There might not have been a bigger surprise performer in 2021 than Cedric Mullins. With just over 400 plate appearances spread across parts of three years prior, he had put up a cumulative 72 wRC+ and accumulated -0.4 WAR; this season, he pushed his wRC+ up to 136 and posted 5.3 WAR, the 14th highest mark among all position players. He also became just the 11th player to reach 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases in a single season over the last decade.

The catalyst for his breakout season was quite simple: Mullins quit switch-hitting and began batting exclusively from the left side. That discussion had begun all the way back in 2018, his debut season, when then-Orioles manager Buck Showalter suggested it to him. After struggling to establish himself in the majors for three seasons, he finally decided to rely on his natural swing during the offseason. “It was getting difficult to try and create two different swings,” he told MASN’s Steve Melewski in March. “I know my left-side is my natural side, so trying to develop my right-handed swing at the highest level was challenging.”

Switch-hitting has always been a scarce skill, but the number of players who can swing both ways has dwindled in recent years. In 2021, just 17 qualified batters (13.1%) were switch-hitters, right in line with the league-wide average over the last decade. Compare that to the decade between 1986 and ’95 (excluding the strike-shortened 1994 season), when more than one in five qualified batters (21.1%) hit from both sides, with a peak of 24.8% in ’89. With modern baseball strategy so heavily emphasizing the platoon advantage, it’s surprising to see so few switch-hitters these days. Giving up that advantage in every at-bat is a radical decision, and there’s barely any precedent for it.

The number of players who have dropped switch-hitting after making their major league debuts is tiny. J.T. Snow did it in 1999, halfway through his career. So did Orlando Merced in 1996. Shane Victorino flip-flopped between switch-hitting and batting right-handed after injuries forced him to give up left-handed batting at various points during his career. More recently, Tucker Barnhart gave up switch-hitting in 2019. But those previous examples were all players who had already established themselves in the majors. Mullins could have seriously damaged his chances of having a productive major league career if his decision went wrong.
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John Means is the best pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles. In a different world, that might be exciting to Baltimore fans as the team builds a contender. An 11th round draft pick in 2014, Means climbed the minor league ladder, burst into the majors with a 3.60 ERA in 2019, and started throwing harder over the subsequent years. Can he be the best pitcher on a playoff team? I’m skeptical. But can he be the third-best? Definitely, and that’s a really cool outcome for someone who was never supposed to make it this far.

Of course, modern baseball being what it is, Means likely won’t be on the next playoff team in Baltimore. Instead, he’ll probably get traded for whatever the O’s can get, because he’s arbitration-eligible and only three years from free agency. You don’t build generational team wealth by passing up the opportunity to trade your good players for future considerations, at least not the way Baltimore is attempting to build for the future. The team is reportedly looking to trade Means, and I think they’ll find a match. So let’s talk about what the team that wins the Means bidding will be getting for their prospects and salary relief.

If you trade for Means, you’re not doing it for the strikeouts. You could look at his career numbers to tell you that, or you could look at his performance in his last 14 starts after returning from an IL stint. He struck out only 20% of the batters he faced, which isn’t cover-your-eyes bad but definitely shouldn’t top your rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

The history of the post-Earl Weaver Orioles has not been a happy one. Over his first stint with Baltimore, from 1968 to ’82, they were the winningest team in baseball, with 1,570 total wins, and averaged four wins per season more than the next-best team, the Reds, during that stretch. At no time during this era did the O’s finish below .500, and that even leaves out their last World Series championship in 1983. Weaver wasn’t just one of the best managers in baseball, but a very modern manager who used what analytics were available at the time.

But the failure of the O’s isn’t just a failure of managing. Weaver was great, but the team’s assembly line of young talent was a pivotal piece to the puzzle. While there are certainly some notable successes, the Orioles simply haven’t produced that much talent over the last 20–30 years. It certainly didn’t help that they placed a low priority on finding talent in Latin America for a long time, depriving them of a source that pretty much everyone else in baseball happily accessed. Read the rest of this entry »

Please note, this posting contains three positions.

Position: Analyst, Baseball Analytics

Reports To: Assistant GM, Analytics

Job Summary
This position is responsible for creating and analyzing baseball datasets through the use of advanced statistical techniques, with the goal of building and maintaining interpretable predictive models and player valuation frameworks to aid in the decision-making of Baseball Operations executives. Read the rest of this entry »

Please note, this posting contains three positions.

Position: Scouting Analyst, Professional Scouting

Reports To: Director, Professional Scouting

Job Summary
This individual will support the efforts of the Professional Scouting department by conducting extensive evaluations of professional players in the United States and abroad. The analyst will utilize multiple information sources, relying heavily on video analysis while also working closely with the Baseball Analytics department. This is a full-time position that is based out of Baltimore, Maryland. Read the rest of this entry »

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below! We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central; now it’s on to the East, starting with the American League.

Tampa Bay Rays (100-62)

The Big Question

The Rays are one of the best teams in history at competing on a year-in, year-out basis with a budget dwarfed by their rivals, right up there with Connie Mack’s, Charlie Finley’s, and Billy Beane’s A’s. But in a very tough division, they walk a very high player churn tightrope without a safety net. Would the Blake Snell trade finally be the one to knock Tampa Bay off that tightrope? The team has to stay smarter than its rivals, which is a lot tougher to do than it was in the heyday of any of the other teams listed above. It’s not so much of a question of if they got good value for Snell — they got real players in return — but whether the team’s rotation depth, already relatively thin with Charlie Morton‘s departure and Tyler Glasnow’s injury history, would be sufficient to prevent the Rays from having another down period. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Glasnow deliverers his high-octane fastball with a standard four-seam grip. That hasn’t always been the case. Back in his Little League days, the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander relied on an extra digit when throwing a baseball.

“I used to throw my heater with three fingers on top,” explained Glasnow, who at 6-foot-8 has grown exponentially since those formative years. “One time I was throwing to one of the coaches with my three-finger grip, and he was, ‘Whoa. That’s weird. Try throwing with two fingers.’ I did, and I think the movement got a little better, and I threw it a bit harder, but I couldn’t throw it for strikes. So I stayed with that three-finger approach for a little bit — a four-seam grip with three fingers — and then as my hands got bigger, I went to two fingers.”

His curveball is another story. Glasnow told me that he first began throwing a breaker around his sophomore year of high school… or maybe it was prior to that? He’s not entirely sure. When I suggested that age-12 isn’t uncommon, the So. Cal native said that may well have been the case. Read the rest of this entry »

Dillon Tate’s fastballs were primarily sinkers this season. Per Statcast, the 27-year-old Baltimore Orioles reliever threw 615 of them in total, versus just 16 four-seamers. Delivered with a one-seam grip at an average velocity of 95.5 mph, and with a spin rate that ranked in the third percentile, the offering has evolved into Tate’s signature pitch. Buoyed by its increased effectiveness, the right-hander appeared in a career-high 62 games, logging a 4.39 ERA and an almost-identical 4.40 FIP.

Tate discussed the evolution of his fastball(s) when the Orioles played at Fenway Park in mid-September.

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Dillon Tate: “I’d always thrown a four-seam, but the evolution of my fastball changed throughout the years. When I was in high school, I would grip a standard four-seam, like so. But the way I was grabbing it… when you grab it with the horseshoe facing in — it’s making a “C” — and you throw it, the Magnus effect takes over; it will start to bring the ball down, and more so in to a right-handed hitter. When you flip it over — make it a backwards “C” — it fights gravity a little bit more, so will stay truer. I learned that in 2017 from one of my rehab coaches with the Yankees, Greg Pavlick.

“So, I’d been grabbing it [with the horseshoe facing in], and then with the Yankees switched over. I had a little bit of success, but then towards the middle-end of 2018, my fastball was getting hit pretty hard. That’s when I started switching over to a sinker, to a one-seam fastball. On a traditional two-seam fastball, a lot of guys will split the seams. I found comfort in going across the seam, and throwing my fastball with [the pointer finger] on one seam. I started to see my groundball rate go up. It’s turned out to be pretty good movement profile-wise — it dances more than my four-seam fastball did — so it’s been a better option for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Mountcastle has a relatively straightforward approach to hitting. To say that it works for him would be stating the obvious. Since debuting with the Baltimore Orioles in late August of last year, the 24-year-old first baseman/outfielder has gone deep 37 times in 706 plate appearances. There are admittedly swing-and-miss issues — Mountcastle’s 26.1 K% is less than ideal — but his .273/.326/.492 slash line and 118 wRC+ are rock solid for a player with barely more than a full season under his belt. Power is Mountcastle’s calling card. Earlier this month, the former first-round pick set an Orioles rookie record for home runs in a season when he left the yard for the 29th time. He’s since added three more.

Mountcastle talked hitting on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or as more of a science?

Ryan Mountcastle: “Man, that’s tough. I would say more of an art. Everybody’s got their own swing, and everybody’s got their own mindset when it comes to hitting. So I think it’s more of an art for each person, how they picture it in their minds.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles are a very bad baseball team. In fact, by the available evidence, they’re the majors’ worst, owners of the lowest winning percentage by a narrow margin and the lowest run differential by a country mile. Yet when the book is finally closed on the 2021 season, they will have left a sizable footprint on the American League playoff picture. For as dreadful as they’ve been, they’ve played quite the spoilers — and could continue to do so.

The O’s have already lost more than 100 games for the third time in the past four seasons; obviously, they couldn’t pull that off during last year’s pandemic-shortened campaign, though had it been played to completion, they might have given the century mark a run for its money, as their their record prorated to 68-94. At 47-102 (.315) this year, they’re one game worse than the Diamondbacks (48-101, .322), and on pace to lose 111 games, second only to their 2018 team’s 115 losses in terms of the franchise’s run in Baltimore. Because they’ve surrendered a ghastly 6.00 runs per game, they’ve been outscored by 276 runs, and could become the fifth team of the post-1960 expansion era to be outscored by at least 300 runs.

The Orioles have been even worse within their division (18-52, .257) than outside it (29-50, .367), but while they lost 18 out of 19 games to the Rays — becoming the third team of the division play era to do that, after the 2019 Tigers (1-18 versus Cleveland) and Mariners (1-18 versus the Astros) — they went 8-11 versus the Yankees. Without that difference, the AL East race would be a four-team pileup:

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