Baltimore Orioles Baseball
Should Teams Shift on Manny Machado More?
Last season Manny Machado hit into 7 shifts. His batting average on balls in play when a shift was on was a lofty .571, while his BABIP with no shift was a more normal .324. That said, 7 samples is a ridiculously small sample size and tells us little about what...
Is the Stolen Base the Orioles’ New Offensive Weapon?
The Orioles' offense has been described a number of ways recently - boom-or-bust, stars-and-scrubs, home run leaders - and none of these phrases imply a team that can manufacture runs1 on the base path. Baltimore actually ranked 16th in stolen bases last season,...
An Optimized Oriole Lineup
Way back in 2007 three baseball analysts published a book titled The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball which took a look at many aspects of the game that could be improved upon through careful analysis and consideration. Among the topics discussed were...
BSL Roundtable: Nelson Cruz Edition
As Spring Training heads into week number two, most teams are getting their workouts in and starting to point towards the beginning of the spring exhibition schedule. The Orioles are no different other than signing their two biggest free agent acquisitions in the past...
10 Days Later, Duquette Changes Perception (And Reality) of 2014 Orioles
Rewind maybe 10 days or so and there wasn’t too much positive news about the Baltimore Orioles. Most publications listed the Orioles as having one of the worst off seasons as they headed into Spring Training*. Maybe it’s the Twitter Effect where we want all of our...
First Jimenez; Who’s Next for the Orioles?
The Orioles have announced the signing of starting pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez to a four-year, $50 million deal. The contract is noteworthy for a few reasons: first, the Orioles have done everything but scratch into a large stone tablet on top of a mountain that thou shalt...
What to Expect from Ubaldo Jimenez
I'm not going to attempt to decipher what the signing of Ubaldo Jimenez means for the team in the big picture. I won't try to assess how the deal impacts their attempts to re-sign players like Hardy or Wieters or Davis. I'm not going to make any predictions for the...
Orioles’ Waiting Results In Ubaldo Jimenez
There is that old saying about patience being a virtue. Dan Duquette showed that virtue all winter by not overspending or overreaching for players who brought minimal gains. Now, it appears that the winter of waiting finally brought something substantial to Baltimore....