Back in August, my colleague Ben Clemens crafted an article titled Wait, Zack Littell is a Starter Now?! It was an apt headline. Not only had the 27-year-old right-hander been DFA’d by the Red Sox a few months earlier — Boston having been his third organization in as many years, and his sixth overall — he’d logged a 4.08 ERA over 145 big-league appearances, all but four out of the bullpen, with just three saves. As Clemens pointed out, Littell “wasn’t even a dominant reliever.”

Of course, this was the Tampa Bay Rays who’d moved him into their rotation. Much for that reason, Clemens qualified his skepticism by saying, “What else can we do but wait and see the results?”

The results have remained largely positive. Littell has a not-so-great 6.75 ERA in 14 appearances out of the bullpen this year, but in the same number of outings as a starter his ERA is 3.41. Moreover, he’s consistently gone five-plus innings. As Rays beat writer Marc Topkin told me for an article that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. the under-the-radar righty “has basically saved the starting rotation.”

How did the opportunity come about? Read the rest of this entry »

Variously known as the “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” “Mr. Hoover,” or “Mr. Impossible,” Brooks Robinson set the standard for defensive wizardry at third base, winning a record 16 consecutive Gold Gloves thanks to his combination of ambidexterity, supernaturally quick reflexes, and acrobatic skill. He was an 18-time All-Star, a regular season, All-Star Game, and World Series MVP, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. More than that, he was “Mr. Oriole” for his 23 seasons spent with Baltimore, a foundational piece for four pennant winners and two champions, and a beloved icon within the community and throughout the game. In 1966, Sports Illustrated’s William Leggett wrote that Robinson “ranked second only to crab cakes in Baltimore.” He may have surpassed them since.

Robinson died on Tuesday at the age of 86. According to his agent, the cause was coronary disease. On the broadcast of the Orioles’ game on Tuesday night, longtime teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Jim Palmer fought back tears to pay tribute. “We all know he’s a great player, he won 16 Gold Gloves, but we also know how special a person he was,” said Palmer, who like Robinson debuted with the Orioles as a teenager, spent his entire career with the team, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. “I think as a young player you make a decision early in your life, ‘Okay, who do I want to emulate? Who do I want to be like?’ Brooks was that guy.” Read the rest of this entry »

The rookies took the spotlight this past Saturday in Baltimore, as the Orioles battled the Rays and clinched their first playoff berth since 2016 via an 8-0 victory. Leading the way on the offensive side was 22-year-old Gunnar Henderson, who led off the first inning with a first-pitch single off Tyler Glasnow and came around to score the game’s first run, then added a two-run homer in the second and an RBI single in the fourth, helping to stake rookie starter Grayson Rodriguez to a 5-0 lead. The 23-year-old righty turned in the best start of his brief big league career, spinning eight shutout innings while striking out seven and allowing just five baserunners. A day later, when the Orioles beat the Rays in 11 innings to reclaim the AL East lead, a trio of rookies — Shintaro Fujinami, Yennier Cano, and DL Hall — combined to allow just one hit and one unearned run over the final three frames.

Earlier this month, colleague Chris Gilligan highlighted the contributions of this year’s rookie class. With just under four weeks to go in the regular season at that point, rookie pitchers and position players had combined to produce more WAR than all but three other classes since the turn of the millennium. Collectively they’re now second only to the Class of 2015 (more on which below), and since the publication of that piece, four teams besides the Orioles, all heavy with rookie contributions, have made headway in the playoff races. The Dodgers clinched the NL West for the 10th time in 11 years on Saturday, while the Mariners and Diamondbacks are clinging to Wild Card spots, and the Reds are in the thick of the NL race as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have a tight grip on the AL East race. With time running out on the season, they have a 2.5 game lead on the Rays with the tiebreaker in hand; the division title comes with homefield advantage throughout the AL playoffs. Their +127 run differential is the third-best in the AL. So then why oh why do we at FanGraphs think they only have a 5.5% chance of winning the World Series, worse than the Astros and Rays and just ahead of the Blue Jays and Mariners?

It’s happened two years in a row now. FanGraphs keeps doubting the Orioles, and they keep winning. But don’t you worry, disgruntled O’s fans. As the resident Orioles believer – I picked them to win their division before the season, even if that was mostly a statement that they were underrated rather than a sincere belief that they were the best team in the East – I’m here to dig through the madness and see what’s going on.

First things first, in these “why don’t the odds believe in my team?” articles, it’s always good to walk through how the odds work. They’re quite straightforward, though straightforward isn’t the same thing as simple. We start at the player level, averaging the Steamer and ZiPS projections to come up with projections for every player in baseball. Then we manually build a depth chart for each team. From there, we stitch those pieces together to come up with team-level offensive, defensive, and pitching projections. We plug those into the BaseRuns formula and get projections of how many runs per game each team will score and allow, then convert those to expected winning percentages using Pythagenpat expectation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hays knows his numbers. More importantly, he understands the process behind his production. He’s also having a career-best year: the 28-year-old outfielder has a 117 wRC+ to go with 36 doubles, 16 home runs, and a .283/.330/.462 slash line as a rock-solid contributor for a postseason-bound Baltimore Orioles team with the most wins in the American League. Overshadowed by young stars like Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, he is nonetheless an important piece of the puzzle.

The personable Port Orange, Florida product hasn’t revamped his approach this season, but he has tweaked it in search of more thump. Hays explained how when the Orioles visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: When I brought it up yesterday, you told me you were aware that many of your 2023 counting stats are almost identical to what they were at the end of last year. What percentage of guys in this clubhouse would you say keep up with their numbers?

Austin Hays: “I think it’s probably about half and half. There are guys who like to follow where they’re at, follow what they’re doing, and there are others who just like to look at the end of the season. I find numbers interesting, so I like to look at my own, and other people’s numbers as well. It’s something I’ve always been interested in.”

Laurila: You’re in the process of passing some personal milestones. Which of your numbers do you care the most about?

Hays: “Doubles is a big one for me, because that seems to be the thing that helps me out the most with my power numbers. I don’t hit a ton of home runs, so the more doubles I can hit, the higher my slug and my OPS can be. You can get doubles in so many different ways, too. It’s kind of a hustle stat in a way. If you can accumulate five to 10 hustle doubles by going hard out of the box throughout the season, they’ll start to add up, That’s thing I’m probably trying to boost up the most.” Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Williams came as advertised when I saw him pitch earlier this month. The 24-year-old rookie right-hander’s fastball topped out at 99.3 mph, while his slider sat in the mid-80s and occasionally topped 90. Allowing one hit and a lone run over five rain-delayed innings against the Minnesota Twins, Williams was all about power.

He also came as advertised when I spoke to him on the day preceding his outing. I was told that the 6-foot-6, 255-pound Cleveland Guardians hurler is a man of few words, and that was pretty much the case. While accommodating, Williams was anything but verbose. No matter. I largely got what I was looking for: a self-appraisal of what he brings to the table.

“Most people know me for my fastball, really,” the righty replied when I asked for a self scouting report. “That’s the main thing people know me as, and it’s what I know myself as.”

The Fayetteville, North Carolina native first hit triple digits during his freshman year at East Carolina University, and as meaningful as that milestone was to his identity on the mound, he recognizes that retiring big-league hitters takes more than pure velocity.

“I don’t think 96 to 100 is that big of a difference,” Williams said. “If it’s down the middle it can get hit. Putting it where you want to is a bigger thing. It also matters how it moves.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles have the best record in the American League, and youthful talent is a big reason why. Gunnar Henderson is the odds-on favorite to capture Rookie-of-the-Year honors, while Adley Rutschman has already reached star status in just his second MLB season. The dynamic duo are the first-place team’s co-leaders in WAR.

They aren’t the only players making an impact. The well-balanced Mike Elias-constructed club has also received meaningful contributions from the likes of Anthony Santander, Ryan Mountcastle, and Austin Hays. On the pitching side, a mix of veterans and less-established arms have more than held their own, in some cases outperforming expectations. From the better-known to the lesser-known, a multitude of players have played important roles in the 90-wins-and-counting success.

With that in mind, who has been the most-underrated player on the 2023 Orioles? I asked that question to four people who see the squad on an everyday basis — two broadcasters and a pair of beat writers — prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

Nathan Ruiz, who covers the team for the Baltimore Sun, chose Danny Coulombe.

“A lot was made of the All-Star combo of Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, but Coulombe has come in and kind of been that main left-handed reliever all season,” said Ruiz. “He’s been really good with inherited runners, which is something they have generally struggled with. Cionel Pérez was really good for them last year, but they felt they needed another lefty so they acquired him [from the Minnesota Twins] for cash around the cusp of the season and he became a solid piece for them right away. He’s been dependable at the back end of the bullpen.”

Melanie Newman went with Kyle Bradish.

“He’s got an ERA that’s sitting there with Gerrit Cole right now,” the Orioles broadcaster opined. “We all talk about Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, and our back end — what they’ve been able to do so far — but Kyle has been consistent. For whatever reason, when we’re on the road in a big spot, those are his best moments. That’s what you want out of a guy, and you forget that he’s only in his second year. His breaking pitches are disgusting. I don’t think he gets enough credit.”

Danielle Allentuck opted for Ryan O’Hearn.

“He has kind of been the guy who, whenever they need the big hit — he’s either coming off the bench or already in the lineup — has been providing it,” the Baltimore Banner reporter told me. “He’s been that kind of spark for them. He’s turning his career around here. We’re talking underrated, and I don’t think a lot of people know about him. He’s not the big name. He wasn’t a big superstar, but he’s come here and turned things around for himself, and the team.” Read the rest of this entry »

With Instructional League underway in Arizona (casts look of disappointment toward Florida) and Fall League rosters likely about two weeks out, the time has come to line the coffers with data and re-worked scouting reports in preparation for another round of farm system audits. Especially at the up-the-middle positions, defense is both very important and also a bit of a black box for readers, as there aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats and so much of evaluating defense is visual. I’ve recently been working on a video deep dive on the position players currently graded as 50 FV prospects or better, specifically to evaluate their defense in detail. Here I’ve taken a pass at the shortstops, providing video supplements for the prospects who I’ve evaluated in the 55 FV tier and above. I’ve made changes to their defense and arm tool grades over on The Board as a result of this exercise, and highlight the instances where this has caused a change to the player’s overall FV grade in the analysis below.

I’ve cut the videos in such a way that you can see each shortstop making similar plays one right after another. The videos feature plays to their left where I want to see them flip their hips and throw, plays that show the extreme end of their range, backhand plays in the hole to their right, plays coming in on the grass, and double play attempts. The fewest balls in play I watched for an individual player was 36 (Colson Montgomery and Dyan Jorge) and the most was closer to 70 (Jackson Holliday, Carson Williams and Marcelo Mayer). Read the rest of this entry »

Félix Bautista has been as emblematic of and as crucial to the Orioles’ sudden breakthrough as any player. In his second major league season, the imposing 28-year-old closer — nicknamed “The Mountain” for his 6-foot-8, 285-pound physique — has emerged as one of the game’s most dominant and valuable relievers, the biggest cog in a bullpen that’s helped to prop up a wobbly rotation. Unfortunately, Bautista’s season is at the very least on hold after he left Friday night’s game with what the Orioles have called “some degree of injury” to his ulnar collateral ligament.

Facing the Rockies at Camden Yards, Bautista entered a 5-4 game in the ninth inning in search of his 34th save and his second in as many nights. He battled Jurickson Profar for six pitches before striking him out on a 101.7-mph fastball, then induced Harold Castro to ground out on a 1-0 pitch. He was one strike away from finishing off Michael Toglia when he stumbled off the mound while uncorking a 102.3-mph fastball that missed up and outside. After he called for time to recover, the sight of him flexing and squeezing his right hand prompted manager Brandon Hyde, head athletic trainer Brian Ebel, and coach José Hernández to check on him and ultimately pull him from the game.

While Danny Coulombe struck out Toglia on his first and only pitch of the night to finish the game, the sequence understandably put a damper on the Orioles’ comeback win. On Saturday, general manager Mike Elias announced that Bautista had injured his UCL and would be placed on the 15-day injured list. It’s unclear yet whether the injury — likely a sprain of the ligament, meaning some kind of tear — is severe enough to require Tommy John surgery. Read the rest of this entry »

Look at the top of the leaguewide standings and you’ll find both types of elite teams: First, the Braves, an all-conquering, all-chewing-up-and-spitting-out combine harvester that sits atop the standings. After them: an Orioles club that’s outplaying its Pythagorean record by eight games.

That’s not to take anything away from the Orioles, who are dogwalking the hardest division in baseball thanks to a dizzying collection of talented young hitters and the best bullpen in the sport. Besides, they don’t ask how — they ask how many. But this is yet another reboot of a classic from the generation prior; in 2012, the O’s romped to the playoffs with a 93–69 record and the run differential of an 82–80 team. Now they’re doing the same thing, with Félix Bautista as Jim Johnson, Gunnar Henderson as Manny Machado, and Kyle Bradish as… Wei-Yin Chen, I guess?

It’s not just the Orioles: the Marlins (minus-37 run differential) are beating the Cubs (plus-62) to the last Wild Card spot. The Brewers are 10 games over .500 with the run differential of a .500 team. Every year, it seems like a low-payroll team with a good bullpen smashes its expected record to smithereens and barges into the playoffs. Is there an actual pattern here, or is this just trivia? Read the rest of this entry »