Call to the pen
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Why the Baltimore Orioles are not beyond hope

By Bill Felber

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 21: Bench coach John Russell #77 and Manager Buck Showalter #26 of the Baltimore Orioles react at the top of the dugout steps with their team losing in an MLB baseball game against the New York Yankees on September 21, 2018 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. Yankees won 10-8. (Photo by Paul Bereswill/Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 21: Bench coach John Russell #77 and Manager Buck Showalter #26 of the Baltimore Orioles react at the top of the dugout steps with their team losing in an MLB baseball game against the New York Yankees on September 21, 2018 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. Yankees won 10-8. (Photo by Paul Bereswill/Getty Images) /
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There’s plenty of recent precedent for turning bad teams — even ones worse than the Baltimore Orioles — into winners

The Baltimore Orioles lost 115 games in 2018, which is pretty bad even for a bad team.

Since the initiation of interleague play in 1997, only one team – the 119-loss Detroit Tigers of 2003 – has suffered more defeats in a single season. In fact, in all of baseball history only four teams – the aforementioned Tigers, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (134), the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics (117) and the 1962 New York Mets (120) have lost more games in a single season than did the 2018 Orioles.

Orioles fans can be forgiven if they are fighting off a sense of hopelessness. Yet there is some reason for hope to be found in recent history. That reason begins not in the win-loss record but in the scoring margins.

Because baseball is a game based on out-scoring opponents, run differential is probably the single most important statistic in evaluating team progress. Records can be influenced by luck, but there is no hiding from the fact that you got out-scored by a massive number of runs.

In their 47-115 season, the Orioles were, to nobody’s surprise, widely out-scored, as it happens by a margin of 622-892. Yet  even that  270-run difference yielded a Pythagorean 55-107 record which – while still bad – was a full 10 games better  than Baltimore actually did. In short, the 2018 Orioles were both bad and unlucky.

We can assess the depth of the problem created by that 270-run margin by measuring the standard deviation of the Orioles run production against the all other MLB teams. Doing so establishes that the 2018 Orioles’ run differential was 1.90 standard deviations worse than the MLB average.

How bad is 1.90 standard deviations worse than average?  Since the beginning of interleague play in 1997, eight teams – encompassing a total of 11 seasons – have recorded a standard deviation of -1.9 or worse.

Yet here’s the hopeful nugget. Seven of those eight desperately bad teams turned themselves around enough to play at least one post-season game within the ensuing five seasons. Two of them won the World Series and a third played in the World Series.

Here’s a synopsis of the eight that give Baltimore fans reason for hope that things could actually change:

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