The Path to Respectability: Baltimore Orioles

by Jason Wojciechowski

om nom nom nom nom
Photo by Paula McVann

I know I'm Dr. Negativo most of the time (I was born this way), but Bill's piece at Baseball Prospectus yesterday illustrating things that could go right for the Twins has inspired me. Over the next N days for some yet-to-be-determined N, I'm going to look at the worst team in each division and try to figure out how they might get to 88 wins. It's a modest goal for a good team, but these aren't good teams. It probably wouldn't even get AL East or AL West team into the playoffs, given the potential 95-100-win powerhouses at the tops of those divisions, but it would at least put the erstwhile bottom-feeder into the competition.

Where there is a clear worst team (like the Orioles in the AL East), I'll just go with them. Where there are multiple good choices, I won't choose: I'll do a post for each team. I will omit the Twins, though, because it's not like I have anything to say that Bill didn't already, and his piece is not behind the Prospectus pay-wall, so you can all read it even if you don't subscribe. (You should subscribe.)

Fix My Team!: Baltimore Orioles Edition

Yesterday, the Orioles were eliminated from the postseason, like the Astros before them. Twenty more teams are going to join them before the season finally winds down. We’re looking at those clubs that fall short and consider how to fix them for 2012. What should their plans be? What moves should they make? And who should they count on going forward?


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The Orioles came in to 2011 with high hopes that an infusion of veterans could gel around a young and talented pitching staff. The Orioles started 5-1 in its first week, and fans raised their expectations to epic heights, only to see the club predictably falter and fall to the bottom of the AL East, where they will have finished each of the last four seasons, and to 90+ losses, which they’ve done for their last 6.

The problem, ironically, has been that vaunted pitching staff, which has allowed 5.27 runs per game, more than a third of a run higher than the next closest team in the AL. The team’s defense also hasn’t helped matters either, turning in the lowest defensive efficiency in the American League, and by far the lowest Total Zone and Defensive Runs Saved totals, according to Baseball Reference. Such is the problem with having the statuesque and sloppy Mark Reynolds playing third base.

The Real Beltway Battle: Camden Yards vs. Nationals Park

By Mark Smith

All you can prove is that I was here, not that I illegally sat here for 6 innings.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been to too many ballparks in my life. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky is a fairly inconvenient place for such things as Cincinnati’s close but not attractive, St. Louis is farther away and would necessitate an actual trip, and everything else is at least 9 hours away. Add to that my mother’s desire to go to the beach for vacation, and you can see why I haven’t been to many parks. I, however, was in Washington, DC for the past month, and while I was there, I took in 4 games, splitting them between Nationals Park and Camden Yards.

Location: Neither place is in a great part of the city. Camden’s existence has improved the surrounding community, but if you go too far, you’re not in the best parts of town. I went with Chip Buck from Firebrand and IIATMS the first time, and after crossing the bridge right next to the stadium, he said, “Uh oh, I think we’ve gone too far,” and after I asked if I should hide, he replied, “I’ll let you know.” Not exactly reassuring. Nationals Park, however, isn’t much different, but it’s in an earlier stage of development than Camden. Located in Southwest DC, the park is in a bad part of town, but it does have some character with the Navy Yard nearby. After a few years, I expect it will improve in the way Baltimore did.

Tickets: I didn’t go big on the spending department here. We spent $9 the first night at Nationals Park with our Student IDs for a very upper-level seat, and we spent $18 on an upper-deck seat out in right field the next. At Camden, we spent around $20 the first time for an upper-deck seat behind third base and $10 for a seat close to the top the next time (though we may or may not have snuck down behind home plate after the third inning). Neither place was a huge bargain, but Camden might have been a bit cheaper.

Entrance: Camden has a clear advantage here. It’s a nice walk-up to the stadium and through the gates, especially with the prevalence of bricks for character. The warehouse is a pretty awesome sight, and the added plaques that denote home runs hit over the right field fence and into the area is a really nice detail. Nationals Stadium, on the other hand, is rather blah. The walk-up has a few vendors and a construction site look that shouldn’t be there several years after opening. Once you walk in, there’s a vanilla concrete entrance with a couple statues and some Geico and President whatchamacallits (they’re not statues; I guess over-sized bobblehead dolls is the best way to describe it) off to the left. They’re actually pretty cool, but they’re so far back in the corner in a picnic area that I almost missed them entirely.

Caught Stealing

By The Common Man

This story comes to us from former MLB reliever, OG blogger, and Twitter superstar CJ Nitkowski, who heard it from Tom Paciorek.  It's about how Rick Dempsey and Robin Yount's older brother, Larry (who would get injured warming up for his first MLB game, and never play again, which is another awesome story) played Little League together and went to the Little League World Series.  Their team, as it turned out, was being coached by a professional bank robber. 

TCM can't find the original June 30, 2002 article in the Baltimore Sun online archives, but Mr. Nitkowski pointed The Common Man to this reprint here, and here's a snippet:

AL Power Rankings Comments Explained

By The Common Man

It’s Power Rankings day again, so The Common Man is back to expand upon his thoughts within the rankings, this week on three AL teams, the Angels, White Sox, and Orioles.

3 Questions: Baltimore Orioles

By Bill

The Orioles are our second-to-last AL team to be questioned. They've made a bunch of fairly big moves this offseason, which you think would make them one of the more fun ones to talk about. You'd be wrong, though. Like, really wrong.


1. Is a good last-place team better than a bad last-place team?
Maybe that's not fair. PECOTA, after all, likes them to finish fourth, six games ahead of the Blue Jays. I just can't see it; the Jays have probably gotten a bit worse and the Orioles have gotten a bit better, but not to the tune of a 25-game swing from 2010.

The point, though, is that even that very rosy projection has the Orioles at 82-80 -- ten games out of first, nine out of a playoff spot, and stuck behind probably the three best teams in the league. So what are they doing acquiring three players -- Derrek Lee, Vladimir Guerrero and J.J. Hardy -- who will be free agents after this season? With those three guys, they've spent $21 million for, basically, a chance to move from a distant fifth place to a distant fourth.

And this is fun: a few days ago, GM Andy MacPhail was speaking to some law students when he said that Alex Rodriguez's huge 2001 contract with the Rangers was "the worst signing in the history of baseball in my view." And why? Because "the needle didn't move at all. The team didn't improve. Attendance didn't go up." MacPhail hasn't spent anywhere near A-Rod money this offseason, but it's hard to imagine these moves turning out any differently.

2. How Good Is Matt Wieters?
And speaking of PECOTA: in 2009, before he'd played a game in the big leagues, the system saw Wieters as putting up one of the greatest seasons a catcher has ever had: .311/.395/.544, with 31 home runs. Of course, that didn't happen, though he was about an average hitter in 2009, which in itself is impressive enough for a 23 year old catcher. But then he took a step back in 2010.

Wieters is still the same guy who was taken fifth overall in the draft, was the #1 prospect entering 2009, and hit an incredible .343/.438/.576 in his minor league career. We're still a couple years from being able to say he won't be a star in the major leagues. I get the sense people are writing him off already, but if you're going to bet on somebody to come up with a huge year out of nowhere this year (and its coming "out of nowhere" pretty much means you shouldn't bet on it, or whatever), Wieters would seem to be a pretty good choice.

3. Can Mark Reynolds Hit (in the AL East)?
I've written about Reynolds several times already (here and here and here), because he's fascinating. The point was basically that while strikeouts by hitters are overemphasized, it is really, really hard to remain a productive player while striking out as ridiculously often as Reynolds does. And he went a long way toward proving that last year, going .198/.320/.433. I think he's an amazingly talented hitter and there's a good chance he turns it around, but I also think that in a division with Sabathia and Burnett and Lester and Beckett and Price, he could strike out 250 times. I'm going to forget all that and just hope that proximity to his alma mater (and mine, sort of), the University of Virginia, helps him somehow.

Cutting Off One's Nose to Save Seven Million Dollars

By Bill

It's been pretty obvious for some time now that J.J. Hardy wasn't in the Twins' plans.  I knew they were going to trade him, and I knew they weren't going to get anything to speak of in return. In fact, I said as much here last week.

Still, watching it actually happen, via Twitter, was a bit like when you drop something fragile or filled with permanently-staining liquid and just have to watch it fall, as though in slow motion, powerless to stop it.  It sucked.

I don't want to go through and analyze the whole thing and point out all the reasons it's so obviously a bad move.  David Golebiewski and Aaron Gleeman and SweetSpot's Nick Nelson have already done a great job of that, and it's just depressing.

Instead, I want to focus on one thing in particular: I don't think I remember a single team pretending to try to contend -- at least not since the Twins dealt Matt Lawton in mid-2001 -- who traded away a starting player for whom they had no viable replacement.

No matter what you think of Hardy, you absolutely have to admit that when healthy, he/s at least an average starting shortstop (in fact, he's significantly better than that, but that's not my point here).  With Hardy gone, here are the Twins' potential shortstops: