Soccer Dad

Can I get excited yet?

The Yankees are now 7 1/2 games out of first place, their worst deficit since ....?
Why September 1997. The last time the O's won the division (or appeared in the playoffs, for that matter.)
And Peter Gammons tells us that the O's 16-7 record as of the end of April suggests that they have a better than 50% chance of making the playoffs. (Remember the 17 - 7 record is as of May 1, not April 30)

Through Sunday, Baltimore has the second-best record in the majors at 17-7 (a .708 winning percentage). The White Sox have the best at 18-7 (.720). Since 1976, 13 teams have finished April with a .700 (or better) winning percentage, and 10 have made the playoffs. The following is the gross data, and teams that were at those percentage levels heading into Sunday:

The O's have scored more runs than anyone else in the Majors powered by an awesome .865 team OPS (nearly 100 points higher than last year's respectable but hardly extraordinary .777 OPS.)
Also I see that the O's are 27 for 31 in stolen base attempts and lead the league in successful steals. (Only Boston 7-0 and SF 15-2 have a better percentage of success.)
With 144 runs scored and 113 allowed the O's have a projected winning pct (using the "Pythogorean" method (144 ^ 2) / ( ( 144 ^ 2) + (113 ^ 2) ) ) of .619 that translate to about 15 wins, so they aren't overperforming by that much. (Though over the course of a whole year such an overperformance would translate to about 13 wins - a signifcant amount.) However the O's won't win 70% of the games they play the rest of the year. No one does. The question is how much they will come down.
Right now they're ten games over .500 so if they split their remaining games they'll end up 86-76. I could live with that. I'd prefer to see playoffs, but a respectable season would be such a welcome surprise at this point, I'd find my interest in the team significantly renewed.
What are the reasons for concern. On the whole an .865 OPS is high and it can't be expected to continue. In terms of individual performances, Brian Roberts and Luis Matos are significantly overperforming so they can be expected to return (somewhat, at least) to earth.
On the pitching side, Erik Bedard has been tremendous (with one exception). Rodrigo Lopez is showing that 2003 was the fluke and Bruce Chen finally seems to be realizing the potential so many thought he had. However the pitching staff still is allowing way to many baserunners. Allowing nearly 1.5 runners per inning as they did last year is more consistent with the 5+ ERA that the team had most of last year than with this year's 4.58. (In fairness, last year's ERA ended up at 4.70, not much higher than this year's current measure.) And with one of the lowest number of ground-out double plays, the O's should reasonably expect their runs allowed to rise.
It's safe to assume that the Orioles will run into some rough patches this year. They will score runs less frequently and allow them more frequently as the year goes on. How much that will hurt them isn't clear right now. As I noted above, I don't think that 86 wins is too incredible to believe right now and that would be wonderful.

Posted by SoccerDad at May 2, 2005 4:34 AM