It’s projection season in baseball, and as a fan one has to take the good with the bad. The good is that real, meaningful baseball isn’t too far off — and even closer if you get excited about spring training — and depending on where you live, nice(r) weather is coming soon as well. As a Minnesota native, that’s what I cling to.
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But the bad, at least as far as Orioles fans are concerned at this point, comes in the form of what each of these outlets forecast for the team this season. And while the Fangraphs iteration of projections got people a bit riled up — the team is holding steady at an AL-worst 78 wins as of this writing — those would be considered rosy projections when compared to what PECOTA has in store of Baltimore fans.
PECOTA is the proprietary projection system native to Baseball Prospectus, the preceding baseball website to those like Fangraphs that lent credence to the idea that there was a deeper understanding of the game that we were missing. And while there was a period of time in which PECOTA was perceived to be “broken,” public perception appears to be that the system has at least made progress toward reaching its previous glory.
And now for the hard part: PECOTA has the Orioles pegged as the worst team in the American League — with a 72-90 record.
That’s a pretty crushing blow coming off winning 81 games a season ago and winning the East a year before that. But apparently the numbers feel the O’s are destined to backpedal despite not having a remarkably different team than a year ago, sans Wei-Yin Chen but with the possible addition of Yovani Gallardo. Of course, with Gallardo not an iron-clad member of the team, he’s not figured into the projections, but it’s not as though he’s going to be the pivot man between a 72-win season and an 80-win one. As far as PECOTA is concerned, the Orioles’ issues run deeper.
Let’s take a look under the hood.
From an offensive standpoint, not much of a fallback is projected. The Orioles scored 713 runs a season ago, and PECOTA pegs them for 697 this year. Roughly speaking, that’s a run every 10 games or so. Not much of a difference. The projections have Matt Wieters pretty much sustaining what he did last year but for a full season — probably a very strong deal for him, as he seeks a long-term deal next offseason — though it might be tough to ask him to amass 500-plus plate appearances after combining for just 394 the last two seasons. There might be a fair amount of DH’ing in his future. Nothing absurd stands out in the rest of the infield, with Chris Davis pegged to hit nearly 40 home runs with a .255/.333/.518 line, with Jonathan Schoop (.248/.281/.430) falling back a bit from last year but J.J. Hardy (.249/.287/.391) regaining his form a bit. Neither of those seem outlandish.
The projections do forecast a bit of a hit to Manny Machado’s line from a season ago. Last year, Machado had a coming of age, hitting .286/.359/.502 in one of the finest age-22 seasons we’ve seen from a third baseman in quite some time. This season, PECOTA has Machado hitting .280/.329/.462 with 22 home runs — quite a decline from 35 a season ago. Chances are, it’s weighting Machado’s previous seasons — when he was both A. incredibly young and B. more injury prone — more than fans might like. It can be easy to fall into the trap of “player A. is young, he can only get better!” and it seems as though PECOTA is trying to serve as a cautionary tale of this. Still, it seems as though Machado’s strides — including playing in all 162 games last year — should favor his chances of beating the projections.
As the roster stands right now — AKA barring an outfield addition in the final week(s) of the offseason — the projections see an outfield of Hyun-Soo Kim in left, Adam Jones in center and Mark Trumbo in right. Nolan Reimold is pegged to vulture 15 percent of the playing time on each side of Jones, but that seems a bit conservative considering Trumbo’s outfielding abilities — or lack thereof. Reimold is still pegged for 302 plate appearances (roughly a half season between left, right and DH) with a .237/.309/.400 line. If he hits like that, I believe he could grab even more playing time from Trumbo, who is pegged for just 0.3 WARP (essentially WAR for our purposes here) despite hitting .252/.303/.467 with nearly 30 home runs. PECOTA likes Jones — .277/.314/.474 — for the most part, but this group has a chance to be a real disaster if the club doesn’t sign Dexter Fowler or Austin Jackson. Jackson actually won’t be enough of a life preserver to save the group, but he could bail out the pitching staff from any collateral damage of having Trumbo in right on a regular basis.
Jimmy Paredes (.255/.284/.389) rounds out what projects to be a pretty average offense, and seems to only further drive home the point that adding a bat could help quite a bit. Even taking a shot on a lottery ticket like Pedro Alvarez — in other words, Trumbo 2.o — could give this offense the necessary boost to get it over the hump and help narrow the gap between it and the pitching staff.
The pitching staff is where it all falls apart. Let’s talk about that next week.
Orioles Analyst
Warne is a Minnesota Twins beat reporter for 105 The Ticket’s Cold Omaha website as well as a sportswriter for Sportradar U.S. in downtown Minneapolis. He also contributes to FanGraphs / RotoGraphs.