The staff of Baseball Prospectus released their Pre-Season Predictions and you can see by the chart below that there was just one person who believes the Baltimore Orioles will win the division this season and a small handful of others that believe they won’t finish last. The vast majority of the BP staff believes they will finish last though. Why?
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1.5 |
1 |
64 |
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Is this a case of the simulations and various formulas used to predict individual and team performance making the vote for them easy to dismiss the Orioles as a legitimate contender? Are we really that much more certain the Boston Red Sox are this much better than the Orioles, or even the New York Yankees for that matter? I’ll admit though, it’s hard to argue with anyone picking the Tampa Bay Rays or the Toronto Blue Jays to win the division outright or earn a playoff spot this season.
Tampa Bay Rays
The Rays have been a very well run, and a very good organization for the last five years now. They did lose James Shields though and you can’t tell me the young guys they’ll be replacing him with will immediately be better. Well, you could tell me that but I’d have a tough time believing you. This organization is pretty well set for the next four or five years though as they’ve acquired another gaggle of solid prospects to develop.
Will they outright win the division? I don’t know because their offense still seems fairly anemic to me outside of Evan Longoria and Ben Zobrist, but Desmond Jennings could have a breakout year so that’s worth keeping an eye on. The starting rotation will still be solid without Shields as well, so you know that they will at least have a shot to win most games.
Toronto Blue Jays
The Blue Jays acquired the core of the Miami Marlins team that went on to lose 93 games, three more than the previous season without them, and scored fewer runs than the team did in their inaugural season back in 1993, with exception to the strike shortened 1994 season of course.
This team’s top slugger, Jose Bautista, is coming off of a brutal wrist injury and subsequent surgery that could make it difficult for him to regain all of his power right away at 32 years old. The group they acquired from the Marlins are all straddling the wrong side of 30, or aren’t far from it, and each come with concerns regarding their durability (Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson) or ability to adjust with diminishing stuff in the American League East (Mark Buehrle).
New York Yankees
Fans in New York are none too pleased that the team chose to forego free agency this year, at least in their usual sense, in an effort to get under that luxury tax threshold of $189M for next season. Needless to say, there’s a loophole in the luxury tax penalty rules that allows the Yankees, or any team really, to get under that magic number for one full season and have their penalties reset back to zero. The Yankees will no doubt be back to their usual free spending ways come 2015.
But the issue for this team is now and they’ll open the season with Derek Jeter, Curtis Granderson, and Mark Teixeira on the disabled list. This team was so hard up for a solution in the outfield until Granderson comes back that they willingly traded for a 34 year old Vernon Wells. I’m sure the name recognition helps out in the marketing department but how much better does he really make them over allowing a younger player to prove themselves such as a Melky Mesa, Thomas Neal, or even Zoilo Almonte?
Boston Red Sox
Then we come to the Boston Red Sox who made every effort to dump any aging veteran with future dead money tied to them on the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for players that may not even be in the organization over the coming season or two (although they were quick to part ways with James Loney).
They replaced those aging veterans with sizeable contracts with other aging veterans, which an argument could be and has been made that they overpaid for them, on shorter term deals. The Red Sox don’t appear to be any better than they were last season and have less overall talent on the roster to begin this season. While they are finally healthy and we can’t ignore that fact they are still not a playoff contender and behind Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz there is not a single pitcher in their rotation that I trust.
This team is currently in transition and getting their younger players like Will Middlebrooks and Jackie Bradley playing time to see what they’ve really got is what this season is all about.
Baltimore Orioles
I mentioned how just one person chose the Orioles to win the division this season, right? If not then allow me to reiterate. Just one person from Baseball Prospectus is predicting the Orioles to win, well, anything this year. The team with the most depth, the team coming off a 93 win season and a playoff run, the team that has probably been better run over the previous 12 to 14 months than either the Yankees or the Red Sox is being chosen to finish last by the vast majority of the Baseball Prospectus staff.
This team is still viewed as a perennial loser because they don’t have, what’s considered, a dominant ace in their starting rotation and because they don’t have a core group of players that can carry the offense. The interesting thing about those perceptions is that they are wrong.
Jason Hammel accumulated 2.6 WAR in just 118 innings before going down with a knee injury that led to surgery. He would have likely pitched around 190 innings and would have likely become a four WAR pitcher if it weren’t for the injury, and there were just 18 starters in all of baseball that were worth four or more WAR in last season.
Adam Jones and Chris Davis each hit over 30 home runs and likely won’t be slowing down any time soon as each are coming into their prime and are fresh off of a breakout season. Another thing that seems to go unmentioned when the Orioles are discussed is the fact that the core of their lineup (Adam Jones, Matt Wieters, and Chris Davis) are coming into their age 27 season and are fairly unlikely to regress from last season.
A team that is as healthy, as young, and as confident as the Orioles are in a division that appears to be as wide open as it was last season is being widely predicted to finish last. This is something that simply doesn’t add up to me because, historically speaking, teams that have a fair amount of depth across the board and are set up the way the Orioles are typically don’t go from 93 wins in one season and then drop nearly 20 of those wins the next.
Is this simply a case of the Orioles not being taken seriously because of their run differential that should largely be ignored due to a porous defense until August and because of a certain 15 year streak that they broke?
