Orioles Offensive Oddities

I love statistical oddities. If I hang around here long enough, I think you’ll all learn that about me. So for this week’s column, I thought I’d check in with some of my favorite statistical oddities about this Orioles offense. We’ll take a look at pitchers next week. (all stats listed are entering Tuesday)

Mark Trumbo had the team’s first triple and also the team’s first stolen base.

This is maybe my favorite stat or anecdote of the entire season. It’s not a team built on speed, but perhaps no player on the team typifies that more than Trumbo. It was his first stolen base since 2014. Somehow has has tripled three times in multiple seasons (2015, 2012).

The Orioles are second in isolated power in baseball.

This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it’s just a stat that isn’t really used a lot in the mainstream. In a nutshell, it’s slugging percentage minus batting average, and it gives you a sense of what kind of power an entire team has once it makes contact. Basically, it’s like showing that if two guys are both slugging .500, the one hitting .250 has shown a bit more pop than the guy hitting .300.  

Only the Mets (three) have hit fewer sacrifice flies than the Orioles (five).

Maybe there is or isn’t a great formula at play here, but off the top I just supposed a team that hits for a lot of power — an MLB-best 55 home runs — would maybe have a lot of sac flies with a flyball-heavy approach. Add to that a top-10 fly ball rate as a team, and this just seems a bit…..odd. The distribution of them has been strange, too: Joey Rickard and J.J. Hardy have two apiece, and Pedro Alvarez has one. But there are none from Manny Machado, Chris Davis or Adam Jones — or at least who I’d consider the usual suspects.

(Chat about this in the forums here!) 

The O’s are tied with the Rays (one each) for fewest sacrifice bunts.

Again not surprising, just interesting that they have just one sacrifice bunt. Any guesses who has it? That’s right, it’s Rickard as well.

Only four teams have grounded into more double plays than the Orioles (34).

In one respect it makes sense with a bunch of heavy-footed sluggers. But then again, they’re 24th in groundball rate as an offense (42.8 percent), so it’s a bit of a weird marriage there. Jones and Schoop — by no means the slowest of runners on the team — have combined for 14 of those double plays. That’s how many double plays the Rays have grounded into as a team.  

The Orioles are dead last in baseball with five steals. They’ve been caught five times, too.

I wasn’t surprised that they were last in baseball with number of steals, but I’m a bit more interested in the fact that they’ve been caught more times (five) than the Red Sox (two). The Red Sox have 30 (!) stolen bases. Machado has been the primary culprit here. He hasn’t stolen a base and has been caught three times.   

The Orioles lead MLB in popup rate (12.9 percent), but also HR/FB rate (16.5 percent).

For me this is pretty simple: live by the fly ball, die by the fly ball.  

The Orioles rank eighth in infield hits with 32.

This one stunned me. It’s not that there isn’t some speed on the team, but it’s just not part of the identity of the club. Rickard leads the way with seven, but Nolan Reimold, Jonathan Schoop and Hyun-Soo Kim each have four. That’s right, four of Kim’s 11 hits have been infield singles.  

The Orioles are third in pull percentage with regards to batted balls (42.2 percent).

It doesn’t surprise me that Hardy is among the team leaders in this respect having watched him with both the Twins and the Brewers. Ryan Flaherty (57.7 percent in a limited sampling) leads the way, but guys like Jones, Schoop, Caleb Joseph and Chris Davis are all contributing highly to the percentage this season.  

Only three teams have a higher “soft contact percentage” than the O’s (21 percent).

I guess it makes sense with all the popups, right? Oddly, the biggest contributors to this have been part-time players like Paul Janish, Kim and Flaherty with Nolan Reimold mixed in. My guess is the lower-quality players have pushed the needle further up here than you’d expect even in small samplings.

Only three teams are seeing fewer fastballs than the Orioles at 53.5 percent.

Maybe a respect factor for the team leading baseball in home runs? This would not shock me.

Just three teams are swinging and missing more often than the Orioles (10.9 percent).

….and yet the team has only the 13th-highest strikeout rate overall. To me this suggests a team that shoots for the downs on strikes one and two, with perhaps a (slightly) more contact-friendly approach later in counts.

Alright. So anything in the numbers that surprises you? Any of my diagnoses that you disagree with?