The beauty of professional baseball is that it has been around for 150 years and yet, still, sometimes fans will witness something without precedent. Supposedly unbreakable records fall. At times players find themselves in situations that defy logic. And sometimes these aren’t moments of triumph, but of heartbreaking failure. In that regard, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the Baltimore Orioles’ $161m slugger Chris Davis, who on Monday night extended a streak of 47 consecutive at-bats without a hit, setting a new record for the longest hitless streak by a position player in major league history.

How did Chris Davis manage to “accomplish” this?

Davis entered Monday night’s game against the Oakland Athletics just two more hitless at-bats away from tying the 0-for-46 record set by Los Angeles Dodgers infielder Eugenio Vélez in 2011. Against starter Marco Estrada, he made outs in first two plate appearances to tie Vélez. In his third trip to the plate, he managed to make solid contact with an offering from reliever Yusmeiro Petit and hit a screaming line drive that just happened to be aimed at a perfectly positioned outfielder Robbie Grossman. Just like that, Davis overtook Velez for sole position in first place … and he wasn’t done. He would go on to strike out looking and then swinging in his next two at-bats to stretch the record to 0-for-49.

Davis ripped a 103.5 mph line drive that had an expected batting average of .580. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. https://t.co/2tBPSa9z0I — Andrew Simon (@AndrewSimonMLB) April 9, 2019

How have things gone so wrong for the slugger once regarded as one of baseball’s most feared hitters? Obviously, there’s some amount of bad luck going on here for Davis. Just by the laws of chance, some of the pitches that he actually made contact with should have found holes between defenders or dropped in for hits. There’s also the possibility that it could be a matter of Davis failing to make adjustments. A piece in last September’s Sports Illustrated described Davis’s struggles in adapting to modern defensive shifts, where one team’s players position themselves around the field based on where the opposing batter tends to hit the ball.

These would be fixable problems, but it’s far more likely that the 33-year-old Davis is in the midst of a particularly painful decline. Last season he hit .168, which was the worst batting average in major league history for a player who qualified for the batting title. When you’re managed to secure two “worst in history” records in your sport in little over a year, there’s a very real chance that whatever’s wrong might not be some sort of fluke.

If he’s so bad why haven’t the Orioles benched him yet?

Here’s the truth about Eugenio Velez going 0-for-46: the only reason that streak stopped at 46 was that Velez’s major league career did. Velez was eventually released and bounced around the minor leagues, where he spent the rest of his career. It takes an unique set of circumstances for a team to give a player that many opportunities to fail. In Davis’s case, there’s two major components. First, the Orioles might be the worst team in all of baseball. They went 47-115 last year and they have given no signs that they are even attempting to win this year. A team that thought they were contending might have already buried him on the bench.

More pointedly, there’s the little fact that Davis is the middle of a seven-year, $161m contract extension that he signed in 2016. Considering the ridiculous amount that they are paying him, Baltimore is in a position where they feel they have to keep putting him out there just to get some sort of return of investment here. Davis’s slump, in other words, comes courtesy of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Is Davis’s contract really that bad?

Let’s start this off by saying that Davis was a great player for the Orioles for a long stretch of time. He led the MLB in home runs with 53 in 2013 and did it again in 2015, when he hit 47. Davis was a big reason why the 2012 Orioles made the franchise’s first trip to the playoffs since 1997. It’s understandable that the they wanted to keep him long term and, at the time, the fact that $42m of his salary would be deferred into the distant future made it look a little bit more respectable. (Of course, now the fact that Baltimore are still going to be paying Davis in 2037 sounds like a cruel joke.)

Even then though, it felt like the Orioles were overpaying by quite a bit, and that it was likely they would likely regret the contract before it was up in 2023, when Davis would be 37. Davis’s extremely poor contact rate – he literally led the league in strikeouts-per-at-bat the year before signing the contract – heavily suggested that he was the type of “home run or nothing” slugger who was at risk for a major decline as he aged. The decline came almost immediately, as Davis’s OPS fell from .923 to .539 over the past four seasons.

How are Orioles fans taking his slump?

Davis was booed on opening day although Davis handled the humiliating experience with grace. “I understand the frustration,” he said, “nobody’s more frustrated than I am. Especially a day like today.” It’s difficult not to feel bad for the guy, no matter how much money that he’s making.

This is starting to feel untenable, what do the Orioles do with Davis going forward?

There’s an old line about “in there’s no such a thing as a truly untradeable contract in baseball.” Chris Davis’s contract could very well end up disproving that adage. The Orioles still owe Davis $92m over the next four seasons, it’s hard to imagine that a team would make a move that didn’t require the Orioles paying the remaining salary owed him.

Right now, the Orioles are just going to keep playing Davis. They put themselves in a position where they are forced to hope that he will start to contribute again because there’s no possible way he could keep being this bad. This is, essentially, the “dead cat bounce” principle, i.e. even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a far enough height. Logic dictates that Davis will eventually start at least showing flashes of production at some point, he won’t be an Automatic Out for too much longer. Logic, of course, also dictated that Davis wouldn’t have fallen this far to begin with. This isn’t a rational game, baseball.

No matter what happens in the near future, all signs point to Chris Davis facing his athletic mortality long before the end of his contract. Unless Davis retires when that happens, which his accountant would strongly advise against, Baltimore could be forced to cut him and just eat the remainder of the money they owe him. Orioles management would love to put off having to make this decision for as long as possible, but Davis’s bat could very well force the issue.