The New Oriole Way: No Need for Good Pitchers in Baltimore

The New York Yankees maintained the slimmest of leads  - just half a game - in their pursuit of another AL East Division Title yesterday by sweeping a double-header with the Toronto Blue Jays, 4-2 and 2-1.

They got a shot in the arm from the returning Andy Pettitte, who provided five scoreless innings to start the game despite being limited to 75 pitches.  Since he hadn't thrown more than 5 innings in any of his rehab stints, I imagine they didn't want to take any chances by stretching him out too much in his first game back.

Half a dozen relievers managed to hold onto a slim lead in the day game and then David Phelps hurled 6.1 innings of one-run ball - only his second Quality Start of his career and his first in a month - to pave the way for another W.  Rafael Soriano saved both ends of the doubleheader to increase his total to 42, which besides being the answer to life, the universe and everything is also evidence that perhaps the $35 million the Yankees gave him before last season weren't wasted after all. 

In any case, the Yankees seem to be doing what they always do: Winning.  None of that is all so terribly exciting, mostly because we who follow the Bronx Bombers have been more or less spoiled since 1994.   
What is exciting is that somehow the Baltimore Orioles, though an astonishing combination of luck, skill, clutch hitting and excellent relief pitching, have managed to be the team that the Yankees find breathing down their collective necks.

There was a time not so long ago when I would have pointed to their terrible run differential as evidence that they wouldn't last.  Or to their lack of any star hitters, or any decent, established starting pitchers.  Or the fact that they hadn't had a winning season since I was a senior in college, or that nobody expected them to win anything coming into the season, or the fact that they had to battle division foes like New York, Boston and Tampa -three franchises clearly much better run than the one in Baltimore.

That time is now past.  The Orioles still have a (slightly) negative run differential, and they still lack an ace pitcher and other than Adam Jones, they don't really have any hitters you'd be comfortable calling a "star".  What they do have is an astonishing record in one-run games (27-8), and an even better record in extra innings (15-2, including 15 straight, the most since 1949).

More important, perhaps, is that they have 85 wins with only 13 games left to play, and so whatever analysis one might do to figure out what will happen from here is nearly moot: the sample size is too small.  Heck, even Houston once won seven out of nine back in April and May, and now they're fighting to avoid 110 losses.

ESPN's David Schoenfeld looked at the Orioles' lack of a true ace yesterday in one of his columns and determined that while it was not so unusual for the best pitcher on a playoff team (in this case Wei-Yin Chen) to be just decent, with only 2.8 WAR, no such team had ever won the World Series either. 

I was somewhat shocked to find that not only is Chen not that good, he's the only pitcher on the team who's actually been decent all year.  Chen is 12-9 with a 3.98 ERA and is the only pitcher on the Baltimores who will qualify for the ERA title this year (162 IP are required).  This got me to wondering how unusual it was for there to literally be nobody else on a playoff team's pitching staff who could say that he had contributed all year.

I used double digit Wins as my benchmark - yes, I know it's an archaic stat, but stick with me here - and looked at every playoff team since they started the 3-division format in 1995.  I used Wins because it's relatively easy to sort and search with them and because while winning 10 games doesn't necessarily make you a great pitcher, it's usually a sign that you at least were sufficiently present on the pitching staff and effective on the mound to be used in such a way as to get credit for 10 or more Wins.  Rarely to lousy, unhealthy pitchers amass 10 Wins.  Got it?

(I did not use Wins amassed for another team, before a late season trade or in the minors, for example, mostly because it would have been a real pain in the butt.) 

That left us 68 playoff teams, and the number of those that had only one 10-game winner?

One.

And none in a full, 162-game season.

The 1995 Colorado Rockies had only one 10 game winner, Kevin Ritz, who went 11-11 with a 4.21 ERA in 173 innings.  Since the league only played 144 games that year, this one is kind of an outlier.  With another 3 weeks in the beginning of the season, Bill Swift would almost certainly have added to his nine Wins, so we can practically dismiss them.

Other than that, no playoff team since 1995 has had fewer than two 10-game winners.  For that matter, only 15 of the 68 have had as few as two, and another of those, the 1995 Cincinnati Reds, also came from a strike-shortened season.  (Unlike the similar-vintage Rockies, the Reds probably would not have added an additional 10-game winner with three more weeks to play, as the next closest pitcher, Xavier Hernandez, was a reliever with just seven Wins, and no starter had more than six.  David Wells had won 10 with the Tigers before coming over in a trade and tacking on half a dozen more for the Reds, so they don't exactly count either.)

In any case, having only two 10-game winners on your playoff team, it seems, does not bode well for your success in the postseason.  None of those teams won the World Series, and only two of them - the 2007 Rockies and the 1997 Indians - even made it that far.

The '97 Indians captured a weak AL Central division with only 86 wins and then squeaked past the Wild Card Yankees and the Orioles before losing to the first Wild Card World Champion, Eric Gregg's 6-foot strike zone Livan Hernandez and the Florida Marlins. 

The '07 Rockies, of course, rode an astonishing winning streak, not just in extra innings or close games like these Orioles, but in nearly all games for about a month.  They won 11 in a row and 14 out of 15 to sneak into the NL Wild Card spot on the very last day of the season, then swept both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks en route to the World Series.  There, despite having gone 22-1 in the previous month, they were swept by the Boston Red Sox.  C'est la vie.

Or, perhaps more precisely, c'est la pitching.  Without at least a few reliable guys to lean on when the team needed to record outs, none of these clubs could withstand the crucible of October baseball.  Almost half of them, seven of the 15 teams, lost in the Division Series, with five of the seven being swept.  Six other teams put up a good fight but ultimately succumbed in the League Championship Series, and the last two we just discussed. 

And these Orioles don't look like they even have a real chance at ending up with multiple 10 game winners.  The next closest pitcher is Jason Hammel with eight Wins, and he's got a knee injury and may not pitch much if at all for the rest of the season.  In any case, he's unlikely to add two wins in the next week and a half.

Chris Tillman is probably their best shot, also with eight Wins, and with potentially three remaining starts, it's conceivable that he could win two more, if he doesn't re-injure his elbow.  (Joe Saunders had six wins with Arizona before getting two with Baltimore, so technically he could win two more games and end up with 10 overall, but he'd have to win both of his remaining starts to do that.)  

As a few other interesting statistical anomalies of the Baltimore pitchers - 

Baltimore has:

• One complete game.  This sounds worse than it is, since today's game doesn't require guys to finish what they start very often.  Oakland has only one as well, and the playoff-hopeful Dodgers and Pirates only have two each, and the Brewers have none at all.  Even Washington has only three, and they've got the best record in baseball.   
• Seven Tough Losses, i.e. losses in games in which they got a Quality Start from their pitcher.  This would be the lowest number in MLB except that the Rockies haven't been even attempting to get Quality Starts since some time in mid June, so they have only four such losses.  Generally the good teams are near the bottom of this list, rarely squandering a good performance by their starter.   
• Thirty relief Wins.  This would be the best in the majors if not for the bizarre experiment in Colorado, where they've amassed 33 such wins.  
• Ten relief Losses.  Fewest in MLB, though Texas and Oakland each only have 11.  
• Allowed 33% of inherited runners to score.  This is the third worst number in the majors (the Angels are at 34% and the Cubs at 38%.) 
• Allowed 74 total inherited runners to score, 4th most in the majors, and seven more than the next closest playoff contender (San Francisco, who has a much better percentage).  
• 58 Holds, third fewest in MLB.  This kind of makes sense, since a Hold requires that a pitcher come into a game in a Save situation and hold onto the lead without actually finishing the game and therefore getting the Save.  Since the Orioles rarely have a lead early enough in a game for this to happen, it's only logical that they wouldn't be able to do this much. Oddly, Texas has even fewer Holds, just 55, but in their case I think it's because they score so many runs that when a relief pitcher comes into a game, it's usually already out of reach, and hence not an opportunity to get a Hold.  
• Allowed only 62 steals, third fewest in MLB, and caught 33% of would be thieves, 5th best in the majors.  This strikes me as one of the "little things" that an old-school manager like Buck Showalter would stress, i.e. not giving away runs with carelessness about he guys already on base.  
• Had relievers enter 73 games with a tie score, most in MLB.
• Had relievers enter the most high-leverage situations (168) in MLB, since their games are always close.    
• Had relievers enter 321 games with the bases empty, most in the AL, but only 9th in MLB.  I imagine this is because NL pitchers often have to be swapped out for pinch hitters, rather than just for situational matchups, so they'll more often come in to start an inning after a pinch hitter has replaced their predecessor on the mound.  The fact that the Orioles have more of these situations than any other AL team I believe is a result of either Showalter's rigid determination to use his relievers to start innings whenever possible, or the fact that Baltimore relievers rarely leave the game with a baserunner on base.  Either way, it's kind of odd.  
• Needed its relievers to get three or more outs 121 times, most in MLB among teams that don't play some weird brand of baseball in Denver.  Only one other potential playoff team has more than 99 such games.  

Naturally, I'll be the first to admit that stuff like run differential and the number of Holds or inherited runners scored in the regular season all go out the window once the playoffs start.  The teams that score more runs than their opponents more often than not in each series will win, just as they always do.  The 2001 Mariners, on paper, were a demonstrably better team than the Yankees that year, but in the end, it was the Seattle tam that ended up watching the Yankees lose the World Series to Arizona, not the team with the 116 regular season victories.

So the Orioles may get into the playoffs, and may even win the AL East, but luck and magic and clutch hitting can go away for no apparent reason at all, just as they showed up for no apparent reason.

Just ask the 2007 Rockies.

Phillies are Disappointing-est of All

ESPN's David Schoenfield had a bit Monday morning about how the LAnahfornia Angels are baseball's biggest disappointment, not, he says, the Boston Red Sox*.  Well, the headline says that, though I don't think that's what he actually means.  Editors often go with pith and punch over, say, correctness.

What I think Shoenfield means to say is that the disappointment created by the Angels' collective failure to live up to this year's expectations should have gotten a lot more media attention than it has, and the Red Sox' clubhouse soap operas and losing record ought to be less surprising and hence less thoroughly covered by the mainstream media than it is.  But then the Red Sox are the Ratings Sox, and that's just how it is. 

*For me, the biggest disappointment was the Red Sox, but not for the reason you'd think.  I finally got to a game at Fenway Park a few weeks ago.  Being a lifelong and avid baseball fan (albeit of the Yankees) I was quite excited to finally get to see this old cathedral of baseball, and even more so when I noticed that reigning MVP/Cy Young Justin Verlander would be toeing the rubber against Sawx ace Josh Beckett.  Sports betting sites were probably giving fairly even odds for what should have been a tight, well-played game.  What more could you ask, right?  


Well, it turns out that you could ask for seats that would allow you to, say, actually have knees.  You could ask for Verlander not to give up 4 runs in 5 innings (it was his shortest regular season start since August of 2010).  Or for Beckett not to pitch lackadaisically for two innings and then leave the game with back spasms.  Or for it not to rain all night, forcing the game to be called in the 6th and forcing my friends and me to get drenched on the way back to our hotels. But I digress... 

Also, you could ask them to expunge this logo - which I think is a worried, strawberry flavored  condom with a billy club - from their nostalgia wall. 

Anyway, while Schoenfield's piece is decidedly lacking in hard evidence to support his editor's contention that we should all be more disappointed in the Angels than the Red Sox, Schoenfield does a capable job of describing why we all aren't more aware of what a bummer of a season this is turning out to be for Anaheim.

But the truly surprising thing to me about the article isn't its lack of statistical evaluations or insightful analysis, but rather the absence of one word:

"Phillies."

I mean, seriously, when we're talking disappointment, Philadelphia has got the market more or less cornered.  Phillies Phans think they're the center of the universe, and their news media just plays into it*.  When rumblings happen in the sports world, Philadelphia fans think their world is ending.  And when a true athletic earthquake happens, Philadelphia imagines it is at the epicenter.  The Phillies' beat writers, sports anchors and bloggers step right in to cover the carnage and the aftermath as though their team is the only one that matters, and the only one that could possibly ever suffer in this way.

*Fifteen years ago, when the Florida Marlins were making their first surprising run at a World Series title, I saw a Philly newscast in which the anchor said people were referring to the Marlins as "Phillies South" because of the presence of Darren Daulton and Jim Eisenreich on the roster.  

Jim Eisenreich, for crying out loud.  

Around that same time, the next March perhaps, I saw a column, I think by Bill Conlin, lamenting the fact that the Blue Jays had been forced to cancel a split squad game with the Phillies on short notice due to some unforeseen circumstances.  The fist line of the column was "First Joe Carter, and now this." 

Because this is exactly like cancelling a Spring Training game.

But melodrama aside, the Phillies and their fans have every right be be disappointed this year.  The team kept together the core that had won five straight division titles, re-signing Jimmy Rollins and with discussions of keeping Cole Hamels in a Phillies uniPhorm Phor the Phoreseeable Phuture.  (Sorry, I'll stop that.)

They had recently added Hunter Pence to an already potent offense (they scored the second most runs in the NL in the second half of 2011, after getting Chase Utley back) and were expecting continued development from young outfielders Dominic Brown and John Mayberry.  They hoped that they could compensate for the loss of Ryan Howard, who tore his Achilles tendon in the last game of the 2011 season, with a decent platoon at first base and a remarkable pitching corps of Hamels, Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Vance Worley, who had gone 11-3 in 2011. 

And just to be sure, after they jettisoned Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson, they spent $50 million on Jonathan Papelbon, to help make sure all those quality starts wouldn't go for naught when the back of the bullpen faltered.

But it turned out that while Howard was perhaps not that hard to replace, he couldn't just be replaced with literally the worst player in the National League, not if you wanted the Phillies to contend.  You also couldn't stomach the losses of both Howard and Utley, whose presence essentially turned the 2011 Phillies season around, for half a year.  Not when Placido Polanco, John Mayberry and Yul Brynner Shane Victorino  were all losing between 50 and 150 OPS points from their 2011 performances.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

In fact, with a few noted exceptions, the Phillies' entire offense more or less went in the tank this year.  Research has been done to show that "protection" in a lineup is either overrated or perhaps very difficult to measure, and while that may be true of any one batter, the loss of the two best hitters in the lineup seemed to have a trickle down effect on the Phillies hitters.

In years past, during and even before their stretch of division titles, the Phils always managed to score a good number of runs, largely because they always took their walks.  Since 2003, during a nine-year stretch of winning seasons, they ranked lower than 5th in the NL in walks only once, and this in 2009, when they led the league in homers and runs and won the NL pennant, so they could afford to only be 7th in walks that year.   

But without Utley and Howard to light the way, the rest of the team sunk from 5th to 14th in walks, and without Victorino or Pence on the roster, they're likely to sink even further.  Well, probably not past the Astros. The absence of Howard and the death of whatever remained of Polanco's "bat" meant that the Phillies got next to nothing out of their corner infield spots this year.  They ranked 11th and 15th out of 16 NL teams in OPS at those respective positions.

Second base has been a hole too, despite ranking 6th in OPS in the NL, because this is an awful year for second basemen.  Phillie shortstops (mostly Rollins) and all three outfield spots rank in the bottom half of the NL in OPS.  The only bright spot in the lineup is the catcher, and clearly that's not going to do it.

The starting rotation, though sometimes injured or not as spectacular as in the past, has been good enough to complete, but the bullpen (other than Papelbon) has been sub-par, ranking 12th out of 16 NL teams in ERA and allowing 34% of inherited runners to score, very nearly the worst mark in baseball.  Papelbon may have 29 Saves and a 2.70 ERA, but he's saving games that don't mean anything, and being paid a fortune to do it.

The worst part about all of this is that it was all eminently preventable.  Ryan Howard's ankle didn't hurt itself on Opening Day or in the middle of spring training, forcing the Phillies to scramble to find someone.  It happened on October 7th, exactly as the Phillies' 2011 season ended.  General manager Ruben Amaro had six months to find a suitable replacement.

Instead he signed Jim Thome in November, even though Thome had not played a game at first base since 2007 and had not spent significant time there since 2005.  Then, three weeks later, he traded the proverbial Mr. ToBeNamedLater to the Rockies for Ty Wigginton, who in 2011 had somehow managed to hit just .242 despite playing half his games at Coors Field (including .216 with two homers in the second half).  Wigginton hadn't had a decent season with the bat since 2008 and, it could be argued, had never had a decent season with the glove, so Amaro's presentation of him as a potential answer to the missing Howard was a cloudy proposition, at best.

Meanwhile folks like Lew Ford and Dan Johnson and Steve Pearce and Brad Eldred could have been had for a song, and could reasonably have been expected to produce at least as much as Wigginton.  Granted, he hit over .300 in April, but has barely cracked the Mendoza Line since, and clearly does not belong in the lineup of a major league team anymore.

After watching Wigginton hit .213 between early May and the All-Star Break, manager Charlie Manuel probably thanked his lucky stars to have Howard back.  He's relegated Wigginton mostly to pinch hitting duty since then, and he's no better suited to that job: He's hit .156 in 45 at-bats.  Unfortunately, Howard is almost exactly as bad as Wiggy was - with an OPS just 20 points higher in roughly the same number of at-bats - as he tries to regain his form after missing the first half of the season.

The Phillies of 2012 have also suffered from a somewhat difficult schedule and particularly tough losses, at least in terms of which teams fate decided to allow to beat them.  The scheduling gods deemed that the 2012 Phillies should play against most of the AL East, generally regarded as the toughest division in baseball, though they also faced Minnesota and took two out of three from the woeful Twins.  But they lost two of three each to Baltimore, Boston, and Tampa and then got swept by the Blue Jays ("First Joe Carter...")

And the Phillies played particularly badly against their own division, losing key games against crucial opponents.  They have won only five of 12 games against the lowly Marlins, four of 12 against the sputtering Mets, and - most damning of all - only three of 12 against Atlanta.  If they had just managed to split the games they've played to date against the NL East they might at least be hovering around .500 and not have had to jettison Jim Thome, Joe Blanton, Pence and Victorino, and might have even picked up some third base help for the stretch.  Kevin Youkilis might be mashing for the Phightin's instead of the Pale Hose.

But it was not to be, and of course no amount of hoping by the Philly-centric Phans will help them surmount the 10-game deficit and hurdle four or five teams to make the playoffs.  And that, for a team that started the year with three Cy Young Awards (Halladay has two) and two former MVPs on its roster, with a $175 million payroll that is second only to the Yankees, is an extraordinary disappointment.

For once, Philadelphia actually has a legitimate gripe.

OK, two.