The Orioles Are Here To Mash, For As Long As They Can

Given the choice, why in the world would you waste time on prissy pretensions like plate discipline or on-base percentage when you could instead smash the everloving shit out of every baseball you see? This is the dilemma faced daily by Chris Davis, 30, Baltimore Oriole and Man Put on God's Earth To Smash Baseballs. It is not the sort of problem that is generally confronted at the team level.

For teams, the idea is generally to go for a little bit of everything, which is reasonable enough. But in the process of scorching the league out of the gates, the Orioles have made double-or-nothing look like a strategy. In a year in which not a single expert at Baseball Prospectus—disclosure: I am one of their "experts"—Fangraphs, Sports Illustrated, or ESPN picked them to win their division, the Orioles now have damn near the best record in the American League, and have clearly made their decision—they're swinging for the dang fences.

So, why is this happening, and why's it happening in Baltimore? It all starts with how GM Dan Duquette built the Orioles—to hit the ball hard enough, far enough, and often enough that nobody noticed that the guys in the rotation were stinking up the joint. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated strategy, but it was one that circumstances thrust upon them, and a gamble that fit the team's budget.

And you know what? It might actually be fun along the way. Manny Machado is an all-around savant and Adam Jones is just a tick less virtuosic, but the one-dimensional sluggers surrounding them can all make some seriously entertaining noise—of both the exploding-baseball and gale-force wind gust variety—at the plate. Chris Davis joins new DH Pedro Alvarez as two of only a handful of dudes in baseball with genuine 80-grade power. Mark Trumbo will periodically make up for his imposing whiff totals by smashing a ball into/through the warehouse at Camden Yards. Hell, even Jonathan Schoop has managed to hit 15 dingers each of the last two years, and he's a second baseman whose name looks like a Salt N' Pepa song. This is a team that's a blast to watch, when it's on, and—more to the point—it's also one that a franchise like Baltimore can afford.

Problem is, most of the mashers in the Orioles' lineup have never been particularly good at doing anything other than hit home runs—things like, just for instance, get on base. Still, let's ignore that for the moment. Teams such as Baltimore can't afford to buy perfect players. If you squint, and don't think too hard, you can sort of see what Duquette was going for: a team that hit for just enough power to make up for bad pitching, and hopefully end the year a few wins above .500.

So far, the power part of the plan has worked even better than expected. The Orioles have a .540 slugging percentage, which is the best mark in baseball through Tuesday morning, and they've hit more home runs (23) than any team except the Rockies (25), who have both Trevor Story and Coors Field to thank. But the pitching, predictably, has been exactly as terrible as expected, clunking along to the tune of a 5.14 ERA for Baltimore's starters, the second-worst mark in the American League. So why, and how, are the Orioles now winning so many more games than they're losing?

Funnily enough, it's because these early-season Orioles are, besides hitting the ball out of the ballpark, doing a silly, new-age thing as well: getting on base often enough to make those homers count. It was an ahead-of-his-time Oriole, Earl Weaver, who said that he believed in "pitching, defense, and the three-run homer," and this year's Baltimore squad has, to pretty much everyone's surprise, made the "three-run" part work for them. So far this year, they've gotten on base at a .354 clip, which is a better mark than any other team in the American League. That's meant that when their big boys come up to hit, they've got someone besides themselves to drive in.

Will it last? In the long run, nothing does, but less existentially: no, probably not. The Orioles' walk rate, even given their recent success, is a middle-of-the-pack 8.7 percent, which suggests that most of their supposed on-base ability is less ability than luck—the luck that lets a ball floated drowsily into the outfield turn into a hit instead of an out, which happens to be the kind of luck that tends to run out sooner than later.

Walk rate and plate discipline, on the other hand, tend to be things a team is either good at or not, and precious few Orioles have shown in the past that they're much good at either. Which is maybe not shocking—again, the Orioles are a mid-market team, despite the millions they dropped on Davis this offseason, and they've got to spend somewhere. They've decided to bet on power, and that means that as their luck runs out, as all luck does, so too will the Orioles' ability to keep those three-run dingers from turning into solo shots. In consequence, over time, their record will probably fall closer to where it was expected to be at the beginning of the year.

Still, saying that the Orioles have been lucky so far this year is not to say that they haven't been fun to watch, or that they necessarily made the wrong moves this offseason. They've been extraordinarily fun to watch, because they tap into exactly the part of every baseball fan—every human, even—that likes to watch defenseless inanimate objects get hit extremely hard.

The brash and battered fraction of the American soul that likes Monster Trucks and Wrestlemania has a spiritual cousin in the hard-swinging, tater-mashing Orioles. So far in 2016, the big baseball deity in the sky likes the Orioles too. That deity's favor tends to be fickle. But there's still plenty to enjoy for the rest of us. And maybe a little hope in Baltimore, too.