Elias taking accountability

[Jagwar]

3 hours ago, Roll Tide said:

I know …. Gotcha. Trade away Stowers & Norby for Garbage and pick up Rivera & Jiminez. And be surprised when you offense stinks. 

But... at that point Urias and Westburg were both healthy, right?

[Jagwar]

57 minutes ago, OriolesUpAndDowns said:

I think this where his draft strategy hurts.  We have zero depth of optionable relievers.  

I was just scrolling through the Baseball Reference 2024 O's page.  I see 32 pitchers (33 if you count McCann) used this season.  I could be missing someone, but I only see 4 of those 33 that the O's drafted (GRod, Akin, Means, Baumann). Every other pitcher was either acquired as a FA, in a trade or off the waiver wire. 

Is that normal for 2024 MLB teams? Or is it even more of a result of not focusing on drafting pitchers?

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, sportsfan8703 said:

@Frobby but where do we rank since that Yankees series?  The season long rankings don’t really matter as much right now. We clearly got figured out starting with that Houston series after pummeling the Yankees. We haven’t been able to adjust. 

Is there a way to look up team stats ranking since the HOU series began?

1.  To figure out how each team has done since the Houston series, you’d have to go to the batting logs of each team on BB-ref and click on the section of the log you wanted to calculate, and then manually determine who ranked ahead of who.   I think we can all agree that nobody’s going to do this.  But it’s possible, and if you want to do it, go to town.  

2.  Alternatively, in a thread yesterday, I calculated that the O’s scored 5.11 runs/game through June 19, 5.04 runs/game from June 20-August 16, and 3.77 runs/game from August 17 through Sunday (now 3.64 through yesterday).  So, it’s a false narrative that the offense has been slumping since June.   The offense may have been a little less consistent since late June, but it was basically fine until mid-August.  The team faltered from late June through mid-August primarily because of the pitching, not the hitting.  

3.  Remember this thread?   I literally track where the Orioles stand in the AL at the end of every month, both for the month by itself and cumulatively.   So, that doesn’t give you exactly what you asked, but it gives you a good idea.   

Anyway, I’m not saying that it’s not a problem that the offense is slumping now.  Obviously, it’s a problem.  But the slump is not as long as people are saying, and you don’t fire the hitting coaches because the offense had a bad month to close an otherwise good season.  
 

[Just Regular]

Parsing words I think "the testing of our depth" part is as close as Elias will come to critiquing Holliday and Mayo.

I believe the club prides itself on its ability to prepare Bats to be ready to stay up, etc., but I do wonder if Sig Mejdal's "leading, bleeding edge" has made substitutes for actual MLB competition less effective than they have been in recent years.

As awful as this run is, I've seen some comments a big off-season is ahead, but I'm not sure I agree.     There's nothing to do next April but play the guys you've planted your flag on.      Adley, Ryan, Holliday, Gunnar, Westburg, Cowser, Mullins, Kjerstad and Mayo is I think about as set an Opening Day lineup as you can find inching towards the winter.    Tommy Pham will be available for free next summer if somebody can't play.

Certainly some interesting day to day calls for however long this year's ride the club can hold on for.    Prospect growth is not linear, and it still isn't impossible Holliday or Mayo will display some in the next 2 weeks.     Mayo can take dozens of at bats a day against Hurter with easy access to the Trajekt machine at home.

[wildcard]

Couple of things about what Mike said:

1).   Grayson will not start during the regular season.    Time has run out to build him up.   That means Burnes, Eflin. Suarez, Kremer and Povich the rest of the way if they can stay healthy.   Maybe Grayson as an opener or a reliever in the playoffs.

Coulombe  as early as Friday.  I am guess either Smith or Kimbrel go.

Westy and  Urias  on rehab  in the next few days.   Getting these guys back could be a  big mental boost for the team.  What level of performance they will be able to produce coming off a layoff is another things.      I would think Mayo and Holliday are optioned.

Mountcastle is swinging but his wrist is still sore.   Where that goes in anyones guess.   If he comes back Jimenez will not be needed.

2).  When Mike says this has been a winning team for that last two years and he believes they can get back to that,  to me he is not just talking about the team.     He is talking about himself.    This is the first time Mike has experienced things not going the way he planned to this degree.    Quite frankly his looks a little shell shocked.   

The pitching having troubles with injuries is reality to him.  Pitchers get hurt.    But his offense going from 5 runs per game in the first half  to almost zero is shocking to him.   He did not see that coming.  Adley, and O'Hearn were supposed to step up when needed.   Instead they took a step back.  None of Holliday, Mayo, or Kjerstad being able to help in the 2nd half was not the way this was planned.   

Here is hoping the Westy, Urias and Kjerstad can help real soon.

 

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, Jagwar said:

I was just scrolling through the Baseball Reference 2024 O's page.  I see 32 pitchers (33 if you count McCann) used this season.  I could be missing someone, but I only see 4 of those 33 that the O's drafted (GRod, Akin, Means, Baumann). Every other pitcher was either acquired as a FA, in a trade or off the waiver wire. 

Is that normal for 2024 MLB teams? Or is it even more of a result of not focusing on drafting pitchers?

I doubt it is normal, though I’m sure that well more than half the pitchers who pitch for any particular team were not drafted by that team.   Teams use so many pitchers these days, and there are so many pitchers who cycle around the league off the waiver wire.  

Edit - Yankees 4/33, Red Sox 4/33, Rays 2/30, Jays 4/29. So, I guess it is pretty normal, now that I look.  

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Frobby

[Sports Guy]

I just hope Elias doesn’t see what happened this year and continue to block younger players with middling vet players all in the name of depth.

[Frobby]

4 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

I just hope Elias doesn’t see what happened this year and continue to block younger players with middling vet players all in the name of depth.

So what do you want him to do?  Should he throw Holliday and Mayo out there for 140 games next year without any backup plan in case they suck?  

[Sports Guy]

14 minutes ago, Frobby said:

So what do you want him to do?  Should he throw Holliday and Mayo out there for 140 games next year without any backup plan in case they suck?  

Your back up plan is Urias and Basallo…maybe even keep Mateo depending on multiple things.  (And you will have other options in the minors)

Edited 22 hours ago by Sports Guy

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

1.  To figure out how each team has done since the Houston series, you’d have to go to the batting logs of each team on BB-ref and click on the section of the log you wanted to calculate, and then manually determine who ranked ahead of who.   I think we can all agree that nobody’s going to do this.  But it’s possible, and if you want to do it, go to town.  

Turns out there is a way to do this on Fangraphs.  Since the start of the Houston series (June 21), the O’s are 16th in runs/game, 12th in wRC+.  I still prefer to break it down this way:

June 21 - August 16: 10th in runs/game, 3rd in wRC+.

August 17 - September 17: 27th in runs/game, 25th in wRC+.   
 

[deward]

11 hours ago, EddeeEddee said:

It's total bs Adley had a terrible start to his career, unless you mean only 10 games in May 2022. 

In those 10 games he had a mere .529 OPS, but by the following month he had raised his OPS to .775.  And the month after that he raised it to .859, finishing the season with an OPS of .851.

Cowser did not hit well in 2023, but he only had 77 plate appearances.

You know who did suck the first two months of his career?  Jackson Chourio.  In his first month he had an OPS of .608, while in his second month he had an OPS of only .582 -- for a total of 174 plate appearances through the end of May.  Jackson Merrill was better but still couldn't crack a .700 OPS for over two months.  He had a scorching June but then cooled off again with an under .700 OPS in July.

Let's end the myths that young Orioles struggle early while none of the other top prospects around the league do.

 

Adley's OPS bottomed out at .413 after game 15, and sat at .513 20 games in, so it was a little more than 10 games in May 2022. He hit his first HR on Jun 15, and took off after that. There wasn't a ton of angst about it at the time, because no one expected that team to become a contender. 

The frustration with Oriole prospects isn't that they don't set the world on fire right away, it's that they often seem to be so hapless at the plate as to be unplayable. It's not just that Cowser didn't hit well in 2023, he put up an OPS of .433 and looked lost and demoralized by the time he was sent back down. Holliday had a 10 game run where he hit his 5 HR's and OPS'd over 1.000; his OPS prior to that was .170, and in a month's worth of games since his last HR, his OPS is .437, and also looks lost up there. Mayo has an OPS of .272 in his first 42 PA. It's not just that some of these guys come up and struggle, they're black holes, which is particularly painful to watch for a team that's fighting for a playoff spot. It would be great if Mayo was putting up an OPS of .608, that would at least mean he's occasionally flashing his potential. 

[Three Run Homer]

10 hours ago, baltfan said:

It’s because the strategies that they are taught and employ work much better in the minors with pitchers with worse stuff and command than in the majors.  This, in turn, inflates their minor league stats.  The good news is that thus far after an adjustment period those players do seem to adjust and do well. 

This makes sense to me.  I wonder what in particular the players are learning in the minors that requires some adjustment in the majors.   Our young hitters may rely too much on an accurate strike zone given the use of robo umps in AAA, and they may need to learn how to defend against bad umpires with two strikes.  Another possibility is that they come up following a mantra of waiting for your pitch, but need to adjust for the fact that major league pitchers may not cooperate--you may sometimes have to swing at strikes or near-strikes that aren't great hitters pitches.  

[baltfan]

26 minutes ago, Three Run Homer said:

This makes sense to me.  I wonder what in particular the players are learning in the minors that requires some adjustment in the majors.   Our young hitters may rely too much on an accurate strike zone given the use of robo umps in AAA, and they may need to learn how to defend against bad umpires with two strikes.  Another possibility is that they come up following a mantra of waiting for your pitch, but need to adjust for the fact that major league pitchers may not cooperate--you may sometimes have to swing at strikes or near-strikes that aren't great hitters pitches.  

The main thing I suspect is swing decisions.  In the minors you can narrow the zone more because those pitchers cannot consistently hit certain spots that are bad for hitters.   In the majors, they hit those spots more. You can still see it with Gunnar who strikes out looking on away pitches quite frequently.  They are going to have to learn to foul some of these pitches away or possibly accept that certain pitches that they would normally not swing at have to become ones that they can no longer take.  

[e16bball]

6 hours ago, sportsfan8703 said:

Is there a way to look up team stats ranking since the HOU series began?

On Fangraphs, click on the tab that says “Teams” and then choose “Team Batting Stats 2024.” 

Midway down the page, before you get to the actual statistics, you’ll see this:

You want the “Custom Date Range,” which is right at the bottom of this screenshot. Put in the dates you want to see as the “Start Date” and the “End Date.” In this case, the Houston series started on June 21 — so you would choose that as the “Start Date” and leave the “End Date” as either today or some date in the future. 

Looks like @Frobby beat me to the results. The short version is that they still hit very well for almost two months after that Houston series. The collapse of the hitting lines up much closer with the point when Mountcastle went down.

I think that’s when the hitting injuries reached critical mass — because we lost Mountcastle and O’Hearn, at least the strategically deployed O’Hearn that we’d all come to love. Adding that on top of already losing Westburg and the Adley tailspin, and that’s more than most offenses can take. Losing Urias a week or two later was just icing on top of an already spoiled cake.

[Roll Tide]

7 hours ago, Jagwar said:

But... at that point Urias and Westburg were both healthy, right?

Does it really matter? Many here have been calling for Urias to be cut most of the year. Westburg’s injury sucks but instead of making real additions we were shopping in the trash can. Soto, Slater, Eloy, Rivera …. no wonder the offense sucks. The whiffs are off the charts. Anyone in the dugout who has any say in the hitting should be fired immediately and sewed for damaging our young players. Tons of regression here….i mean tons. And Gunnar , 24 errors WTF.