Fangraphs: The Orioles Are Better Than We Thought, Again

[Can_of_corn]

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-orioles-are-better-than-we-thought-again/

At least they own it every year.

Leaving aside any issues of magnitude, this was the fifth year in a row that the Orioles won more games than they were projected to win. Five years in a row, the Orioles have been projected to finish at least a hair under .500. Five years in a row, the Orioles have finished at at least .500. Let?s say a given team has a 50% chance of beating its projection, and a 50% chance of falling short. It?s a bit of an over-simplification, but it?s good enough. To beat your projection five years in a row: 3.1% chance of happening. Slim chance. And the magnitudes matter.

[callahan09]

That third graph.... that is a huge outlier!

[Phantom]

Believe it or not, the Orioles had our second-lowest American League projected winning percentage. I know that doesn’t make us look great, but better to embrace your flaws than ignore them.

God bless fangraphs for this.

[Spy Fox]

Glad they included this part to reduce the "it's just luck" response:

BaseRuns strips away a lot of the randomness. Over the last five years, the Royals have won 25 more games than BaseRuns would’ve expected. The Orioles are tied for second at +24. Why don’t we take that away, just for fun? Here are five-year differences between BaseRuns wins and projected wins.

It’s still the Orioles in first, by 10 wins. So the projections haven’t just missed on account of the un-projectable events. The Orioles have very legitimately out-played their projections, even when you take away what’s mostly explained as random. In four of the last five years, the Orioles’ BaseRuns record has been better than the projected record by at least six wins. In the fifth year, they were the same. The point being, the Orioles have knocked their projections out of the park, and they’ve done it far more than anyone else.