player is doing the other two things. Davis ended last season with just sixteen home runs against a hundred and ninety-two strikeouts, while recording the lowest batting average—.168—in M.L.B. history by an everyday player. As of Monday, in twenty-eight at-bats this season, Davis has struck out fifteen times.

Last week, in Baltimore, the crowd booed Davis. (“I understand the frustration,” he told reporters. “Nobody’s more frustrated than I am.”) Sports fans often save their greatest indignation for players who are failing to produce at a level commensurate to their salaries, as if a highly paid bust is like some corporate villain—a C.E.O. earning millions while the company tanks and workers are laid off. Yet, on Monday night, the response was different. When Davis passed Vélez’s mark, lining out to left field, he received a light round of applause from the tiny crowd at Camden Yards (6,585, the smallest ever). The response felt right. Davis is, right now, a very rich and very miserable man, deserving not of pity (there is all that money, after all) but certainly empathy. In a profile in Sports Illustrated, last summer, Davis, a devout Christian, talked about the times that his struggles had brought him to tears, and to despair; it’s hard to figure he’s feeling much better these days.

The options now are all pretty grim. The Orioles could release Davis, paying him a salary to go away. Davis could quit, taking the drastic step of forfeiting nearly a hundred million dollars, which he is still owed. Or he could agree to go to the minor leagues—per his contract, he can’t be demoted by the team without his consent—and there try to discover something that might lead to a return to form. Yet it’s hard to see what exactly he might do to get better. Some of his drop-off is a result of the increasing use of defensive shifts against him; as a dead-pull hitter, he’s had hits taken away by fielders stacked on the right side of the infield. As a viewer, it’s maddening to see a player continue to hit into the shift while there is a gaping hole on the other side—but it’s harder than it looks to suddenly overhaul one’s approach and start hitting the other way, especially for a power hitter like Davis, who earned his contract for hitting home runs, not singles. Even if Davis were to figure out a way to beat the shift, there is the matter of his physical decline; since 2015, according to a statistic known as barrels, which charts balls that are hit especially hard and at an angle likely to produce extra-base hits, Davis has gone from the top of the league to below average, all while striking out more and more. In short, he’s hitting the ball less well and to the wrong places—and it’s getting worse.

There would be some poetry for a return to the minors for Davis, whose nickname, Crush Davis, is a nod to the character Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner in “Bull Durham.” Crash, in the movie, is approaching the record for career home runs in the minors, another rather backhanded baseball honor, as it reflects his years playing in obscurity more than it does the kind of greatness needed to make it in the majors. Yet there is also something thrilling about watching an aging Crash hit homer after homer against increasingly younger pitchers. “Bull Durham” is full of speechifying about this or that great meaning of baseball, but it’s also about the plain honor of digging in for the next at-bat, wherever you are playing—the great gift and beauty of a ball arcing into the night. Maybe Davis will suddenly turn it around in Baltimore. If not, there might be hope for him in some smaller American city and some smaller ballpark, in Norfolk or Bowie or somewhere else, where the fastballs are a little slower, and the breaking stuff breaks a little less cruelly.