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Captain Obvious: the O’s won’t beat good teams pitching like this


Frobby

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If they play .500 ball the rest of the way they’ll be at about 86 wins. This got TB in the playoffs last year. This team wasn’t built to win the division so it’s probably best not get ahead of ourselves. 
 

Either way, they’ve done what they needed to do. But I don’t expect them to continue with this success. SP isn’t great, BP seems to be playing over their heads, hitting can be great but there’s also quite a bit of lackluster spots. Plus, Elias has made a habit of avoiding doing anything bold, so it’s sink or swim for the guys we got. Means can provide a boost down the road hopefully. 


Overall, if 86 wins is where they’re at…I’d have signed up for that with no issues at the start of the season. 

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The SP, outside of Kyle Gibson, has been putrid. Even Rodriquez has looked shaky at best. Even though it's only been a handful of starts, he looks like Chris Tillman 2.0. Even when he gets ahead of batters, he has no out pitch, ad the batters foul off pitch after pitch. 

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41 minutes ago, Brooks The Great said:

Braves easily have the best offense in baseball from a pure talent perspective. I'm not hopeful about this series or really even most of the rest of the month of May, especially since the roster isn't optimized. It's time to cut bait with McKenna and O'Hearn, and Westburg needs to be brought up to play regularly. Cowser shouldn't be far behind either, and I'd rather see Ortiz playing 2B instead of Frazier on both sides of the ball.

But this team does tend to play up or down to its competition, including last season.

If going 17-5 outside the AL East and winning all non-ALE series is "playing down to the competition", sign me up for more.

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47 minutes ago, Moshagge3 said:

I was scared of Atlanta before, then I looked at their box score from today and saw they have Kevin Pillar. Now I'm petrified. How many years has that dude been torturing us?

Kevin Pillar, over the course of 91 games against the Os, has hit .321 with an OPS of .868.  His 47 career RBI against us is 15 more than he has against anyone else.  Absurd.  

I live here in Atlanta and I will be at the game tomorrow night.  

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We're getting near the time where Elias needs to package some of this excess positional player talent in the farm system to land a TOR starting pitcher or at the very least a solid #3 starter. 

Make a trade and get Means back (even if not at full strength) will help bolster the pitching staff.

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30 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

We're getting near the time where Elias needs to package some of this excess positional player talent in the farm system to land a TOR starting pitcher or at the very least a solid #3 starter. 

Make a trade and get Means back (even if not at full strength) will help bolster the pitching staff.

No one is trading anyone in May. We will have to limp to July and hope we are still above .500 before anything happens

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37 minutes ago, OsFanSinceThe80s said:

We're getting near the time where Elias needs to package some of this excess positional player talent in the farm system to land a TOR starting pitcher or at the very least a solid #3 starter. 

Make a trade and get Means back (even if not at full strength) will help bolster the pitching staff.

A #3 starter does nothing for increasing raising the ceiling for potential post season success. 

I’m not sure why we wouldn’t be hunting for a #1 like Cease or if he’s unavailable a guy like Eduardo Rodriguez who is pitching out of his mind and so far having a career year?

We are the most prospect rich team in the game. I know somebody a few posts back posed a scenario where we bring up Westburg, Cowser, and Ortiz. But there is simple no place to play them all without either platooning them (which I believe would be horrible utilization for assets such as them) or the more sensible option which is to trade from you excess?

As things sit now, our offense is pretty good and will be excellent if/when Gunnar and Santander start hitting (like today). But the problem with this team is our starting pitching has been really bad. I believe it was like 25th in MLB going into today’s game. Success is not sustainable when you starters are so bad that no matter who is on the mound, no lead is safe.

The next few weeks are definitely going to be a litmus test. If we continue to see poor pitching performance after poor pitching performance, we may need to acquire 2 starters in addition to Means return at some point. This pitching has been terrible.

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1 hour ago, Beysbol said:

I was thinking the exact same thing. I live in Atlanta, but won't be going to the games because of my terrible social anxiety. It sucks, but I'll just have to watch it on TV (of course the Atlanta network since MASN will be blacked out). 

I generally am a fan of Atlanta (used to live there), but oddly enough that is the one place in all of the cities I’ve been to see a ballgame where I had a somewhat unpleasant experience wearing an Os cap to another team’s stadium. And that must’ve been back around 2011 or so before they had their mini renaissance.

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15 minutes ago, Orioles0615 said:

No one is trading anyone in May. We will have to limp to July and hope we are still above .500 before anything happens

I agree that we are going to have to wait awhile. But if you listened to Hyde’s interview on MLB radio before today’s game and read between the lines of “our guys are just young and inexperienced”. I got the sense that they know that they need someone to anchor the rotation at the top if they want to contend in the post season.

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2 hours ago, oriole said:

If they play .500 ball the rest of the way they’ll be at about 86 wins. This got TB in the playoffs last year. This team wasn’t built to win the division so it’s probably best not get ahead of ourselves. 
 

Either way, they’ve done what they needed to do. But I don’t expect them to continue with this success. SP isn’t great, BP seems to be playing over their heads, hitting can be great but there’s also quite a bit of lackluster spots. Plus, Elias has made a habit of avoiding doing anything bold, so it’s sink or swim for the guys we got. Means can provide a boost down the road hopefully. 


Overall, if 86 wins is where they’re at…I’d have signed up for that with no issues at the start of the season. 

86 won’t be enough.  Book it.  Tampa clinched a playoff spot with five games to go and then lost their last five games. If they’d been must-win, they would have won a couple I’d bet.  Also, with the more balanced schedule, the AL East teams are going to win more games this year.  That handwriting is already on the wall with how the East has done against the other divisions.  I’ll put the over/under for the 6th seed at 90 wins.  

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5 hours ago, SteveA said:

If going 17-5 outside the AL East and winning all non-ALE series is "playing down to the competition", sign me up for more.

The team's run differential doesn't really equate to the great record. They play close games, just like last season. It's a talented team and they've beaten the teams they needed to beat. My point is that the schedule has made it much easier for the team to win games, and a tough stretch is coming up. 

I'll sign up for more of that as well, but just as OP pointed out, the poor starting pitching isn't going to be conducive to winning baseball games with the quality of teams coming up on the schedule. But also part of my point - the team seems to step up it's play (or at least it did last year) when the schedule gets harder as well. Hope to see that continue and that improved starting pitching is part of it.

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  • Posts

    • dWAR is just the run value for defense added with the defensive adjustment.  Corner OF spots have a -7.5 run adjustment, while CF has a +2.5 adjustment over 150 games.    Since Cowser played both CF and the corners they pro-rate his time at each to calculate his defensive adjustment. 
    • Just to be clear, though, fWAR also includes a substantial adjustment for position, including a negative one for Cowser.  For a clearer example on that front, as the chart posted higher on this page indicates, Carlos Santana had a +14 OAA — which is the source data that fWAR’s defensive component is based on. That 14 outs above average equates to 11-12 (they use different values on this for some reason) runs better than the average 1B.  So does Santana have a 12.0 defensive value, per fWAR? He does not. That’s because they adjust his defensive value downward to reflect that he’s playing a less difficult/valuable position. In this case, that adjustment comes out to -11.0 runs, as you can see here:   So despite apparently having a bona fide Gold Glove season, Santana’s Fielding Runs value (FanGraphs’ equivalent to dWAR) is barely above average, at 1.1 runs.    Any good WAR calculation is going to adjust for position. Being a good 1B just isn’t worth as much as being an average SS or catcher. Just as being a good LF isn’t worth as much as being an average CF. Every outfielder can play LF — only the best outfielders can play CF.  Where the nuance/context shows up here is with Cowser’s unique situation. Playing LF in OPACY, with all that ground to cover, is not the same as playing LF at Fenway or Yankee Stadium. Treating Cowser’s “position” as equivalent to Tyler O’Neill’s, for example, is not fair. The degree of difficulty is much, much higher at OPACY’s LF, and so the adjustment seems out of whack for him. That’s the one place where I’d say the bWAR value is “unfair” to Cowser.
    • Wait a second here, the reason he's -0.1 in bb-ref dwar is because they're using drs to track his defensive run value.  He's worth 6.6 runs in defense according to fangraphs, which includes adjustments for position, which would give him a fangraphs defensive war of +0.7.
    • A little funny to have provided descriptions of the hits (“weak” single; “500 foot” HR). FIP doesn’t care about any of that either, so it’s kind of an odd thing to add in an effort to make ERA look bad.  Come in, strike out the first hitter, then give up three 108 MPH rocket doubles off the wall. FIP thinks you were absolutely outstanding, and it’s a shame your pathetic defense and/or sheer bad luck let you down. Next time you’ll (probably) get the outcomes you deserve. They’re both flawed. So is xFIP. So is SIERA. So is RA/9. So is WPA. So is xERA. None of them are perfect measures of how a pitcher’s actual performance was, because there’s way too much context and too many variables for any one metric to really encompass.  But when I’m thinking about awards, for me at least, it ends up having to be about the actual outcomes. I don’t really care what a hitter’s xWOBA is when I’m thinking about MVP, and the same is true for pitchers. Did you get the outs? Did the runs score? That’s the “value” that translates to the scoreboard and, ultimately, to the standings. So I think the B-R side of it is more sensible for awards.  I definitely take into account the types of factors that you (and other pitching fWAR advocates) reference as flaws. So if a guy plays in front of a particular bad defense or had a particularly high percentage of inherited runners score, I’d absolutely adjust my take to incorporate that info. And I also 100% go to Fangraphs first when I’m trying to figure out which pitchers we should acquire (i.e., for forward looking purposes).  But I just can’t bring myself say that my Cy Young is just whichever guy had the best ratio of Ks to BBs to HRs over a threshold number of innings. As @Frobby said, it just distills out too much of what actually happened.
    • We were all a lot younger in 2005.  No one wanted to believe Canseco cause he’s a smarmy guy. Like I said, he was the only one telling the truth. It wasn’t a leap of faith to see McGwire up there and Sosa up there and think “yeah, those guys were juicing” but then suddenly look at Raffy and think he was completely innocent.  It’s a sad story. The guy should be in Hall of Fame yet 500 homers and 3,000 hits are gone like a fart in the wind cause his legacy is wagging his finger and thinking he couldn’t get caught.  Don’t fly too close to the sun.  
    • I think if we get the fun sprinkler loving Gunnar that was in the dugout yesterday, I don’t think we have to worry about him pressing. He seemed loose and feeling good with the other guys he was with, like Kremer.
    • I was a lot younger back then, but that betrayal hit really hard because he had been painting himself as literally holier than thou, and shook his finger to a congressional committee and then barely 2 weeks later failed the test.
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