Why are the Baltimore Orioles 13-18? Part I

The answer to this question seems obvious—"They're not very good." That's certainly true, but you wouldn't get far as a baseball GM if that's all you could say. The first question you should always ask is, "does luck play a role"? Well, our Pythagorean W-L is exactly the same, 13-18, so it seems the answer to that is no.

So first, let's take a look at our hitting. As of May 10 (before the Tampa Bay game), Baltimore was a completely league average hitting team. Their overall line of .269/.338/.428 is almost identical to the AL average of .268/.339/.426.

Looking a bit more deeply, there is one major worrying sign—our 11 caught steals rank last in the AL, and our steal percentage is second last ahead of only Oakland (which isn't saying much).

Baserunning has been a chronic problem this year, the biggest culprits being Brian Roberts (4 SB / 3 CS), Felix Pie (1 SB / 2 CS), and Adam Jones (3 SB / 2 CS).

Perhaps it's no coincidence that we rank last in the AL in triples (with just two)—we have a lot of fast guys with gap power, which should theoretically lead to many triples. Bad baserunning could be an explanation.

Nonetheless, our offense is slightly below average at worst. Let's look now at the pitching, which was deemed our biggest problem area before the season. As a whole, the team ERA of 5.39 ranks 12th in the AL.

However, ERA doesn't tell the whole story—it depends on defense, among other things. Our peripherals show a slightly more optimistic picture. Orioles pitchers have struck out 6.69 batters per nine, which is good for 8th in the league (and pretty much equal to the league average).

Remarkably, our K/BB ratio is 2.05, good for fourth in the league—considering all of our control problems last year (from Daniel Cabrera to Radhames Liz to Dennis Sarfate), that's a good sign.

So, why is our team ERA so bad? There are two reasons. The first is bad fielding (which I'll get to in a moment), and the second is our inability to keep the ball in the park. Orioles pitchers have given up 49 home runs, worst in the league.

There are many culprits here, including the currently injured Alfredo Simon (5 HR in 6.1 IP) and Dennis Sarfate (3 HR in 12.2 IP), Mark Hendrickson (7 HR in 26.1 IP), closer George Sherrill (3 HR in 12.2 IP), and Brian Bass (5 HR in 20.1 IP).

Most of these guys are scrubs, with the obvious exception of Sherrill, who incidentally gave up all three of his homers against right-handed batters—adding credence to the idea that he should be a left-handed specialist, not a closer.

Our fielding independent ERA is 5.16, about 0.20 points below our actual ERA—so poor fielding has been a factor. Home runs are the biggest problem though—if we had the same peripherals, but gave up just an average number of homers (33), our fielding independent ERA would be just 4.39—I'd take that any day.

So far I've covered hitting and pitching—in part two I will look at fielding and then go into some additional details —why are these problems happening, and how can we fix them? For instance, moving Sherrill into a lefty-only role would probably lower his home runs, but who would be the new closer?