Last week, both Jeff and I wrote about the Orioles and BaseRuns. Jeff said this towards the end of his piece:

In four of the last five years, the Orioles’ BaseRuns record has been better than the projected record by at least six wins. In the fifth year, they were the same. The point being, the Orioles have knocked their projections out of the park, and they’ve done it far more than anyone else.

I ended my article with the following quote:

Haven’t [the Orioles] overperformed their BaseRuns wins for many years now? Yes, they have. But they’re overperforming at run prevention, not run scoring.

That night, Buck Showalter thumbed his nose at us both. Specifically, he mocked and derided the concept of run prevention by refusing to use his best run preventer in a tied elimination game with one out and runners on the corners. That refusal hurt the team’s chances of winning in a high-profile way. And thus another Orioles team bit the dust.

Given what happened, the prospect of talking about the Orioles and run prevention makes me twitch. But I’ll suppress it because there’s some interesting analysis here. Onward!

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Zach Britton has recently found himself at the forefront of baseball consciousness for a lot reasons, mostly positive, some negative, albeit through no fault of his own. He had a supremely excellent season in a tightly tailored, typical closer’s role for the Orioles, and his non-usage in last week’s wild-card game has almost become a caricature, a metaphor for outdated laissez-faire managerial strategies.

He will certainly receive many, many Cy Young votes, and might even walk off with the award. In my piece here last week, I compared his 2016 performance to some of the top seasons produced by AL starters, utilizing granular batted-ball data, and found that, while Britton does at least belong in the conversation, he didn’t deliver as much production to his club, in a year that is admittedly without a runaway choice among starting pitchers. What if I told you, however, that Britton didn’t even have the best season among AL relief pitchers?

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You already know the story of last night’s AL Wild Card game. The Orioles lost, and Zach Britton didn’t pitch. Everyone is talking about it today. Jeff Sullivan wrote a good piece on Showalter’s call, as did basically every other baseball writer in existence. Now, 12 hours later, it’s still hard to believe that it actually happened.

In reading the accounts from those who talked to Showalter — this one by Tyler Kepner, in particular, was really well done — you can feel the respect people have for him, and rightfully so. Showalter is one of the winningest managers in baseball history, and despite what he did last night, he didn’t get that way on accident. Two years ago, I wrote a post extolling Showalter’s postseason usage of his relievers; he clearly understood then that the postseason is a different animal, and needs to be handled differently from the regular season.

And while I certainly was among the chorus calling for Britton in the eighth inning — and every inning after that — you don’t have to squint too hard to see some logic in how Showalter used Mychal Givens, Brad Brach, and Darren O’Day. The Jays lineup is very right-handed, and those pitchers all throw from difficult angles for RHBs. Britton is the Orioles’ best reliever, but especially against a right-handed lineup, Showalter was picking from a variety of good options, all of whom were likely to pitch well in that situation. Britton might have been a bit more likely, but when factoring in the platoon splits, you can least kind of see why Showalter might have felt comfortable with his three primary right-handed setup guys.

But while Showalter stated in the postgame press conference that his decision wasn’t based on some philosophical issue, the 11th inning suggests differently. Because the only way you rationalize letting Jimenez face Edwin Encarnacion is if you’re dead set against using your closer in a tie game on the road.

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There is one article to be written about Tuesday’s American League wild card game, and that article will be written in 25,000 different places. I thank you for taking the time to read our own version. I can’t promise that it’s a different version from what’s likely to be already out there, but, see, that’s just the thing. There was a problem with how Tuesday played out for the Orioles, and everybody but perhaps the TBS broadcasters has been able to put their finger on it.

The Orioles lost, sure, and that’s the biggest problem. There’s no problem that affects them more. But the Orioles lost in extra innings. After Chris Tillman was removed, Buck Showalter cycled through six different relievers. Not one of those relievers was named Zach Britton, a closer who spent the year being so dominant he’s constructed a case for the Cy Young. The final pitch of the Orioles’ season was thrown by Ubaldo Jimenez. This is about what it looked like, and then it was time for them all to get packing.

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The Blue Jays just walked off against the Orioles, with Ubaldo Jimenez giving up the game-losing home run to Edwin Encarnacion in the bottom of the 11th inning. The story, though, is that the Orioles used seven pitchers in their final game of the season, and potential Cy Young winning closer Zach Britton was not one of them. The Blue Jays beat the Orioles in large part because the Orioles didn’t use their best pitcher tonight.

At this point, there are two possible explanations for Buck Showalter’s decision.

1. Zach Britton wasn’t available, or felt something off when he warmed up in the 8th inning. Given that Buck Showalter seems like a reasonable human being, this should probably be our default assumption right now. Often times, when a manager does something inexplicable with their bullpen usage, there’s information asymmetry, and they know something we don’t know. That may very well be the case here.

OR

2. The “save” stat just cost the Orioles their 2016 season. If Showalter really used Brian Duensing and Ubaldo Jimenez before Zach Britton because he was waiting to get Britton a lead so that he could earn a save, then this is the craziest managerial decision that I can remember in my baseball-watching life.

I don’t see another possibility, really. Either Britton is hurt or Buck Showalter just screwed up in an historic way. It will be interesting to find out how honest the team is about Britton’s availability in postgame comments.

Update: It was option #2. A few quotes from Showalter.

Buck: "He was available"

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) October 5, 2016

Buck: "You could (regret) afterwards, but we went 4 innings trying to get to that spot (of using Britton)."

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) October 5, 2016

Buck: "Playing on the road had something to do with it too."

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) October 5, 2016

"Nobody has been pitching better for us than Ubaldo."

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) October 5, 2016

As an Orioles fan, BaseRuns is never far from my thoughts. Since 2010, the team has outperformed its BaseRuns record every year — most notably in 2012, on the way to its first playoff appearance in over a decade. This year’s Orioles are no different, sitting last week at +5 wins versus what BaseRuns models. Fans say it’s Orioles Magic. The algorithm says such performances are expected. Jeff Sullivan doesn’t know precisely what to say.

After the team signed Pedro Alvarez, I paid attention when Dave asked if they would strike out too much, where by “too much” he meant “to such an extent that they’d win fewer games than their BaseRuns record suggests.” With another season in the books, I’ve picked up here where Cameron left off, exploring the relationship between a team’s strikeout rate and its BaseRuns in a few more ways.

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There’s a certain urgency to a post like this. Yesterday, I talked about the Cubs, and I had little choice but to mention the Cubs probably won’t win the World Series. The Orioles, one has to figure, are worse than the Cubs, so the Orioles probably won’t win the World Series, either. The odds are strongly against every individual team, meaning fans of every individual team are likely looking ahead to crushing heartbreak. If and when that heartbreak occurs, it’ll be a little while before people want to reflect upon happy memories.

So instead of waiting, I want to slide this in today. For all I know, some hours from now, the Orioles’ 2016 season will come to an end. They have something like a 50/50 shot to move past the Blue Jays, and then they’d just be rewarded with another tough match-up against another tough roster. The playoffs are hard and the playoffs are draining. But no matter what happens soon, it was another strong season for Baltimore. And it was another strong season that the projections didn’t expect.

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Tonight’s AL Wild Card game is a pretty fascinating matchup. Both teams launch home runs at prodigious rates, as the Orioles led the majors in long balls, and the Blue Jays finished fourth overall, just four home runs back of a tie for second. Interestingly, however, neither team was as good offensively as those home run totals might make you think; Toronto ranked 11th in offensive runs above average while Baltimore came in 13th. If they’re not launching homers, they can be held in check, so tonight’s game might not be the slugfest that could otherwise be expected.

Especially because the rules of the Wild Card game incentivize frequent pitching changes, and both of these teams should be taking advantage of the flexibility. The Blue Jays are starting Marcus Stroman, but they also have starters Francisco Liriano and Marco Estrada on the roster, plus the normal compliment of seven relievers; the Jays could mix-and-match their pitchers from the first inning and still have enough arms to get through the game, even while holding one of the extra starters in reserve for a potential extra inning contest.

Likewise, the Orioles are also carrying 10 pitchers, with Ubaldo Jimenez and Dylan Bundy available in relief, along with seven traditional relievers. But if you’re Buck Showalter, you’re probably a lot less excited about the possibility of bringing in Jimenez (5.44 ERA/4.43 FIP/4.64 xFIP) or Bundy (4.02 ERA/4.70 FIP/4.61 xFIP) in an elimination game, and the plan is more likely going to be to ride Tillman as long as he’s effective, than to turn the ball over the team’s normal relief corps.

That relief corps, of course, is anchored by Zach Britton, the best pitcher the Orioles have. Britton’s dominance is almost hard to believe at this point; 202 of the 254 batters he faced this year (80%) either struck out or hit a groundball. He’s the most extreme groundball pitcher we’ve ever seen, only he also blows hitters away with a similar strikeout rate to what Noah Syndergaard posted this year. Opposing batters hit .161/.221/.191 against him this year. To put that in perspective, Mariano Rivera only held hitters to a lower OPS than Britton’s .430 mark once in his career; in 2008, when hitters put up a .423 OPS against him.

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I’ve got a vote for American League Manager of the Year this season and I’m terrified. My first vote as a member of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and it’s the impossible one.

Maybe impossible is too tough a word. I’m sure I’ll figure something out in time to submit a vote. But evaluating the productivity of a manager just seems so difficult. We’ve seen efforts that use the difference between projected and actual wins, or between “true talent” estimations for the team and their actual outcomes. But those attribute all sorts of random chance to the manager’s machinations.

I’d like to instead identify measurable moments where a manager exerts a direct influence on his team, assign those values or ranks, and see where each current manager sits. So what are those measurable moments?

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With the minor-league playoffs finished, the Baltimore Orioles summoned first-base prospect Trey Mancini from Triple-A Norfolk this week to help sure up their offense. Mancini wasted no time making an impact for the O’s, notching his first career home run in Tuesday’s game against the Red Sox. Mancini broke out in 2015 when he slashed an outstanding .331/.370/.539 between High-A and Double-A. His raw numbers regressed a bit this season as he moved to a more pitcher-friendly park, but he still managed a strong .282/.357/.458 showing, with almost all of that coming at Triple-A.

Mancini’s power is enticing. In each of the last two seasons, he’s reached the 20-homer mark and ISO’d over .175. However, some of his other attributes take away from some of that shine. Mancini’s a first baseman, meaning he’ll need to hit a bunch to have a long-term future in the bigs. He also turns 25 next spring, making him a bit old for even the Triple-A level. And perhaps most importantly, he kind of strikes out a lot — likely due in part to his long swing.

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