Has our competitive window closed???

[osfan83]

Has MSK or Herman posted in this thread. Is DocJJ a poster who basks in the Orioles misery? I know I am not one. I just thought there were people in this thread who are worried about the future of the team and expressed what they believe are the problems. Unfortunately those people seem to get classified as "unhappy" and "not a real fan". Kind of like during the Vietnam War when protesters were told to "love it or leave it".

I think it's all in the way it is presented. To me there is a big difference between:

" This team faces many challenges this off season, and in my opinion, it is unlikely that we will make the post season in 2016"

and

" This team is doomed! No moves will be made to upgrade the team this off season, and nobody will play any better than they did in 2015. Get ready for another long stretch of losing!"

[osfan83]

You can be optimistic and hopeful and still be reasonable. The Orioles are losing 3 free agents. These 3 players are worth over 40M on the open market. Assuming the Orioles spend wisely it will be good just to replace what we lost, and that was from an 81 win team. I am hopeful that Duquette makes some great moves this offseason, whether that be a low cost Korean or Japanese or Cuban FA (cheap compared to ML free agents). Maybe Mancini is ready to assume the 1B position. As a fan, I can be optimistic. If I try to be objective, I think the odds are against us.

Why do people keep saying that this is an 81 win team? That's what they were in 2015. You could take that exact same team and play in 2016 and win anywhere from 72 to 89 games! Over a 162 game season, I would bet that 40 games probably could go either way based on a bad or good bounce, a breeze blowing a bit harder in the right or wrong direction, an umpire calling a borderline pitch a ball or a strike.

Pretty much any team that played .500 ball the year before, without any changes, has a realistic shot at the playoffs the next year.....or a realistic shot at 72 wins.

[DrungoHazewood]

I think it's all in the way it is presented. To me there is a big difference between:

" This team faces many challenges this off season, and in my opinion, it is unlikely that we will make the post season in 2016"

and

" This team is doomed! No moves will be made to upgrade the team this off season, and nobody will play any better than they did in 2015. Get ready for another long stretch of losing!"

My issue is the hyperbolic nonsense, like seemingly serious suggestions that whatever happens this offseason will probably lead to a decade of losing.

[Redskins Rick]

My issue is the hyperbolic nonsense, like seemingly serious suggestions that whatever happens this offseason will probably lead to a decade of losing.

I am in total agreement with you here!

[osfan83]

You sounded so pleased that the Orioles were in first place after 75 games, as if that means anything. The fact that the Orioles had the worst record in the league against teams with winning records means that any arbitrary date you select to make a point is suspect and lacks context.

The Cubs got swept in the NLCS like the O's got swept last year. The difference is the Cubs have an ownership and GM committed to improving and winning. The Orioles showed their fan base that improving and winning are not priorities only lucky by products of maximizing profits

Why can you only view things in hindsight? So when the O's were in first 75 games in, you were not happy? You were miserable because you knew they would not hold the lead so what is the point?

I'll tell you this...if the O's are in first in 2016 75 games in, I'll be pretty pumped!

[abbott]

Why do people keep saying that this is an 81 win team? That's what they were in 2015. You could take that exact same team and play in 2016 and win anywhere from 72 to 89 games! Over a 162 game season, I would bet that 40 games probably could go either way based on a bad or good bounce, a breeze blowing a bit harder in the right or wrong direction, an umpire calling a borderline pitch a ball or a strike.

Pretty much any team that played .500 ball the year before, without any changes, has a realistic shot at the playoffs the next year.....or a realistic shot at 72 wins.

So the 96 win team in 2014 was a bounce or two, a breeze away or a borderline call away from 87 wins? They were just plain lucky in 2014? Or were they so unlucky that they should have been a 106 win team?

[DrungoHazewood]

So the 96 win team in 2014 was a bounce or two, a breeze away or a borderline call away from 87 wins? They were just plain lucky in 2014? Or were they so unlucky that they should have been a 106 win team?

Article quoting Tom Tango:

There?s a statistical limit to how accurate any projection about a team can be in the long run. Years ago, sabermetrician Tom Tango researched the amount of talent and luck that go into team winning percentages and found that chance explains one-third of the difference between two teams? records. That makes it hard to predict how many times a team will win over a season. The smallest possible root-mean-square error (a mathematical way of testing a prediction?s accuracy) for any projection system over an extended period of time is 6.4 wins. In a single season, forecasters can ? and do ? beat an RMSE of 6.4. But whenever that happens, it?s due to luck. The amount of random variance that goes into team records makes the 6.4 barrier literally impossible to beat over a large number of seasons.¹ Over time, no forecaster?s system can ever do better.

So even if God himself told you that the Orioles had a true talent of 90 wins you'd still have 6.4 wins of uncertainty in their actual record. Since God is never so forthcoming, you'll always have 8, 10, 12 or more wins of uncertainty about how good a team actually is.

[mdbdotcom]

Article quoting Tom Tango:

So even if God himself told you that the Orioles had a true talent of 90 wins you'd still have 6.4 wins of uncertainty in their actual record. Since God is never so forthcoming, you'll always have 8, 10, 12 or more wins of uncertainty about how good a team actually is.

Why do you bring up God when everyone knows it's Duquette's fault?

[weams]

So the 96 win team in 2014 was a bounce or two, a breeze away or a borderline call away from 87 wins? They were just plain lucky in 2014? Or were they so unlucky that they should have been a 106 win team?

They were a left-handed power hitter away from the World Series.

[osfan83]

So the 96 win team in 2014 was a bounce or two, a breeze away or a borderline call away from 87 wins? They were just plain lucky in 2014? Or were they so unlucky that they should have been a 106 win team?

Yep... the 2014 team could have won 87 games. If you took that exact same team and played the season over again, I would not be shocked if they won 87, 94 or 102 games.

[DrungoHazewood]

Why do you bring up God when everyone knows it's Duquette's fault?

One of the more reasonable explanations for the 2012 season was that someone sold their soul to the devil.

[DrungoHazewood]

Yep... the 2014 team could have won 87 games. If you took that exact same team and played the season over again, I would not be shocked if they won 87, 94 or 102 games.

If you run a good simulation of any baseball season a thousand or 10,000 or 1,000,000 times you'll get cases where the team that actually won 81 games wins 60 or fewer and others where they win 100 or more. Even though they have exactly the same starting conditions for each and every player in the league each time.

[weams]

One of the more reasonable explanations for the 2012 season was that someone sold their soul to the devil.

You know it was Andino's. He'll suffer eternity for Baltimore.

[osfan83]

If you run a good simulation of any baseball season a thousand or 10,000 or 1,000,000 times you'll get cases where the team that actually won 81 games wins 60 or fewer and others where they win 100 or more. Even though they have exactly the same starting conditions for each and every player in the league each time.

So many variables. Down a run in the 8th, wind blowing out gives you a 2 run homer for the win....the next day the wind is blowing in, and that exact same hit falls short and you lose.

The next week you are down in the 9th, but the closer on the other team has a sore arm from pitching in the series before you got to town, you take advantage of that and score two in the 9th to win. The next night, the same situation, the closer is healthy and you lose.

[OFFNY]

JohnnyK27 said:

 

I knew pretty early that they wouldn't catch the Yankees ........

 

DrungoHazewood said:

 

Knew is the key word. You knew the future because you'd decided on the narrative before it happened. But many people in prior years knew that the 2012 Orioles would never compete, and they knew that the 2014 Orioles were nothing at all like a 96-win team that would lap the division. That your crystal ball worked this year doesn't mean you really have a crystal ball. You didn't know anything about the future. You suspected that the team wouldn't play all that well based on the delta between who you wanted them to sign and who they actually signed, and this year the outcomes happened to match your discontent.

 

o

 

In 2012, the Orioles were 46-44 after 90 games.

They had just gone 7-17 over their previous 24 games.

Their starting pitching was in such tatters and were so desperate that they called up Tommy Hunter from AAA-Norfolk to try to stop the bleeding. In fact, our ace starter at the time (Jason Hammel) had just gone down with a knee injury that required surgery, which would subsequently sideline him for at least the next 7 weeks.

At that point, almost every Oriole fan on the planet (myself included) was fearing a repetition of what happened in 2005, when the Orioles were in 1st place until late June, and then went 32-60 over their final 90 games to finish at 74-88. At that point, all I cared about was the Orioles rebounding enough to eke out a winning season (83-79, 84-77, 85-77, etc) to break the 14 consecutive season losing streak, and start to change the mindset and reputation of loserdom that the Orioles' franchise was suffering from at the time.

Lo and behold, Tommy Hunter pitched 7.33 innings of 1-run ball to get the Orioles the W that they so desperately needed, the Orioles went on to win their next 4 games to push their record to 51-44, and they never dipped back below 3 games over .500 the rest of the way. From that point onward (the Tommy Hunter game), the Orioles went 47-25 over their final 72 games of the season ........ just the opposite of what many of us (myself included) were fearing might happen.

I'm not asserting that the 2015 Orioles had a good chance to wind up doing what the 2012 Orioles did (win 93 games, and claim a playoff berth) in June or July, and I did not think that they would myself. The circumstances surrounding the 2012 Orioles and the 2015 Orioles were different, and in hindsight, one could point out the reasons why the 2012 Orioles finished at 93-69, and the 2015 Orioles at 81-8. Rather, I am pointing out a recent example of "knowing" what would happen before it happened not turning out the way that most people (myself included) expected them to.