Seems to me the most fun you can have as a sports fan is when your team exceeds expectations. It’s fun when a known good team plays like a good team, too, but then you don’t get the same kind of magic of surprise. You’re already planning ahead for the playoffs, and you’re more likely to be disappointed by anything short of a title. It’s always the best to pull for someone people didn’t see coming, and a team most people didn’t see coming this year was the Orioles. Orioles fans, then, ought to be enjoying this, yet it seems an awful lot of them are spending their time ripping on FanGraphs. See, FanGraphs projected the Orioles for last place. Ergo, we’re maroons! Fans apparently don’t love it when you ascribe surprising success to random variation. I guess that shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

So let’s consider what we have here. The Orioles are in the running to finish with baseball’s best record. They were projected to be something like a .500 team on true talent. Obviously, then, they’re exceeding the preseason projections. The roster hasn’t really changed all that much. So where are the Orioles beating the forecasts? We already know they’re doing better than they were expected to do. Why is that, in 2014?

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My Sunday afternoon was spent covering the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles game at Progressive Field. In the fifth inning, something caught my eye from the press box:

Quite the double play turned by the #Orioles to kill a potential rally with two on in the fifth. Nice snag by Gausman, quick turn by Hardy.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_ABJ) August 17, 2014

Double plays happen all the time. This one was a bit unique in that it was started by the pitcher, but it still appeared to be a pretty standard double play. Most exciting double plays are the result of a glove flip, a diving stop or a barehanded catch-and-throw. Here’s what this one looked like:

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Two years ago, the Baltimore Orioles gave a middle finger to the concept of regression to the mean. For six months, they won game after game by a single run, relying on a bullpen that posted the highest WPA in history to make the postseason despite the skepticism of sabermetric writers everywhere, including here on FanGraphs. The story of their season was essentially told in two numbers: 93-69 record, +7 run differential. To O’s fans, it was a fantastic season, but to writers like those found here, it was essentially a fluke.

The 2012 Orioles were a decent team that managed to distribute their runs in about the most effective manner possible, but there’s just no evidence to suggest that this is a repeatable skill over significant periods of time. And sure enough, after going 29-9 in one run contests in 2012, the 2013 Orioles went 20-31 in games decided by a lone run. For one year, the Orioles defied the odds, but as we’d expect, they couldn’t get that to carry over into the next season, and they won eight fewer games despite playing basically at the same level as the previous year.

But now, it’s 2014, and the Orioles are doing it again, though not quite to the same degree. Their 24-17 record in one run games isn’t quite so crazy, but they are outperforming what context-neutral models would suggest based on their overall performance to date. As Jeff noted, the Orioles are #2 in Clutch performance this year, winning five more games than their underlying statistics would have suggested. And once again, their bullpen leads the Majors in WPA, though it’s not quite the historical performance of two years ago.

And while Orioles fans may have been able to accept random variation as the explanation for 2012, the fact that they’re doing it again just two years later leads to suspicion that perhaps the Orioles — or maybe just Buck Showalter — have figured out how to game the system. A few comments I received yesterday, both in my chat here and on Twitter.

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

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Prepare yourself for an unpopular opinion – there is a difference between a well-pitched game and a low-scoring game contested by two bad offenses. Not every quality start is a gem, thanks to the current state of offense in Major League Baseball.

On the same night the defending World Series champions eked out seven total bases in a 19 inning game, the Baltimore Orioles slugged six home runs. The following afternoon, they hit another three bombs. After a fallow period of one day, the O’s got back on the bats, hitting three MORE home runs Monday night, fueling yet another win for the first place team in the American League East.

Over the past seven days, the Orioles hit SEVENTEEN home runs. That is more than the rest of the AL East combined in that stretch, more than 11 teams can claim in the second half. It is this power surge that keeps them afloat and in front. It is this suddenly rich mine of home run power that helps them overcome/offset an otherwise underwhelming squad from top to bottom.

While we all stare at their lineup and wonder how they manage to remain first in a deeply-flawed division, the O’s look like a club that zigged while the rest of baseball zagged. Always a team built to score runs, they simply struggled to get all their pistons firing in sequence – until now.

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What Mike Petriello wrote in July, continues to be true in August: the Orioles are tough to figure out. What is objectively true is that Baltimore is leading the American League East by a substantial margin, and that it unlikely to change.

As Mike noted in July, the Orioles are doing this despite many things not going as expected. However, one player is pretty much the same as he always: Adam Jones. From 2010 to 2013, Jones’ cumulative wRC+ was 116. To date in 2014, his wRC+ is 115. Jones’ offensive production so far this season may be a bit down from his 2012 and 2013 performances, but he is still pretty much the same hitter: good (not great) production based on average and power despite a low walk rate.

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It’s not so bad in the bigger picture. Since the start of last season, Chris Davis has been worth more than seven wins, equal on our pages to the contribution from Jayson Werth. That’s not quite superstar-level, but that’s pretty damned good, and you’d think just based on that that the Orioles are pleased with their slugging first baseman. But since the start of this season, of course, Davis has looked like a different player. Or, Davis has looked like an identical player, but he’s performed like a different player. He’s basically tied in WAR with Garrett Jones, and Mike Petriello tells me he recently heard an Orioles fan complaining about Davis pinch-hitting for Delmon Young. Things are weird.

The Orioles, as a whole, are weird. They’re right where they want to be, in first place, but they’re in first having gotten very little out of Davis. They’re in first having gotten very little out of the injured Matt Wieters. They’re in first having only recently started to get production out of Manny Machado. They’re in first having gotten very little out of Ubaldo Jimenez. In order to hang on, the Orioles are probably going to need their most talented players to step up down the stretch. You can count Davis among them, but he’ll have to shake off a season-long slump, a slump we can isolate to one particular part of his game.

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Bud Selig has been giddy watching baseball teams attract bigger and bigger local television deals. More local TV revenue to a team means more money for the league to spread via revenue sharing and greater competitive balance. And Bug Selig sure loves competitive balance. On a recent visit to PNC Park, Major League Baseball’s commissioner told Pittsburgh Pirates broadcasters that he got “goosebumps” watching the Reds and Pirates square off in last year’s postseason.

But big local TV contracts aren’t all Skittles and puppies. Certainly not for fans who are forced to pay higher and higher cable and satellite TV bills to watch their home team. Nor for cable and satellite TV customers who don’t care about baseball but have to pay the higher prices as part of their bundled programming.

It turns out that big local TV contracts aren’t always good news for teams either. That has turned Selig’s mood quite sour.

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In 2012, the Orioles — fresh off a losing streak dating back to the Cal Ripken / Mike Mussina / Davey Johnson squad of 1997 — shocked all of baseball by winning 93 games and the American League wild card game. Backed by what seemed like completely unsustainable one-run luck and with the knowledge that the rest of the AL East was still dangerous, most analysts said something along the lines of “that was fun, good luck doing it again.” They didn’t quite get back to the playoffs in 2013, but 85 wins was still something to be proud of, thanks mostly to 53 homers from Chris Davis and the smashing defensive debut of Manny Machado.

Once again, no one thought much of them headed into 2014. The Red Sox had just won the World Series; the Yankees had added Masahiro Tanaka, Brian McCann, Jacoby Ellsbury and Carlos Beltran. The Jays couldn’t possibly be as bad as they’d been in 2013, and the Rays might have been the best team of any of them. In our 2014 predictions, only two writers picked the O’s to win the division.

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They say all games are created equally, and that each outing in a long season is just one of 162 games. That’s certainly true, from a mathematical perspective – 90 wins is 90 wins, regardless of how a team gets there.

From a practical perspective, however, not all games are equal. While the primacy effect may make it seem like it’s the games late in the season, within a tight race, that “matter more,” the argument can be made that it’s the games earlier in the year that can shape a team’s endpoint the most. In particular, success in the games ahead of the July 31 trade deadline, when looked at together, is paramount.

The American League East is a great example of this. With five teams projected to perform similarly before the season, the spread in the division so far is perhaps wider than most anticipated, with 9.5 games separating first and last. The team quality evaluation hasn’t changed all that much, however, with each team projected to win between 35 and 37 games (.480-.521) the rest of the way. The teams who have performed well early are in the driver’s seat for a playoff push, even though they don’t necessarily project as better than the others the rest of the way.

This is important not just for building an edge within the division – it’s made three teams buyers and two teams sellers ahead of the deadline.
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