Since it became clear that the 2014 Yankees weren’t very good, a lot of people in our chats started asking about the 2015 Yankees. Specifically, a lot of people started asking about the shortstop for the 2015 Yankees, since they’re not going to have Derek Jeter, in a different way from how the 2014 Yankees didn’t really have Derek Jeter. A name I kept arriving at was J.J. Hardy — he was due to be a free agent, and he’s pretty good, and he’d cost plenty without costing plenty. He seemed like a good option for a Yankees team that might not want to break the bank. Also, he’s not an option anymore.

In the break between playoff series, the Orioles have signed Hardy to a multi-year extension:

Source: Hardy deal 3 years, $40 mil with $6.5 mil deferred. Vesting option 4th year based on ABs #orioles

— Roch Kubatko (@masnRoch) October 9, 2014

In re-signing Hardy, the Orioles are getting for about market value a player who is no longer young but who is not yet a problem. That sentence is all the analysis you need, but now let’s get into some details you might want.

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The Orioles finished off the Detroit Tigers yesterday, winning their division series three games to none, though the primary story of the series still seems to resolve around the Tigers and their disastrous bullpen performance. Despite throwing $10 million per year at Joe Nathan over the winter, and then trading for Joakim Soria at the deadline, the Tigers bullpen combined for 19.29 ERA in this series, and that includes two shutout innings from regular season starter Anibal Sanchez. If you look at just the Tigers postseason pitchers who were relievers in the regular season, they combined to allow 11 runs in just three innings against the Orioles, good for an ERA of 33.00.

The Orioles likely would be up 2-1 in this series even if the Tigers relievers had pitched well — Detroit’s starter left with the team down 4-3 in Game 1 and down 2-0 in Game 3, and the Tigers never managed to make up those deficits in either game — so it’s not accurate to say that the Tigers bullpen cost them the division series. However, on the other end of things, we could put together an argument that the Orioles bullpen, and more specifically Buck Showalter’s management of his relievers, won this series for the Orioles.

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We keep trying to explain the Baltimore Orioles. After all, they’re destroying the American League East, up by 12.5 games at the moment over the Blue Jays. They’re likely to clinch it in the next 24-48 hours, and when the playoffs roll around, they’ll be the No. 2 seed, kicking off an ALDS at home against either Detroit or Kansas City, depending on which of the two win the AL Central. They’re doing this despite a list of things that have gone wrong this year, most of which I laid out here in July, and that was before Manny Machado injured his knee and Chris Davis got suspended. Dave Cameron made a very thorough case for the simplicity of accepting randomness, and August Fagerstrom looked into how much power the lineup has had, largely thanks to Nelson Cruz.

It’s all of those things, and it’s none of them. It’s the managerial genius of Buck Showalter, if you want it to be, and it’s also the unquantifiable magic of balls bouncing the right way. It’s Dan Duquette playing with never-ending roster moves, or it’s outstanding (and generally random) performance in clutch situations, or it’s defense that hasn’t had a single weak spot. We can argue about whether the Orioles are a good team that has had enough things go their way in the right spots to look like a great one, or if they are actually that great team and we’ve just been so wrong about them, but in the end it doesn’t matter so much. The wins are banked, and they’re headed to the playoffs, and if that sounds insane knowing that they won’t have Davis, Machado or Matt Wieters, you’re not alone.

Sometimes, though, it’s not so complicated. Sometimes there’s a Steve Pearce.

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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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