Orioles-Tigers Game 2: Another Step Toward Respect
The numbers – at least some of them – suggested the Tigers would win Game 2. Justin Verlander was on the mound with a record of 7-0 and a 2.84 ERA in eight starts at Camden Yards. His record in seven ALDS starts was 4-0 with a 1.79 ERA. Baltimore starter Wei-Yin Chen had a 4.91 ERA in two career starts against Detroit and had never pitched in the postseason.
There was also perception. While not without flaws, the Tigers are a superstar-laden club capable of turning it on at any time. The Orioles – you know the refrain by now – aren’t as good as their record and destined to fall to earth.
Of course, this is baseball. Verlander out-pitched Chen, but the story often goes well beyond the starting pitchers. And while Detroit’s all-too-predictable bullpen implosion is going to get the most ink, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that a resilient team was once again resilient. This game wasn’t only about the Tigers losing.
I wrote it last night and it bears repeating: The Orioles are good. This is not a statement based on a two-game sample, nor is it bandwagon jumping. I predicted a postseason berth for Buck Showalter’s team in March and they certainly held up their end of the bargain. The team no one seems to respect is now 98-66.
According to writers covering the ALDS, Orioles fans aren’t off base in complaining their team doesn’t get the credit they deserve. Everyone I queried was in accord with that belief. Lack of star power, particularly in the starting rotation, was a common theme. Also mentioned was market. Baltimore isn’t Boston or New York.
As for projections and how the Orioles got to this point – one win from the ALCS – allow me to say something atypical of a FanGraphs article:
Fans who see this team on a daily basis might understand them better than many analysts do. Buck Showalter certainly does. That’s not meant as an indictment of analytics, it’s just that… well, this is baseball and some things are harder to quantify than others. Maybe the best explanation is that the Orioles aren’t what they’re supposed to be. They are what they are.
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Following today’s game I ventured into the Tigers clubhouse to ask about the lack of respect the Orioles are getting on a national level. To say they have a different perception than the masses – especially the media masses – would be an understatement.
The first player I approached was Ian Kinsler, who initially said he had no idea why the Orioles don’t get more credit. When I related to him that one theory is a lack of stars, he was almost incredulous.
“Their lack of stars? That’s an interesting opinion,” Kinsler said, punctuating his response with a laugh.“Don’t you think they have great players?” When I told him I feel they do, but some don’t, he opened up with both barrels.
“Media dictates everything,” opined Kinsler. “In that division there’s the Yankees and there’s Boston, and Tampa is always the media darling – they think they’re the gift to baseball or something – so the Orioles get overlooked. That’s the case for a lot of teams. They’re good. They’re a postseason team that won the East and they played well today. We played well today too, they just had a big inning.”
Max Scherzer had the same initial response, and a similar follow-up. “I have no idea,” said Scherzer. “That’s the national media and I don’t control the media and what people think. They’re a good team. They’re solid all the way through. I don’t know if there’s a way to quantify that or not – having a complete team – but they’re tough. Regardless of how they go about doing it, they’re one of those clubs.”
“From a player’s perspective, we don’t think that,” Joba Chamberlain told me. “We know what kind of lineup they have. I think maybe people perceive their starting staff as not really having a huge name, but they have some guys who throw the ball really well from top to bottom. As players, and as a team, we don’t perceive them that way. They’ve had a lot of guys step up in big situations. They’re good.”
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David Price, who will start for the Tigers in Game 3, was asked on Wednesday about the Orioles’ aggressiveness with the bat. On the heels of two tough losses – Delmon Young’s first pitch game-winning double is notable from a strategic standpoint – here is a look back at what Price said:
“With a team that scores runs at the high rate they do with home runs, that can open doors for a lot of other stuff. It takes kind of a big swing to hit a home run, If you can execute your pitch, that can definitely play in your favor.”
Execution. Right now, the Tigers simply don’t have anyone in the bullpen who can do that, at least with any kind of consistency. Young didn’t leave the yard, but his hit was as loud as a bomb. Joakim Soria, who made the fatal pitch, described it this way:
“One day you make a quality pitch and they hit it. One day you make a mistake and they hit a fly ball. That’s baseball. [Young] is a fastball hitter who will swing at the first pitch, and I threw him a slider. He was on it. It wasn’t that bad of a pitch – it was a low pitch – but he hit it well.”
In other words, Soria threw the right pitch – a slider to a first-pitch-fastball hitter – with the game on the line, and it was rifled into the left-field corner. It went exactly as scripted: The team that’s not supposed to keep winning won again.
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
Chen pitched in 2012 in the ALDS against NY and got W AND a Quality Start, which to the TBS crew makes him the best postseason pitcher since Bob Gibson.
My bad on this. I took no-postseason-appearances off the press notes — can’t verify now as I didn’t bring them back to hotel –and didn’t cross-reference. It’s also possible I misread. Either way, my apologies for getting this wrong.
Ain’t random variation a doozy?
I have been a fan of the Tigers since 1985 and it has been an endlessly humiliating experience.
at least you get respect though.
A bit of respect to be sure, but nothing hurts quite like unfulfilled potential (even if this potential is perhaps a misperception of what are some serious deficiencies).
Dombrowski has made some sly trades but he has demonstrated some serious inabilities as a general manager as well.
One consideration, that I believe is important, is the bullpen. While starting pitching and relief pitching should be equally important, I think the confidence that is generated by a strong bullpen is an important factor in a team’s success.
If you are on the Tigers bench, you must be waiting for a coming implosion; conversely, on the Orioles bench, the team must have confidence that if the score remains close they can win.
I don’t know how much of a role confidence plays, and it certainly isn’t something can be measured empirically, but ,if I were on either bench, it would be in my mind.
And the frustrating part for the Tigers must be not understanding why their bullpen is so bad. Soria was having his best season ever before the trade.
To the point of “fans that see them on a daily basis” the bullpen confidence that you mention is absolutely the secret sauce here. 2012 was very similar but 2013 wasn’t because of Jim Johnson’s struggles. If you watch the O’s regularly you see a late inning confidence with the bat that comes with a shut down bullpen. If the starters, who are all very similar stat wise can keep the game close into the last 3 innings there seems to be a sense amongst the lineup that their a a bleep and a blast away from winning the game. That has to help hitters over a long season and then possibly becomes habit in the postseason.
The Padres hitters used the comforting knowledge of a dominant bullpen to thunder to a 77-85 record.
Yeah but you can’t have ONLY a bullpen. The Padres had a historically bad lineup. They couldn’t hit anything all year long. You still need to have talent in the lineup above all else.
I don’t think anyone really gives enough credit to the difference in defensive quality between these teams. Every defensive metric puts at least 100 runs between the Orioles defense and the Tigers defense. TZ had it as high as 130 runs. On top of that, the O’s are one of the most aggressive shifting teams in the league and they the runs saved via shift are excluded from these numbers. When your defense is spotting you over 2/3 run per game over the other team it makes up for a lot of other shortcomings (like with the pitching.)
Flahrt’s double play for Gausman was huge. I can’t believe I’m writing that, after Machado (and even Davis) I was waiting for a blow up at third. It looked good today.
Funny, ain’t it? They don’t appear to be as good as the other teams (especially without Wieters, Machado and Davis) but they win. It’s not bad to be under-rated. I recall, at the beginning of the season, seeing all these fourth and fifth place predictions for the Orioles. Except for the New York Times (really!) which had them winning the AL East.
“Fans who see this team on a daily basis might understand them better than many analysts do. Buck Showalter certainly does.” Ah, the discovery that you can know some things by crunching numbers, others by being a fan watching one team, and still others being it’s field manager. And that these all constitute “understanding” relevant to the game. This is not about the Orioles at all. How much better Fangraphs would be if this was widely understood by its writers. And readers. Thank you.
well spoken.
I have no doubt that our current metrics available don’t fully encapsulate all of baseball, but the problem is how to measure these other things. What, for example, are the things that Showalter knows that analysts (as if we can actually sum up all ‘analysts’ in one way) don’t?
There would need to be a way to measure it beforehand to predict the future, otherwise you would fall prey to confirmation bias. For example, A-rod was considered a clutch hitter through 2004. Then over the next few years, he was considered un-clutch. In addition, you would need to find a way to separate player performance from manager performance. Finally, you would need a statistically significant sample size.
Until those conditions could be done, we have no idea how valuable a manager like Showalter could be. Just using the argument that the Orioles are good and the media says they shouldn’t be, therefore Showalter is clearly awesome is pure conjecture.
I think the fans, media and sabrmetrics all undervalue bullpen performance, it is difficult to predict due sample size problems and often goes unnoticed by fans and media. Defense is the same way, UZR and DRS is flawed because of sample size issues, and largely goes unnoticed by fans and media. The Orioles starters fall in the same category, a bunch of no names but they have consistently out performed their peripherals all season. Add that all together, with a solid lineup and you have a very good if not great team that has flown under the radar all year long.
I agree 100%
I couldn’t believe that fangraphs had Detroit as the heavy favorites to win this series. I believe that the O’s chances of winning the WS was less than 7% at the beginning of this series, while Detroit’s (going from memory here) was over twice as much. They seem to ignore the W-L record, especially in the 2nd half of the season. Defense and the bullpen are both key. The starting pitchers for the O’s and Tigers are actually (ERA-wise) just about the same–I’d give the nod to the Tigers because of experience. And the offenses I’d put about equal (Detroit’s 3-4-5 are incredible, but the O’s 1-9 are quite good). But the big difference is the defense and the bullpen. O’s are much better in these two key areas.
By ERA they may be the same, but that’s as far as it goes. Tigers are tied for best rotation in the majors with a FIP- of 87, whereas Baltimore is 27th with 108. Yet in spite of that, the Orioles rotation has a much lower ERA than the Tigers starters.
Pays off to be an elite defensive team. The O’s rotation isn’t that good, but their defence is so talented that they can make an awful rotation look strong. And when you pair that with a strong lineup & D it’s not a huge surprise they’re winning. Meanwhile the Tigers have a much stronger rotation, but the defence is so lousy that they make them look much worse than they are.
It is interesting that the top 2 defensive clubs hold a 2-0 lead in the ALDS.
But since comparing teams includes the defensive component, since we are not trying to seperate pitcher contribution and are just trying to look at overall contribution, for comparing Tigers vs. Orioles it is important to look at that elite defense. It certainly is interesting to see the top 2 defensive clubs doing well: Imagine if the Tigers rotation had the Orioles or Royals D behind it!
It wasn’t like a judgment call or decision that had the O’s at 7%. That’s the formula and it traditionally performs well at predicting outcomes.
The big failing from Fangraphs isn’t that their numbers analysis underrates the Orioles, it’s that so many of their writers failed to recognize that the way the Orioles are constructed (elite defense, bullpen reliant, great manager) hides a lot of their best aspects in areas that the numbers don’t do well with.
This article was fantastic. That’s all I have to add.
The problem with Soria’s pitch is that it was inside the strike zone. As an Orioles fan I was petrified of this match-up, but belatedly I realized that Detroit’s high Zone% actually plays into Baltimore’s aggressiveness at the plate.
This. You don’t throw Delmon Young a pitch in the strike zone unless you have to.
As a White Sox fan, I get a certain amount of schadenfreude seeing that hacker Delmon Young beat the Tigers.
I swear Delmon Young is slowing turning into MLB’s equivalent of Robert Horry.
I had no idea Robert Horry was an anti-Semite. That sucks
He just walked hardy to load the bases on 4 maybe 5 pitches (and they weren’t close). He had to throw a strike, because he couldn’t afford a walk.
Delmon doesn’t walk
Neither does JJ
I was so glad we didn’t play KC just for this reason. Good pitchers throw stikes, the Os swing at anything, I am more afraid of pitchers that can’t hit the zone than those that attack it.
if flukiness can’t be quantified, maybe wOrMc+ can be. weighted ORIOLES MAGIC!!!!
As someone who has watched this team 120 or more times this year I have come to think this. The reason they lack respect is the things they do well are not easily measurable or given as high a value. Things like running out every single ground ball, their belief in each other and trust in each other, the ability to put what happened with the last pitch/at bat/ inning/ game behind them immediately and the mind set that they are never out of a game are things you can not put a number on but when added together make them a very good ball club.
They run out ground balls but not fly balls (looking at you Pearce)
Well said. Those things are likely also true of St. Louis and San Francisco, likely upset winners in the NL.
Every single team says those things. What makes the Orioles different? How do you separate out talent from intangibles?
I see a team that produced 54.3 WAR in 2014 (using RA9 because the Orioles have a ton of pitchers who consistently beat their FIP’s). That team had 41.2 WAR in 2013 (using RA9). All of those WAR’s correlate very well with their win-loss record. Perhaps we should look at FIP and ERA differences and the unexpected breakouts (Davis, Machado, Pearce, etc.) as a reason instead of instantly jumping to “Orioles magic!”
How was Machado an unexpected breakout? He was the #3 overall pick, then was a consensus top 5 prospect in all of baseball.
When comparing teams (not comparing pitchers) you don’t use FIP or even ERA. You use runs against. The Orioles defense and bullpen make them extremely formidable and underrated.
Absolutely right. Defense and the bullpen are key.
While I don’t know if runs against is the correct metric, this is very much true: We use FIP and other metrics because we are trying to seperate pitcher quality from quality of defense to better predict how pitchers will do in the future and better say what only a pitcher’s contribution is in it. But when looking at team vs. team matchups, we know the defense and so on and thus should take tha into account: A team with the Orioles defense should be expected to outproduce their defense independant numbers (due to having a very good defense) and the opposite is true for the Tigers (who have a very poor defense), right? Obviously doesn’t happen 100%, but what in baseball does.
“Tigers are a superstar-laden club capable of turning it on at any time.”
With a bullpen capable of blowing the biggest lead at any time.
Just follow the same formula Boston used last year. Run up the pitch counts of the starters, then take batting practice against their relievers.
The problem with this is that the Orioles are exceptionally bad at running up pitch counts. Scherzer only had like 95 pitches when he got pulled in game 1. Why run up pitch counts when the opposing manager is a dumbass, though?
They’re bad at running up pitch counts in individual plate appearances, but stringing multiple hits together, even if you’re only averaging 3 pitches per PA or so, is a good way to get pitch counts to a decent level and chase a starter.
The Orioles are a very good team capable of beating anyone, and there is no asterisk in the standings as to how it is accomplished.
I have to confess: the Orioles have really surprised me.
WOOOO BIRDS ROYALS WORLD SERIES TAKE THAT STATNERDS WOOOOOOOOOOOO
Birds-Royals world series? That would be confusing, since both teams would get the home field advantage. But I’m sure the statnerds could figure it out, using their high powered computer thingees.
Maybe he meant Cardinals?
Or he meant ALCS
“Fans who see this team on a daily basis might understand them better than many analysts do. Buck Showalter certainly does.”
Someone else already singled this out (and it’s probably true for other teams as well), but this comment shows a lot of awareness, and it’s particularly welcome after Cameron’s defensive article a couple weeks ago. Stats don’t need to be defended for their own sakes. Science exists in the certain knowledge of its inadequacy. The stats and theories we currently use will all be improved on if intelligent people keep paying attention to them. And definitely, there’s something going on with this team that is more concrete and reliable than random variation.
The O’s have great at bats and are well managed. They stay alive and are good two strike contact hitters – at least this post season they sure are. They don’t have a flashy rotation but have a solid bullpen with a lot of good options, as well as a lot of depth – which gives Buck S. a lot of good options and he knows how to maximize his team. Detroit is a powerhouse team with a huge hole in the last three innings of any game. Those last 6-9 outs are impossible for them to accomplish with a mediocre bullpen and horrible defense. Sadly for them baseball doesnt have a clock.
When the O’s can make a starter throw 100 pitches in 5 innings, they are probably going to win. Good luck throwing 170 pitches, David Price.
Then again… Anything can happen.
It’s fairly easy to explain. Karmic retribution for Joba’s idiotic beard.