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: