The Orioles Aren't Winning the "Right" Way, But They're Winning

The Baltimore Orioles were not widely predicted to be playing first-place baseball in the year 2016. In and of itself, that is not an odd opinion; outside of 2012 and 2014, the last time the Orioles finished a season fewer than 12 games back in the American League East was 1997. You do have to give some points for recency, and the Orioles weren't supposed to be very good in the last few seasons they made the playoffs, either. As far as punditry and prediction go, the AL East has been the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays' show for the past half-decade, with the New York Yankees in a recurring "Special Guest Appearance" role.

This might undersell the weirdness of what has happened this year: not only were the Orioles not supposed to take first place—they were supposed to be actively bad. When I appeared on Baseball Prospectus's Effectively Wild podcast in February and pegged the Orioles as a roughly .500 ball club, Ben and Craig were dubious; they had Baltimore winning 60-something games and finishing near the bottom of the division. They were hardly alone in holding that outlook.

We were both wrong, of course, or at least have been so far. On June 30th, the Orioles are 47-30 and on pace to win some 98 games en route to their second AL East championship in four years.

"On pace" are two of the less useful words in baseball, and they certainly don't indicate that's how the season will actually end, but it was never even supposed to get this far. Breaking camp, the Orioles had two fatal flaws in their roster. The first was the outfield situation. Spring training showed the Orioles' top position-player acquisition, Korean outfielder Hyun-Soo Kim, to be so completely lost at the plate that Baltimore tried sending him back across the Pacific. The O's second biggest position-player acquisition, outfielder Mark Trumbo, looked so hapless out there as to make it nearly impossible for his loud but mostly tepid bat to undo the damage.

What happened once the season began, of course, was that the veteran Kim was perfectly fine; he is currently leading the team in batting average (.339) and on-base percentage (.431, a mark no one else on the roster comes particularly close to matching). More surprisingly, Mark Trumbo has announced himself as the second coming of Nelson Cruz, leading the American League with 23 home runs going into the O's June 30th game against the Seattle Mariners. Combine that with a well-timed hot start to the year from Rule 5 pick Joey Rickard, and the outfield has been a potent part of an offense that also has got MVP production from infielder Manny Machado and much better than expected hitting from catcher Matt Wieters and second baseman Jonathan Schoop. Combine that with Chris Davis making good on the first leg of the massive deal that will keep him in Baltimore for seven more years, and it's easy to see why the O's are tied for the second best record in the AL, and for the most home runs ever hit by a team in the month of June (55).

The second fatal flaw was the one most commenters expected would sink the club: the starting rotation. While the Orioles have put together a great bullpen over the past few years, and then made sure it stayed together by re-signing Darren O'Day in the offseason, their starting rotation for all of recent history has been a make-work slapdash of doomed reclamation projects, underachieving prospects, and rentals. The only real change to that over the past two or three seasons has been the addition of risky FA signings Ubaldo Jimenez and Yovani Gallardo to the mix.

And unlike the outfield, which surprised everyone, the rotation has been, well…

Yes, it has been quite bad. Chris Tillman's 3.52 ERA (126 ERA+) and 94.2 IP decisively lead all the other starters, reflecting the fact that when you pitch poorly, you don't go deep into games, and therefore throw fewer innings. Kevin Gausman has shown flashes of realizing his top-tier potential at times, and Tyler Wilson has been a serviceable back-end starter in outcomes, if not necessarily in ability. And that is all the good news there is about the Orioles rotation.

The Gallardo and Jimenez signings, both of which were made at the very tail end of free agency after every other team had passed on the pitchers, and both of which required the surrender of a draft pick, have both been unqualified disasters. Mike Wright isn't a credible Major League starter in the long term, and honestly, Wilson may not be, either. There are no reinforcements coming from the minor leagues, and the only pitcher of note who could ride in off the DL to save the rotation is Vance Worley, who already lost his job in the rotation once due to ineffectiveness, so let's wrap this paragraph up.

Other than the injured Worley and the demoted Wright, the most palatable internal options are David Hale, who was recently claimed off waivers from the Colorado Rockies, and Cuban signing Ariel Miranda, who has a 4.40 ERA in 77.2 innings so far this year in AAA. Neither option is particularly agreeable to the stomach, which is why the Orioles might take the upcoming All-Star Break as an opportunity to further stretch out reliever and former top prospect Dylan Bundy to join the rotation when games resume. Ideally, Baltimore would send him down to get there, but when Baltimore brought him up to pitch an inning for the fans in 2012, they started his option-year clock, and now cannot send him to the minors without him having to clear waivers first.

So what do the Orioles do? How do they address the rotation? Or, more to the point, do they need to address the rotation in the first place?

After all, Baltimore is winning a whole lot of games despite a whole lot of bad pitching, and it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that Gallardo and Jimenez find their groove in the second half, or that Gausman learns to pitch like an ace all the time. More important, addressing the rotation means trading more prospects, which means fewer good, young players coming up out of the system, which means that in order to get more players down the line, the Orioles have to spend more money or trade still more prospects. Baltimore doesn't have a lot of prospects on a good day. Dealing from that stock for a fourth straight year to add some deadline rentals would deplete it even further.

In the end, standing pat and seeing how long manager Buck Showalter can play out the string with the roster he has is probably the best bet, not only because of who is on Baltimore's roster but because of who's on everybody else's in the East. The teams the Orioles will be playing the most this year are hardly better off as far as staff quality goes; even the Red Sox and the Rays are having abysmal years on the mound, and Toronto's not hitting the way it did last year.

Sometimes the only answer to a problem with no good solutions is to push through it, and see where you end up. Maybe the power of home runs alone can get the Baltimore Orioles a division crown. It's a gamble, but it has got them this far already.

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