Do we really understand our team's strengths and weaknesses?

[Can_of_corn]

48 minutes ago, Hallas said:

Those 30+ runs allowed by the outfield defense over league average could have had a hand in it too.

I hope Jones can figure out how to throw again.  He had a nearly 2-win swing on defense alone between 2015 and 2016.  We still need to sign a RF that can play a little defense though.

Do you think the O's missed Cruz's glove?

[Aristotelian]

4 hours ago, Frobby said:

 

OK, so I did some quickie analysis.   Since 2000, World Series teams have averaged 4.15 runs and 0.93 homers per game in the WS.    In those years, major league teams averaged 4.56 runs and 1.04 HR in the regular season.   (Note: I don't know what the actual teams that went to the World Series averaged; that's more work than I care to do right now.)   So, runs in general are down by 9% in the WS, while homers in general are down 11%.     So, that suggests a slight disadvantage for homer-reliant teams in the post-season, but I'd say it's not a huge effect compared to the general downturn in offense.

I think that has more to do with pitching matchups than weather...

[crissfan172]

7 hours ago, Frobby said:

I honestly didn't think the O's were more streaky on offense than most other teams in 2012-15.   But it would be hard to take that position in 2016.  

I do think that because most of us are so focused on the O's, we don't notice the hot and cold streaks of other teams and tend to think our streaks are more pronounced than others'.    Some time this winter I'm going to try to come up with a method to test whether it is actually true.  

I think I'm going to try and tackle this tonight. Hopefully I'll have something done by the morning. 

[oriolediehard]

3 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

Do you think the O's missed Cruz's glove?

He is mostly a DH.  The O's won the division with him.  Anyway who is available for the O's to get a good hitter,good defensive OF'er,a guy who takes walks and steals bases for the O's to get for 2017? The only players available are Encarnacion and Trumbo who are DH's. We can use Rickard maybe one of the rule 5 players for OF defense, we can depend on our offense from Davis,Machado,possibly Welingtion and either of the 2 DH's I mentioned.  Use those 2 Rickard /rule 5 outfielders mainly for defense and we can live without their bats.

 

[Aristotelian]

9 hours ago, Frobby said:

I honestly didn't think the O's were more streaky on offense than most other teams in 2012-15.   But it would be hard to take that position in 2016.  

I do think that because most of us are so focused on the O's, we don't notice the hot and cold streaks of other teams and tend to think our streaks are more pronounced than others'.    Some time this winter I'm going to try to come up with a method to test whether it is actually true.  

I actually don't think we are streaky in terms of going hot and cold. We had an extremely hot June and a decent April. Aside from that, our OBP was below average consistently, including a sustained stretch July, August, and September. Our runs scored coincided closely with our OBP except for August when we were #1 in HR, #25 in OBP, and #15 in runs scored. Every other month, we were scoring runs when the OBP was good, and not scoring when the OBP was bad, regardless of the number of HR.

April  Runs #9  - HR #3 - OBP #8

May  Runs #26 - HR #11 -  OBP #21

June Runs #1 - HR #1 - OBP #1

July Runs #28 - HR #15 - OBP #28

August Runs #15 - HR #1 - OBP #25

September Runs #22 - HR #3 - OBP #26

Looks to me that our ranking in Runs is correlated much more closely with OBP than with HR. We were in the top three in HR four times but we were in the top three in Runs only once and top ten only twice. Meanwhile, both times we were in the top 10 in OBP we were in the top 10 in runs. We were in the bottom 10 in runs 3 of the 4 times we were in the bottom 10 in OBP.

[Moondoggie]

7 hours ago, oriolediehard said:

The O's need to sign a slugger for the O's to compete in 2018. Either sign Encarnation or Trumbo. Anybody is fooling themselves if they think Trey Mancini is going to do the job to replace them.  Remember when the O's thought they could win without Nelson Cruz.  The truth hurts.

http://birdswatcher.com/2016/12/16/baltimore-orioles-encarnacion/?utm_campaign=FanSided+Daily&utm_source=FanSided+Daily&utm_medium=email   

I would love to sign Encarnacion, but not because the Orioles need a big slugger. They don't. They still have plenty of guys to hit home runs. What they need are guys that can get on base ahead of the power guys (and hopefully run a little bit). I would advocate signing two corner outfielders who fit that description and using Kim as a DH against right-handed pitching (thus keeping Kim's OBP abilities in the lineup while improving the outfield defense). But I would certainly take Encarnacion and his consistency. He manages to sock those 40 homers every year without striking out an inordinate amount (he was over 100 Ks last season for the first time since 2008). With more guys on base at the top of the order and less striking out to strand those runners, the Orioles could have quite an offense. Encarnacion also isn't frustratingly streaky like Davis and Trumbo. He just goes about his business every night.

But it's still all about the pitching. And the pitching is helped by good defense.

[El Gordo]

54 minutes ago, Moondoggie said:

I would love to sign Encarnacion, but not because the Orioles need a big slugger. They don't. They still have plenty of guys to hit home runs. What they need are guys that can get on base ahead of the power guys (and hopefully run a little bit). I would advocate signing two corner outfielders who fit that description and using Kim as a DH against right-handed pitching (thus keeping Kim's OBP abilities in the lineup while improving the outfield defense). But I would certainly take Encarnacion and his consistency. He manages to sock those 40 homers every year without striking out an inordinate amount (he was over 100 Ks last season for the first time since 2008). With more guys on base at the top of the order and less striking out to strand those runners, the Orioles could have quite an offense. Encarnacion also isn't frustratingly streaky like Davis and Trumbo. He just goes about his business every night.

But it's still all about the pitching. And the pitching is helped by good defense.

Where are you playing Encarnacion if Kim is DH?

[oriolediehard]

Where are we going to find that hitter who can get on base with good defense?

[Moondoggie]

27 minutes ago, El Gordo said:

Where are you playing Encarnacion if Kim is DH?

I'm not moving Kim to DH if Encarnacion is on board. What I said was that I advocate signing two corner outfielders and moving Kim to DH, BUT I would happily take Encarnacion because of his consistency. But the chances of the Orioles signing Encarnacion are practically nil.

[crissfan172]

13 hours ago, Tony-OH said:

I think there is very little doubt that an offense that gets on base is a more consistent offense than the low OBP, big power offenses the Orioles have employed. One of my biggest critics of Duquette is that he built a one-dimensional offense and that is why the teams has long dry spells with the offense and that makes them tough to watch at times. 

 

13 hours ago, Frobby said:

I honestly didn't think the O's were more streaky on offense than most other teams in 2012-15.   But it would be hard to take that position in 2016.  

I do think that because most of us are so focused on the O's, we don't notice the hot and cold streaks of other teams and tend to think our streaks are more pronounced than others'.    Some time this winter I'm going to try to come up with a method to test whether it is actually true.  

So I tried to figure out if we were as streaky as we seemed compared to the league (spoiler: we were), and I also tried to figure out what makes an offense consistent. To figure out which teams were most volatile, I took the standard deviation of each team's R/G per month. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_cQP_BMtiXXY1Fremp4REwtR28/view?usp=sharing

As you can see, the Orioles' runs scored per month varied the most. However, I couldn't find a direct correlation between any statistic and volatility. The one stat I would like to test it against is "percentage of runs scored via the home run", but unfortunately that data isn't readily available. I'm really not sure there is a reason for why a team is more or less streaky than others. At the very least, not one that can be easily measured by statistics. 

 

[Frobby]

8 hours ago, crissfan172 said:

 

So I tried to figure out if we were as streaky as we seemed compared to the league (spoiler: we were), and I also tried to figure out what makes an offense consistent. To figure out which teams were most volatile, I took the standard deviation of each team's R/G per month. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_cQP_BMtiXXY1Fremp4REwtR28/view?usp=sharing

As you can see, the Orioles' runs scored per month varied the most. However, I couldn't find a direct correlation between any statistic and volatility. The one stat I would like to test it against is "percentage of runs scored via the home run", but unfortunately that data isn't readily available. I'm really not sure there is a reason for why a team is more or less streaky than others. At the very least, not one that can be easily measured by statistics. 

 

Thanks for doing that, and I'm not too surprised by the outcome for 2016.    Without going to the trouble of doing this for all the teams, I'd be interested to know what the Orioles standard deviation was for each of 2012-15.   We've basically been a low OBP, high HR team during that entire time.  

[Number5]

10 hours ago, crissfan172 said:

 

So I tried to figure out if we were as streaky as we seemed compared to the league (spoiler: we were), and I also tried to figure out what makes an offense consistent. To figure out which teams were most volatile, I took the standard deviation of each team's R/G per month. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_cQP_BMtiXXY1Fremp4REwtR28/view?usp=sharing

As you can see, the Orioles' runs scored per month varied the most. However, I couldn't find a direct correlation between any statistic and volatility. The one stat I would like to test it against is "percentage of runs scored via the home run", but unfortunately that data isn't readily available. I'm really not sure there is a reason for why a team is more or less streaky than others. At the very least, not one that can be easily measured by statistics. 

 

Thanks for the work on this, but why calendar month?  Wouldn't the results be different if we went from, say, the 12th of one month thru the 11th of the next?  Calendar month is really just as arbitrary, isn't it?

Just guessing at what would make any team better over one 30-day period than another, my inclination would be that factors such as strength of schedule, pitching match-ups, home/away schedule, and injuries (both for that team and their opponents) have a lot more to do with it than anything we can put a finger on statistically. 

[Frobby]

4 minutes ago, Number5 said:

Thanks for the work on this, but why calendar month?  Wouldn't the results be different if we went from, say, the 12th of one month thru the 11th of the next?  Calendar month is really just as arbitrary, isn't it?

Just guessing at what would make any team better over one 30-day period than another, my inclination would be that factors such as strength of schedule, pitching match-ups, home/away schedule, and injuries (both for that team and their opponents) have a lot more to do with it than anything we can put a finger on statistically. 

The answer is obvious - it's easy to find monthly splits.   To do a more sophisticated analysis would take 100 hours of work and/or require a pretty powerful computer program.    

[Number5]

6 minutes ago, Frobby said:

The answer is obvious - it's easy to find monthly splits.   To do a more sophisticated analysis would take 100 hours of work and/or require a pretty powerful computer program.    

I agree that calendar month splits are readily found.  That doesn't mean that they are necessarily a meaningful measurement, does it?  As I said, there are many possible reasons for the differences in performance at different times in the season that are not being taken into account, and if we chose another 30-day period other than the one beginning on the first of each month, the results would very likely happen to be quite different.  I don't know that for certain, of course, and I'm not about to spend 100 hours of work trying to find out , but it just makes sense logically to me.  I would strongly doubt that any team's fluctuations are always up or down on the same dates in every calendar month.  Therefore, using a different starting date of the month in the 30 day periods for your comparison will yield different results, wouldn't it?  After all, you would be breaking up some of the "cold streaks" and "hot streaks" into different 30 day periods, but not others, right?  I'm not even sure that 30-day periods are the best way to measure the "streakiness" of baseball teams.  One week or 10-day periods would seem more appropriate to me, although the task of finding a way to measure that would appear to be even more burdensome. 

Perhaps we sometimes try to find statistical explanations for things which really can't be statistically analyzed.  Some of us may recall the season where, for whatever reason, Ken Singleton would hit a home run every time Mike Flanagan pitched.  It was a strange phenomenon.  There really is no way to provide a valid reason for that statistically.  It just plain happened.  And it was fun.  Why pitchers, hitters, and all athletes, in fact, "have it" one day and not another day is just one of those mysteries of sport.  As they say, "That's why they play the games."

As far as this particular discussion, I'm not so sure that a team with many power hitters is any more prone to "streakiness" than a team built to score in other ways.  In fact, it seems to me that having numerous power guys actually would act to overcome the "streakiness" of each individual.  On a day Trumbo goes 0-4 perhaps Davis and Schoop each hit 2-run homers and the team wins 4-3.  A team built on getting on base and scratching out runs requires more players to not have bad days that a power-laden team, or so it seems to me.  Who knows? 

[weams]

14 minutes ago, Number5 said:

  On a day Trumbo goes 0-4 perhaps Davis and Schoop each hit 2-run homers and the team wins 4-3.  A team built on getting on base and scratching out runs requires more players to not have bad days that a power-laden team, or so it seems to me.  Who knows? 

Home runs are sure things. Runners get stranded on third ALL THE TIME.