If you’re reading FanGraphs, you probably like baseball. If you like baseball, you’ve probably watched an Orioles game this year. If you’ve watched an Orioles game this year, you’ve probably seen Darren O’Day pitch. Even as relievers go, he pitches a lot, as he appeared in 69 regular season games, the wild card play-in game, and has now pitched in all four games of the ALDS. And, if you’ve seen O’Day pitch this year, then you’ve probably noticed that he throws from a really low arm slot, but thanks to our friends over at SBNation, we’re going to show you O’Day striking out Alex Rodriguez last night, just so you can appreciate the funkiness in all it’s glory.

Watching that, you almost feel bad for Rodriguez. How is he supposed to hit that? What is any right-hander supposed to do with a slider from that arm angle that starts on the outer half of the plate and ends up a foot outside? And, if that was the match-up option, why not send Raul Ibanez up to pinch-hit for Rodriguez? Certainly, a lefty would have far more success against O’Day’s drop-down delivery, right?

You would think. And, with pretty much every other low slot/sidearm/submarine guy on the planet, you’d be right. Chad Bradford had insanely large platoon splits. Same deal with Mike Myers. Justin Masterson’s low arm slot is the main reason he struggles against left-handers. Guys who throw the ball from that kind of arm angle are usually brutal on same-handed hitters and ineffective against guys from the opposite side of the plate.

And yet, O’Day ran through the entire Yankees line-up last night, including six guys hitting from the left side: Nick Swisher, Curtis Granderson (okay, not much of an accomplishment right now), Raul Ibanez, Ichiro Suzuki, Mark Teixiera, and Robinson Cano. That’s a pretty decent collection of left-handed bats, and O’Day just mowed them down. And perhaps the most amazing part of the entire thing is that we probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

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The author, because he’s an idiot, mistakenly wrote this preview for the Yankees-Orioles series despite having definitely been assigned the Nationals-Cardinals NLDS, instead, by his fearless editor Dave Cameron. Interested readers can expect full coverage of the Nationals and Cardinals beginning tomorrow (Monday).

If you’ve made your way to FanGraphs — and if, furthermore, our demographic data is even half accurate — you’re the sort of person who either (a) has done well in school or (b) is currently doing well in school. Which, that means you’re probably also the sort of person who (a) has taken a number of quizzes before and also (b) has done well on those same quizzes — and maybe even (c) actively enjoys taking quizzes.

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The Baltimore Orioles have had an amazing season. They weren’t supposed to be any good, but they kept winning. They were supposed to regress to the mean, but they never did. They spent the entire summer giving Pythagoras the bird, and then, forced to play for their lives on the road against a Rangers team that simply looked to have every advantage, they won handily. Behind Joe Saunders. Against a line-up full of right-handers. The 2012 Orioles are why there’s a Twitter account called “You Can’t Predict Baseball”.

But, now, in a five game series against the Yankees, everyone’s going to bet against the Orioles again. Everything points to New York being the better team. They won more games. They scored 92 more runs and allowed 37 less. They have the best offense in baseball. They’re the Yankees. They have players who we expect to be good.

The Orioles, meanwhile, have a roster full of guys with track records of mediocre performance. This isn’t a team full of fresh-faced kids straight up from the minors — well, besides Manny Machado, anyway — who are introducing themselves to the Major Leagues. It’s a roster heavy on guys who were discarded by other organizations, with histories that suggest that they just aren’t that good.

Perhaps no player typifies the 2012 Orioles more than Tommy Hunter. And it’s guys like Tommy Hunter who are why we need to reevaluate what we know about the 2012 Orioles.

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The presentation of Joe Saunders as a joke has escalated ever since the Orioles had the gall to name him starter for Friday’s American League Wild Card game. Nobody is accusing Joe Saunders of greatness, but he has made a living on competency. He has a 98 career ERA- — just slightly better than average. Aggressively competent, even.

Still, it’s understandable why Saunders is treated as the kind of pitcher who should be hit hard. In both browsing his statistics and watching his pitches, he has no discernible strengths. He lives in the high 80s with his fastball. He doesn’t throw a curveball with exceptional break. He has a changeup, but he isn’t a changeup artist of the Shaun Marcum or Johan Santana variety.

But in one way, Joe Saunders has been one of the major league’s best pitchers since 2008:

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The Orioles and Rangers square off tonight in a winner-take-all/loser-goes-home showdown. The Rangers are throwing Yu Darvish, who has been their best starter for the last month or so, and has the stuff to dominate on any given night. The Orioles are throwing Joe Saunders, who they acquired in an August trade after he cleared waivers. This seems to be the definition of the word mismatch.

There are some match-ups where you’d be okay with Saunders pitching in a critical game because of the composition of the opposing team’s line-up. For instance, Saunders would be a pretty good match-up against a team that has a lot of thump from the left side that he can neutralize. Because, realistically, Saunders is a situational lefty masquerading as a starting pitcher.

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On Tuesday evening, Orioles’ first baseman Chris Davis launched a 445-foot home run to center field off Tampa Bay’s James Shields to place himself in elite company. It marked his sixth-consecutive game in which he hit at least one home run, making him the 19th player in Major League history to accomplish that feat.

In the American League, the last player to hit a home run in at least six-consecutive games was Kevin Mench in April 2006, but some of the other names include Lou Gehrig, Roger Maris, Jim Thome, and Reggie Jackson (the only other Baltimore Orioles player). The longest stretch of consecutive games with at least one home run is eight games, which is held by three players — Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly, and Dale Long.

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It was a rough week for Team Entropy, as sweeps by the Orioles and Athletics knocked out most of the larger snafus the Rays and Angels could have caused over the final three games:

There’s still room for a three-way tie between the Athletics, Rays and Angels, though, and the AL East, AL West and NL Wild Card could also see tied finishes as the year comes to a close.

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The Baltimore Orioles celebrated the 20th anniversary of Camden Yards this year. A few more winning seasons and the Orioles just might get back to the sell-out crowds that filled Camden Yards in 1992 and for nearly a decade thereafter.

The high-water mark for attendance at Camden Yards was in 1997, when the the Orioles won the American League East with a record of 98-64. That year, 3,711,132 fans filled Camden Yards to the brim nearly every game. It’s been a steady decline ever since. Still, even as the team floundered after the 1997 season, more than 2,000,000 fans bought tickets year after year, putting the Orioles in the top half of American League teams in attendance.

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Things are setting up for an exciting final week in the American League Wild Card race. With the Orioles and Athletics unable to break away from the Angels and Rays — just two and three games behind Oakland respectively, and another half game behind Baltimore — it could be a wild seven days for Team Entropy. MLB will need to get its contingency plans in place, as there are a number of scenarios that lead to three or even four-team ties:

The cases in black preclude involvement in any tie. Every other result for each team leads to at least the possibility of involvement in a three or even four team tie after 162 games. Then, of course, the question becomes just how likely each possibility is.

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Few things get baseball fans more excited than the opportunity to begin taking an extraordinary young talent for granted, so baseball circles are abuzz right now with talk of the Orioles’ promotion of top prospect Dylan Bundy. It didn’t at any point appear as if Bundy would see the majors in 2012, so this news comes as a surprise, but few were also counting on the Orioles to remain in the race for this long, and now the circumstances are what the circumstances are. Suddenly, Bundy makes some good sense.

To hear the Orioles tell it, they weren’t going to call Bundy up, then Tuesday night they played the Mariners for seventy innings, so they decided to call Bundy up. It might seem short-sighted to you for the Orioles to change their plans for a top prospect because a September game went longer than expected, but for one thing, the Orioles kind of need to be short-sighted at the moment, and for another, how likely is this to stunt Bundy’s development, really? It doesn’t matter so much that the Orioles changed their plans if the difference for Dylan Bundy is small or inconsequential.

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