Over 162 games, which is the full season, the Royals were the best base-stealing team in baseball, and it was all worth to them about a dozen runs. That is not very many runs, unless they were to all happen in one or two games, and there’s a reason we don’t talk about stolen bases much during the year. They’re just such a minor factor, of far less significance than, say, playing good defense, or hitting for power. So maybe now you think the Royals’ running game is getting too much attention. They went nuts in one game, but that’s it. I’ve personally never before devoted this much attention to a running game, but here I am, putting together another post. I’m deeply interested in the way the Orioles’ ALCS roster matches up against how the Royals intend to score runs.

The matchups are a little thing, but we’re so bad at predicting the big things in a short series I might as well try something else. The Orioles released their 25-man roster, and while nothing came as a shocker, there is one notable swap — Ubaldo Jimenez will not participate. Brian Matusz will particpate, or at least he’ll be available to do so. The simple explanation is that Matusz is left-handed, and the Royals’ lineup is fairly left-handed, so Matusz fills a greater need. That’s all true, but there’s also a little more. The Royals want to get on base and run. They could have some difficulty doing both.

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The Royals are an incredible story, and the Orioles are an incredible story, and when you break down a big incredible story into its component bits, you’re left with a whole bunch of tinier incredible stories. Among the possessors of those stories on the Orioles is closer Zach Britton, who, like a lot of good relievers, is a failed starter. Britton failed to build on a promising rookie season and was reduced this year to bullpen work, but in that role Britton has excelled. And not only is it remarkable that he’s excelled — it’s remarkable how he’s excelled.

If you’re familiar with Britton, you know the story. If you’re not, you will be. Britton, basically, has one pitch. He’ll mix in the occasional breaking ball, but nine times out of ten, Britton is attacking with his sinker. People liked his sinker when he was a starter and it flew in at 92 miles per hour. Now it’s coming in at 96, so it doubles as both a setup pitch and a putaway pitch. Kenley Jansen has his cutter, Jake McGee has his four-seamer, and Zach Britton has his sinker. It’s the pitch that’s allowed him to tie for the highest single-season groundball rate we have on record.

Britton’s sinker is the whole secret to his success, in that people can’t do anything with it even when they know that it’s coming. At FanGraphs we track pitch values, which measure the quality of a single pitch based on the results that it gets. This year, Johnny Cueto had the highest fastball pitch value. McGee came in second — he’s also a one-pitch pitcher. Then you’ve got Clayton Kershaw, then you’ve got Zach Britton, and of course, Cueto and Kershaw were starters. Britton had one of the most dominant individual pitches in baseball, allowing him to be a shutdown closer, and so far in the playoffs Britton hasn’t thrown anything but his bread and butter. He knows what’s been working for him.

A few people have remarked that when they see Britton’s sinker in action, they’re reminded of Jonny Venters. Unfortunately Venters hasn’t been able to pitch in the majors since 2012, so I found myself curious: does anybody else in baseball throw Zach Britton’s sinker? Does it have peers, or is it a standalone pitch? After thinking on it, I’ve come up with a method. And for simplicity, I’m ignoring handedness concerns. Left-handed and right-handed sinkers will be combined.

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Chris Tillman’s 2014 has a pretty great storyline. Approaching the end of July, Tillman had an average ERA and below-average peripherals, with 51 walks to go with 83 strikeouts. That’s not at all what the Orioles were looking for, and then all of a sudden Tillman turned his year around. Over the dozen starts he had remaining, he allowed 23 runs, with 15 walks and 67 strikeouts. Last week, Tillman was reasonably effective against the Tigers, with six whiffs in five innings. People who look at the Orioles’ rotation don’t see an ace, but Tillman’s the closest they’ve got, and he’s pitched at that level for a couple of months.

So, Tillman’s had a great second half of the year, just like the whole team around him has, and that’s one thing you could talk about. But in October, people love to focus on the matchups, and Tillman’s about to go up against the Royals, who made a name for themselves in the Wild Card game by running all over the place. The perception of the Royals, now, is that they’ll run you to death if you give them the chance. And yet, Chris Tillman doesn’t give runners chances. This’ll be a fascinating matchup for a number of reasons.

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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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