BP: The Orioles Are In and Out of It

[Just Regular]

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/76762/the-orioles-are-in-and-out-of-it/

Good article today, as BP (among others around the baseball interwebs) grapple with the reality these Orioles aren't the cardboard cutout punchline they've been pigeonholed as for about half a decade.

Towards the end there is a fun little chart with the great Mike Elias second guess we could easily be debating all offseason; the guesstimated 1-2-win dings willingly embraced by delaying Adley to Game 40, and turning a couple qualified big leaguers into A-ball pitchers (who may pitch 300-400 innings credibly in 2025).

They’re projected to wind up with an average record of 81.8-80.2, one that gives them 27.4% playoff odds based on all the results that exceed that mean. But with the help of the wayback machine, and using PECOTA to simulate the resulting 1,000 multiverses, things look rosier in a hurry:

Level of Messing with the Past	Projected Standings	Playoff Odds
Are you crazy, I watched TimeCop	82-80	8.1%
Kidnap Robinson Chirinos and leave him on a tropical island	84-78	38.3%
Kidnap Robinson Chirinos, and trick Mike Elias into falling into a pit trap covered with fronds and leaving him there for a couple of days near the deadline	85-77	68.8%

Mike Elias doesn’t care about 2022. He has his eyes on a bigger prize, and he isn’t willing to sacrifice anything for some short-term feel-good road playoff series in Houston. 

[Hallas]

Is the "kidnap Robinson Chirinos" scenario implying that Adley would start the season with us?  Because I thought he was injured.  He almost certainly would have either started the season with us or only been down for 2 weeks if he didn't have the injury.  I think they just left him in AAA to give him a decent rehab tuneup since he basically missed all of spring.

[Can_of_corn]

4 minutes ago, Hallas said:

Is the "kidnap Robinson Chirinos" scenario implying that Adley would start the season with us?  Because I thought he was injured.  He almost certainly would have either started the season with us or only been down for 2 weeks if he didn't have the injury.  I think they just left him in AAA to give him a decent rehab tuneup since he basically missed all of spring.

And maybe keep him away from Super 2 status and to diminish his chances at a top RoY finish.

Will have to see where the cutoff ends up.

[Just Regular]

12 minutes ago, Hallas said:

Is the "kidnap Robinson Chirinos" scenario implying that Adley would start the season with us?  Because I thought he was injured.  He almost certainly would have either started the season with us or only been down for 2 weeks if he didn't have the injury.  I think they just left him in AAA to give him a decent rehab tuneup since he basically missed all of spring.

Some of the PECOTA-loving BP flavor is the author suggests that because Jacob Nottingham was on the roster and PECOTA considered him a replacement level player, the Orioles could have avoided Chirinos' below replacement level performance.    The story goes as far as to say Chirinos "was the worst player in the league by a wide margin".

[Hallas]

1 hour ago, Can_of_corn said:

And maybe keep him away from Super 2 status and to diminish his chances at a top RoY finish.

Will have to see where the cutoff ends up.

We kept him down longer than we needed to for super 2 status.  And he might get top-2 ROY anyway because he's just been that good.  I'm not saying that the super-2 status wasn't icing on the cake, or maybe was seen as a secondary bonus, but I don't think it was the primary reason we kept him down.

 

That said, i'm 100% sure that if he was healthy he wouldn't have broke camp with the O's.

[Can_of_corn]

6 minutes ago, Hallas said:

We kept him down longer than we needed to for super 2 status.  And he might get top-2 ROY anyway because he's just been that good.  I'm not saying that the super-2 status wasn't icing on the cake, or maybe was seen as a secondary bonus, but I don't think it was the primary reason we kept him down.

 

That said, i'm 100% sure that if he was healthy he wouldn't have broke camp with the O's.

I don't know if Super 2 was a factor.  If it was they are predicting a rather early cutoff.

I trust that they have a good idea of when the cutoff will be and when the time comes we will be able to guess if it was a factor.

[Pickles]

The contention that Chirinos has cost us 4 games defensively, almost solely based on his framing, is a laughable proposition.  

[Hallas]

35 minutes ago, Pickles said:

The contention that Chirinos has cost us 4 games defensively, almost solely based on his framing, is a laughable proposition.  

Where are you getting 4 games from framing?  He's been worth -12 runs on framing by Fangraphs, so that's the equivalent to 1 win.

[Pickles]

3 minutes ago, Hallas said:

Where are you getting 4 games from framing?  He's been worth -12 runs on framing by Fangraphs, so that's the equivalent to 1 win.

I was referencing the article.  It was one of the claims being made.  And to be fair, it wasn't that he had cost us that much defensively, but that he was projected to over the course of the season.

[Can_of_corn]

3 minutes ago, Pickles said:

I was referencing the article.  It was one of the claims being made.  And to be fair, it wasn't that he had cost us that much defensively, but that he was projected to over the course of the season.

Pitch framing numbers tend to break with reality at either end of the curve.

[Hallas]

4 minutes ago, Pickles said:

I was referencing the article.  It was one of the claims being made.  And to be fair, it wasn't that he had cost us that much defensively, but that he was projected to over the course of the season.

Well that makes sense, over 150 games it would be 36 runs.  or almost 4 wins.  That's pretty wacky.

[Pickles]

1 minute ago, Hallas said:

Well that makes sense, over 150 games it would be 36 runs.  or almost 4 wins.  That's pretty wacky.

Well it was also prorated to his playing time, so maybe only half the games.  I don't see how that can be claimed.  By God, if that's the case Pedro Severino must have been costing us a dozen games the last few years.

[Can_of_corn]

Just now, Pickles said:

Well it was also prorated to his playing time, so maybe only half the games.  I don't see how that can be claimed.  By God, if that's the case Pedro Severino must have been costing us a dozen games the last few years.

As I said, the numbers on the edges are crazy.

If framing was that valuable it would show up more in free agent contracts.

[Pickles]

Just now, Can_of_corn said:

As I said, the numbers on the edges are crazy.

If framing was that valuable it would show up more in free agent contracts.

There are things unknowable.  Claiming to know them is dangerous.

[Hallas]

30 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

Pitch framing numbers tend to break with reality at either end of the curve.

 

I really don't know what to do about pitch framing.  I guess if basketball analytics are going to give James Harden credit for drawing 3 point shooting fouls we can give catchers credit for pitch framing.  But the premise feels really wrong to me.  The two trains of thought that I currently am leaning toward are that pitch framing is either overvalued across the board, or it's more or less correctly valued currently, but cannot be forcast for the future because it's highly dependent on umpire training and development, or the lack of robo umps.  I'd like to think we can assume that umpires are going to get better at not getting fooled by good pitch framers since they get graded on their work.  Or maybe we see an intermediate situation with robo-umps, where players get a challenge patch and they can make 1 challenge a game like you do in tennis.  Any of these scenarios would have varying effects to suppress the value of catcher framing to the point where projection of future framing wins long-term is almost pointless.

Edited August 16, 2022 by Hallas