What happened between 1997 and 1998

[Winning_Season]

I was old enough to be a fan in 97' 98' but not old enough to understand the reasons why the Orioles went from first place and a Championship contender to utterly mediocre and settling into the 4th place position they occupied for most of the next 15 years.

From what I remember the team (inexplicably) fired Davey Johnson but brought back almost everyone else from the 97' team but just stunk up the joint. Can anyone else help me understand why there was such a regression between these two seasons?

[Sports Guy]

Pitching and defense drop off.

Allowed 100 more runs, while scoring about the same.

[backwardsk]

The 97 team had four consistent starters that were all above average to really good. They all made 30 or more starts. Kamienicki had the worst ERA+ of the four at 110. The starting staff in 98 really struggled after Erickson and Mussina. 
 

Ripken was in steady decline from 96-98. Anderson declined as well. Alomar had an off year for him with only a 100 OPS+.

[RavensNOsGuy]

The only memory I have of the 98 season is Benetiz plunking Tino Martinez and starting that massive brawl at Yankee Stadium. Think everything went downhill after that.

[Aristotelian]

Jimmy Key got injured and missed most of the season. We effectively replaced him with Doug Drabek. We also lost Myers and tried Armando as closer to predictable effect. Everyone else just kinda underperformed. Just goes to show the difference between a .500 team and a playoff team isn't that much. 

[Say O!]

It was a VERY old team. In fact, all batters with more than 300 ABs were on the wrong side of 30yrs old and bb-ref has the average age as 33.4 for 1998 team.  In contrast, the 2023 team has average of 27. 

[DrungoHazewood]

On 8/18/2023 at 9:46 AM, Say O! said:

It was a VERY old team. In fact, all batters with more than 300 ABs were on the wrong side of 30yrs old and bb-ref has the average age as 33.4 for 1998 team.  In contrast, the 2023 team has average of 27. 

Yes, by far the biggest problem with that team was that the average age was 104 and the farm system was more-or-less barren as it had been since the early 80s and would be until very recently.

Also, that was the timeframe where Peter Angelos went from "ooh, Camden Yards draws 3.5m fans a year so we can have the top payroll in baseball!" to "ooh, I paid all this money for a bunch of all stars and we didn't even win the World Series, so let's stop paying all that money." In 1995-97 they signed pretty big free agents all the time. In the 1997-98 offseason the top signings were Lenny Webster (re-signed), Scott Kamieniecki (re-signed), Doug Drabek, Joe Carter, Norm Charlton, Ozzie Guillen, Doug Johns and Harold Baines (re-signed), who had an average age of dead.

[Hallas]

17 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Yes, by far the biggest problem with that team was that the average age was 104 and the farm system was more-or-less barren as it had been since the early 80s and would be until very recently.

Also, that was the timeframe where Peter Angelos went from "ooh, Camden Yards draws 3.5m fans a year so we can have the top payroll in baseball!" to "ooh, I paid all this money for a bunch of all stars and we didn't even win the World Series, so let's stop paying all that money." In 1995-97 they signed pretty big free agents all the time. In the 1997-98 offseason the top signings were Lenny Webster (re-signed), Scott Kamieniecki (re-signed), Doug Drabek, Joe Carter, Norm Charlton, Ozzie Guillen, Doug Johns and Harold Baines (re-signed), who had an average age of dead.

Baines didn't play that badly.

 

That was an 85 win team by Pythagoras.   Benitez being horribly unclutch contributed to us underperforming out run differential.  I also think Ray Miller was a bit of a button pusher and if Davey Johnson didn't get run out of town Johnson would have optimized bullpen usage to get Benitez out of higher leverage situations.  The main other underperformer was Roberto Alomar, who went from all star to washed at 30, and then went back to being an all star for another couple years after he left.

 

I don't think age necessarily contributed to that particular team being a little worse than it should have been, but I do think the team was getting ready for a collapse at some point anyway, so whether that happened in 98 or 99 is somewhat academic.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Hallas

[vab]

Another issue was Ray Miller's horrendous handling of the bullpen. You would think a former pitching coach would be an expert at that but he had guys getting up and down multiple times sometimes without even getting into the game. That was a big factor in the extra runs allowed. 

[DrungoHazewood]

9 hours ago, Hallas said:

Baines didn't play that badly.

 

That was an 85 win team by Pythagoras.   Benitez being horribly unclutch contributed to us underperforming out run differential.  I also think Ray Miller was a bit of a button pusher and if Davey Johnson didn't get run out of town Johnson would have optimized bullpen usage to get Benitez out of higher leverage situations.  The main other underperformer was Roberto Alomar, who went from all star to washed at 30, and then went back to being an all star for another couple years after he left.

 

I don't think age necessarily contributed to that particular team being a little worse than it should have been, but I do think the team was getting ready for a collapse at some point anyway, so whether that happened in 98 or 99 is somewhat academic.

Looking at bb-ref, the 1998 Orioles' top 13 players in PA were the following ages: 33, 33, 30, 32, 37, 33, 34, 36, 39, 33, 38, 27, and 34. Jeffrey Hammonds was the only regular or semi-regular on the team who wasn't past the experiation date. Yes, they finished 7th in the league in runs, but it wasn't if they were going to seriously decline but when. Even in the age of magic age-reversing elixir.

Edited August 23, 2023 by DrungoHazewood

[Hallas]

5 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Looking at bb-ref, the 1998 Orioles' top 13 players in PA were the following ages: 33, 33, 30, 32, 37, 33, 34, 36, 39, 33, 38, 27, and 34. Jeffrey Hammonds was the only regular or semi-regular on the team who wasn't past the experiation date. Yes, they finished 7th in the league in runs, but it wasn't if they were going to seriously decline but when. Even in the age of magic age-reversing elixir.

 

I'm kind of mincing hairs here - I think that 2000 was the year that their AARP cards got cashed in.  They shouldn't have been *that* bad in 1998 and 1999, even if the team was a ticking time bomb of... father time.  In 2000 their team OPS went down by .025, moving them from 6th to 10th out of 14 AL teams, and they had clear declines from Cal and Brady.

 

Also, it sure felt like the pre-PED testing era had a much higher percentage of players that managed to delay decline periods to mid-30s or later.  I do recall seeing some stats saying that players of that era tended to hang on for longer than they have in the past 10 years or so.  So between this delayed decline phenomenon, and the team's decent run differential, I'm inclined to put more of the blame on unclutch relief pitching and terrible bullpen management/inadequate manager specifically for that year, with the team's age being a secondary factor.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Hallas

[Moose Milligan]

I think during this time I didn’t have an understanding of exactly how old those guys were. Maybe it’s cause I was in high school and didn’t understand the game like I do now. 
 

If the Orioles fielded a team that old right now it’d be awful. It’s hard to look at those names now and not wonder wtf they were thinking. 
 

I do remember being really pissed about Doug Drabek. 

[Hallas]

3 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

I think during this time I didn’t have an understanding of exactly how old those guys were. Maybe it’s cause I was in high school and didn’t understand the game like I do now. 
 

If the Orioles fielded a team that old right now it’d be awful. It’s hard to look at those names now and not wonder wtf they were thinking. 
 

I do remember being really pissed about Doug Drabek. 

 

I found some articles on this; there was in fact a change in aging curves in the 90s vs today, and hitters are declining earlier today.  Today a 30 or 31 year old has a decline equal to a 32-33 year old from the 90s and early 2000s.

 

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/hitters-no-longer-peak-only-decline/

https://tht.fangraphs.com/aging-curves-revisited-damn-strikeouts/

[AnythingO's]

Not withstanding all the posts above but after 1997 Peter Angelos let Davey Johnson go or rather pushed him out. Davey got the maximum out of his teams which is why he is in the HOF as a manager I believe. The reason, the Alomar spitting incident in Sept of 1996. Davey fined Alomar and sent the fine to a charity. PA objected to Davey selecting the charity and considered it insubordination.