Orioles Proving Ground

Like most teams, the 2013 Baltimore Orioles came up short of the playoffs, and will have some decisions to make heading into the offseason.  The Orioles finished the season with an 85-77 record, tied for 3^rd place in a predictably competitive AL East.  They were 12 games behind the Boston Red Sox and 6.5 games out of the second wild card spot.  They were in the thick of the wild card race up until a 6 game losing streak beginning on September 19 ultimately did them in.  As I mentioned last week, despite winning 8 fewer games than they did in 2012, they arguably had a better team this year than last year.  In large part, this was due to the fact that they went from having the best record in one run games in 2012 (29-9) to the worst record in one run games in 2013 (20-31).  Some of this is luck, but some of it is also due to a less effective bullpen in 2013, as you’ll see below.

After the jump, you’ll find several tables that look at how the 2013 Orioles performed in certain categories compared to the rest of the American League as well as all of baseball.  It will provide a starting point to look at what the Orioles need to do to improve for the 2014 season.  In addition to my offseason opinions on this site, the writers at Camden Depot (the ESPN affiliated blog for the Baltimore Orioles) will be doing a position by position analysis that looks at what happened in 2013, and the steps that the Orioles need to take to improve that position to win the World Series in 2014.  I am responsible for the starting pitchers and the shortstop position.  I plan on linking to my posts as they go up, and will also post links to all the position write-ups at the end of the month when we’re all finished.

As always, please consult the Fangraphs Library for definitions of advanced statistics such as wOBA, FIP, UZR/150, and DRS.

Position Players

Pitchers

This entry was posted on October 12, 2013 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Offense, Offseason, Pitching with tags 2013 Rankings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.