Do We Have Too Many Streaky Hitters To Win It All?

[Spy Fox]

16 minutes ago, sportsfan8703 said:

Funny, we tend to be less streaky when facing good pitching?  Berrios is a beast. AL pitcher of the month in April and has held us down twice now. They got a heckuva back end of the pen too with Garcia and Romano. Also, what got into Kikuchi?  97?  We were talking about him in the offseason like he was Irvin 2.0. 

Kikuchi and Garcia have really turned it around, we beat up on both of them until this year. 

Romano though has sucked this year and is now on the IL with elbow inflammation. 

[DirtyBird]

22 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

It will be a different offense when Holliday is up and hitting.

There are no signs of that happening. Your should try watching some of his AAA at bats.

[Ripken]

No.  This is what hitting at the best level looks like.  No one just goes 1-3 or 2-4 every day.  You get a great series with a 6-12 and then follow that with a 1-13.  That's how it is.  Bad luck on HHBs, facing great pitching, nagging injuries, and the like hurt hitters and, of course, there are bad teams, poor pitchers and good luck, too.  The few elite hitters have more sustained good stretches and shorter down times but that's what makes them elite and why there are so few of them. 

[OsBeavs]

1 hour ago, ORIOLE33 said:

I know, we have a good team. You don't win 100 plus and have the record we have without being a good team. But one thing I think is alarming is all the streaky hitters we have in our lineup. Mountcastle, Santander and I would even have to throw Gunnar in the mix to name a few, are all streaky hitters. This becomes a real detriment when we go up against good pitchers in the playoffs. 
 

I've heard that hitting coaches are a bit overrated. But we have way too much talent coming through our system for us to not have a few more guys that can constantly hit in the high 200's. 

I'd say streaky (high variability) batters are quite common. Judge, Seager, Goldschmidt, Bregman, Rodriguez, Ramirez, Carrol all started extremely cold this season among others. About half of them have had a hot streak now but some of them still haven't hit all season. At least almost all the Orioles have had good stretches.

[Sports Guy]

36 minutes ago, DirtyBird said:

There are no signs of that happening. Your should try watching some of his AAA at bats.

You mean how he entered the night 14 for his last 33 with 10 BBs?

In his “bad month” of May, he had an 860ish OpS with an OBp over 420.  

Edited June 7 by Sports Guy

[SteveA]

Scoring is down around MLB.

We are the HIGHEST SCORING TEAM in all of major league baseball, at 5.10 runs per game.   We score more than the Yankees, more than the Phillies, more than the Dodgers, more than the Braves.

I don't care if we have some streaky hitters, if the net result is we are the best offense in baseball, that's more than fine with me.   

 

Now I have been a BIT concerned about our "slow starting" offense in games.

In MLB, the overall OPS is .699.   But facing a starter for the first time in a game, MLB teams OPS .686, the 2nd time they OPS .697, then the 3rd time they OPS .761.   So the pattern in MLB is to roughly "be yourself" the first two times through the order and then really make some hay 3TTTO.

The Orioles OPS is .753 overall.   But facing a starter for the first time, we drop to .674, 79 points worse than our average.  2nd time .812, 3rd time .807.   Those are great.   So for whatever reason, our major league highest scoring offense becomes below average the first time through the batting order.   I don't understand that and I don't like it.   

But overall, I don't think streakiness matters at all.  If you have some streaky hitters, you are just as likely to have them get hit in October as you are to have them slump in October.

[Just Regular]

15 hours ago, Aristotelian said:

It would be awesome if we had a dominant guy like Shohei who never has a bad month and can put an offense on his back. Those guys are incredibly rare and that is just not how this team is built. I'm good with giving it a shot with these guys.

Gunnar is as close as anyone but it is crazy even SS v. DH they are running about even.

Ohtani is kind of in the 1919 Babe Ruth moment of his career right now, and it'll be fun to watch what he and the Dodgers come up with.

I don't know that he can't be Ken Griffey, Jr. if he tried, and is that more useful?

[DrungoHazewood]

17 hours ago, ORIOLE33 said:

I know, we have a good team. You don't win 100 plus and have the record we have without being a good team. But one thing I think is alarming is all the streaky hitters we have in our lineup. Mountcastle, Santander and I would even have to throw Gunnar in the mix to name a few, are all streaky hitters. This becomes a real detriment when we go up against good pitchers in the playoffs. 
 

I've heard that hitting coaches are a bit overrated. But we have way too much talent coming through our system for us to not have a few more guys that can constantly hit in the high 200's. 

"Do we have too many streaky hitters to win it all"?

The short answer is no.

The long answer involves first defining what is meant by streaky and then doing a bit of analysis to see if the Orioles have more or fewer hitters who fit that definition than average. Because right now we haven't even remotely established that the Orioles' hitters are streaky, much less to the extent that we can quantify a negative or positive impact on team performance.

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, SteveA said:

Scoring is down around MLB.

We are the HIGHEST SCORING TEAM in all of major league baseball, at 5.10 runs per game.   We score more than the Yankees, more than the Phillies, more than the Dodgers, more than the Braves.

I don't care if we have some streaky hitters, if the net result is we are the best offense in baseball, that's more than fine with me.   

 

Now I have been a BIT concerned about our "slow starting" offense in games.

In MLB, the overall OPS is .699.   But facing a starter for the first time in a game, MLB teams OPS .686, the 2nd time they OPS .697, then the 3rd time they OPS .761.   So the pattern in MLB is to roughly "be yourself" the first two times through the order and then really make some hay 3TTTO.

The Orioles OPS is .753 overall.   But facing a starter for the first time, we drop to .674, 79 points worse than our average.  2nd time .812, 3rd time .807.   Those are great.   So for whatever reason, our major league highest scoring offense becomes below average the first time through the batting order.   I don't understand that and I don't like it.   

But overall, I don't think streakiness matters at all.  If you have some streaky hitters, you are just as likely to have them get hit in October as you are to have them slump in October.

That's some good information. But let's look at that a little bit... The O's OPS facing the starter the first time in the game is .674, as you note, which is 15th in the Majors. So they're exactly average. In 556 PAs. But one thing to remember is that includes all first PAs in a game against the starter, whether that's the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd inning.

In the 1st inning the O's have a .703 OPS, good for 12th in MLB.

But as I just typed in another thread, unless you have a real good reason to believe otherwise, your going-in assumption for all random splits and small samples of data is that there's nothing there. It's just noise. It'll all even out in the long run. I see no reason to think otherwise with this. The O's place in the league in OPS in each inning:

1st: 12th
2nd: 5th
3rd: 6th
4th: 2nd
5th: 18th
6th: 19th
7th: 1st
8th: 5th
9th: 15th
Extras: 6th
Overall: 3rd

I wouldn't look too deeply at these tea leaves, lest we wrap ourselves up in trying to hire a 5th and 6th inning hitting coach to try to solve this troubling "problem" with scoring in those innings.

The O's are 3rd in OPS in a pitcher's park. They're only scored 10 fewer runs than the super-Yank$, and they've played three fewer games. They're good. It'll work itself out.

Edited June 7 by DrungoHazewood

[OsBeavs]

2 hours ago, SteveA said:

Scoring is down around MLB.

We are the HIGHEST SCORING TEAM in all of major league baseball, at 5.10 runs per game.   We score more than the Yankees, more than the Phillies, more than the Dodgers, more than the Braves.

I don't care if we have some streaky hitters, if the net result is we are the best offense in baseball, that's more than fine with me.   

 

Now I have been a BIT concerned about our "slow starting" offense in games.

In MLB, the overall OPS is .699.   But facing a starter for the first time in a game, MLB teams OPS .686, the 2nd time they OPS .697, then the 3rd time they OPS .761.   So the pattern in MLB is to roughly "be yourself" the first two times through the order and then really make some hay 3TTTO.

The Orioles OPS is .753 overall.   But facing a starter for the first time, we drop to .674, 79 points worse than our average.  2nd time .812, 3rd time .807.   Those are great.   So for whatever reason, our major league highest scoring offense becomes below average the first time through the batting order.   I don't understand that and I don't like it.   

But overall, I don't think streakiness matters at all.  If you have some streaky hitters, you are just as likely to have them get hit in October as you are to have them slump in October.

That is interesting information, thanks for sharing it. If you think about how young the lineup is, it makes some sense that they might get off to a slow start . Some of them may be facing pitchers for the first time at the beginning of a game or at least have very few at bats versus the pitcher. It is impressive how much improvement they show the second time through the lineup.

[Aristotelian]

2 hours ago, Just Regular said:

Gunnar is as close as anyone but it is crazy even SS v. DH they are running about even.

Ohtani is kind of in the 1919 Babe Ruth moment of his career right now, and it'll be fun to watch what he and the Dodgers come up with.

I don't know that he can't be Ken Griffey, Jr. if he tried, and is that more useful?

I just looked at Gunnar's splits and it's true, he does not have a monthly OPS below .819 since May of '23. That is seriously impressive and I would not have guessed that. He really is a phenomenal player. And to think we got him in the second round of the same draft as Adley.

Shohei has been .818 or higher since a .722 "slump" in April 2022.

So I don't think Gunnar is quite in the same league as Shohei, although maybe he could be at 26 or 27.

As of now Gunnar has a slight edge over the DH version of Shohei in the fWAR race.

[LookitsPuck]

17 hours ago, DirtyBird said:

There are no signs of that happening. Your should try watching some of his AAA at bats.

The guy that is hitting .333 over the last two weeks with an OBP of .464 and slugging .578 for an OPS of 1.042? Those at bats?

[LookitsPuck]

I'm less concerned about the offense, and more concerned about one of the rotation spots, but particularly the bullpen which really needs an elite arm. 

[jamalshw]

Short answer: no. 

To win a World Series you need three things: (1) Talent, (2) Health, and (3) Luck. 

The talent is here. You mention streaky and yes, there are streaky players, but most players are streaky. Only the best of the best are able to really avoid long slumps (and even they have many mini ones during the course of a season). 

Health is the next key. The losses of Means and Wells are tough, but manageable. The same for Mateo given how solid he's been. The uncertainty around Bradish is more concerning though (fingers crossed the fact he's not yet on the IL is a good sign). We will see where we are in the health department come the end of the year. 

As for luck, that's where timing comes in. Yes, we have streaky hitters. If those streaky hitters are (mostly) hitting when the postseason comes around, all is good. If everyone is cold like the team was a few weeks back, then we are in for a postseason similar to the one we had last year. The better the players, the better the chance they won't be slumping, but luck is a significant factor. 

[Sports Guy]