It wasn’t supposed to be this way for the Orioles. After a second trip to the postseason in three years, one in which they got about one-sixth of a season from Matt Wieters and half a season from Manny Machado, making the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1996-1997 was the clear goal. It hasn’t happened that way. The team recently dropped six straight, and has dropped eight of their last 10, to give themselves a firm uphill climb toward a wild-card berth.

Perhaps what is most frustrating for the Orioles is that they have significantly outscored all four teams standing with them or in their way of the second wild-card slot:

American League Second Wild Card Competitors

Team	W	L	Run Diff	BR Run Diff	WC Playoff Odds
Texas	65	61	-29	-43	28.2%
Anaheim	65	62	-4	-20	31.8%
Minnesota	65	62	-9	-80	13.0%
Tampa Bay	63	64	-19	21	10.7%
Baltimore	63	64	49	9	7.7%

BR = BaseRuns, WC = Wild Card

When you expand from actual run differential to BaseRuns run differential, you can see that the Rays have a legit case to be positioned ahead of Baltimore, but overall that has to be a pretty frustrating table for the Orioles and their fans.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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There are a lot of rookies getting attention this season. And with good reason — it’s been a pretty good year for rookie position players. But while Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, Joc Pederson, Jung-Ho Kang, Randal Grichuk are Carlos Correa getting lots of pub, it seems as though Miguel Sano has not generated the same volume of coverage nationally as have his peers. And that’s a shame, because he’s just as deserving of praise.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The Nationals have not played very well in the second half. This isn’t news. Since the break, they have an 8-12 record and have been outscored by 11 runs. This isn’t a soul-crushing stretch by any means, but when your competition is red hot, a stretch where you’re only scoring 3.65 runs per game can certainly seem soul crushing. The interesting question to me is what the Nationals can do about it? Are they content to just wait this out and take the patient approach that eventually their hitters will snap out of it, or is it time for action? Actually, let’s rephrase that — what actions can the Nationals even take?

We know that the Nationals have a great pitching staff. Their bullpen unit is solid. The core unit they’ve relied on the most the past 30 days — Aaron Barrett, Casey Janssen, Felipe Rivero, Tanner Roark and Drew Storen — has done pretty well. The worst xFIP- among those pitchers for the past 30 days is Rivero’s 114. For the season, the highest belongs to Janssen at 108. Perhaps there isn’t enough reliability in that group, especially given Storen’s playoff experience. So to that mix they have added Jonathan Papelbon. Potential problem addressed.
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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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We’ve all been there. Our buddy down the street is somehow beating us at “RBI Baseball,” even though we own this game. We always beat him! What is going on today? Well, no matter, we’ll just press the reset button and start over. That’ll teach him. This is my house.

That might not be precisely what the Detroit Tigers have been thinking this season, but it’s not far off. The Royals are good again? Exactly how are the Twins winning games? Detroit kept sinking further and further this year until they were far closer to last place than they were to first. And with their rest of season’s projection not that rosy anymore, the Tigers are bowing out. From Jayson Stark’s report yesterday: Read the rest of this entry »

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