Milwaukee Brewers leftfielder Khris Davis. Credit: Mark Hoffman

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Brewers leftfielder Khris Davis revealed Tuesday that he received a recent death threat deemed serious enough to be investigated by Major League Baseball.

Davis said he received the death threat on Twitter while the team was in Chicago on the last road trip. He told club officials, who contacted MLB's investigative wing.

The tweet, attributed to "Xero Vanderbilt," referenced Davis' Twitter name and, using a racial epithet, said "You (sic) family should all be killed."

Davis, 26, in his first full year in the major leagues, called the threat "a distraction" but it was obvious it was much more than that for a period. Davis said manager Ron Roenicke gave him a pep talk after the threat to encourage him not to let it change him as a person or player.

Davis was struggling at the time at the plate. Asked if he lost confidence, he said, "No, it's just out of frustrations of other distractions, really. It's not like 'Can I play here?' It's more of the distractions around me annoying me.

"Recently, I had a death threat on my Twitter. MLB checked it out. Unfortunately, yes (there were bad intentions). I don't know. It's a crazy world. I was in Chicago. They tagged me with some stuff and I didn't have a good game."

Davis said he met with manager Ron Roenicke after that happened.

"He reminded of a few things about hitting and said I should be here," said Davis. "I believed him, and I believe in myself. He approached me about the Twitter thing because he found out about it.

"It is (hard to ignore). I just know there are distractions. I just know when I block them out, at the end of the day it doesn't matter."

Brewers general manager Doug Melvin couldn't go into any details because MLB investigations are conducted in private but said the team was assured the matter had been handled.

"All we do is turn it over to MLB security," said Melvin. "It is serious when that happens. We were just told it was handled. We don't get involved with it. We don't get details of it. Anything that is deemed serious, we all have MLB security at every city we go to. We have a card with a number (to call).

"You cant (take it as a joke) today if you look at the stuff every day on the news. We were told it's been taken care of. I'm sure it was (distracting). All this social media stuff, people think that it's good. A small percentage of it is good, to me."