The Orioles Have Earned This, but They Might Not Sustain It

The majority of Major League Baseball teams are now at least 40% of the way through this shortened season. A small sample still, to be sure—we haven’t been doing this for even a month yet—but at the same time, nearly half the full slate. While the standings aren’t yet stratified (only one team is ten games back in their division), the playoff picture is taking shape, and in a year in which more than half the league will make the playoffs, this leaves a lot more teams on the national radar than there would otherwise be.

Some of the contenders are expected: the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Twins, the Rays. Some aren’t stunning, but catch the eye: the White Sox, the Rockies, the Padres. Some are jarring: the Marlins, the Orioles.

With all these teams, but especially the last two groups, the question is beginning to be asked as to whether they are “for real.” Let’s try to answer that in three ways, using FanGraphs for all three.

Pythagorean Win-Loss

This is a concept first explored by Bill James. It quantifies the idea that run differential is more reflective of a team’s true performance than simple win percentage. Here’s more on it, from FanGraphs.

Using PythagenPat, the Pythagorean Win-Loss variant used by FanGraphs, we can see who’s underperformed and overperformed their run differential. Teams at the top have overperformed. Teams at the bottom have underperformed.

The verdict? The Cubs have been a bit lucky, especially considering they don’t exactly have a rock star bullpen like that of the A’s or Yankees, a trait that makes more close wins than close losses an expectation. The Dodgers have possibly been a little unlucky, even with the best record in baseball. The Angels should be closer to the mix. The Pirates aren’t really the 162-game equivalent of a 32-win team, but they might be the 162-game equivalent of a 49-win team.

BaseRuns

A statistician named David Smyth came up with this one, which expands on the run differential concept but makes calculations based off the underlying factors that determine run differential: hits, walks, home runs, stolen bases, etc. Instead of looking at run differential itself, it looks at the components of run differential and calculates an expected win percentage. Here’s more from FanGraphs on it as a concept and how they calculate it, and here’s how it breaks down:

Takeaways?

Again, the Angels perhaps don’t deserve to be in as dire of straits as they’re in. One would expect the Reds to be much closer in the NL Central, and the Blue Jays to be more present in the playoff scene. The Rays and A’s may be very aptly leveraging their bullpens, and may have gotten lucky so far. The AL Central should be even tighter than it already is.

Projected Rest-of-Season Win Percentage

You may have noticed that the Orioles have not been notably overperforming their underlying metrics. In fact, BaseRuns has them a win better than they’ve been. The good play has been real. But it still might not last.

What Pythagorean Win-Loss and BaseRuns don’t consider is individual players performing unsustainably well, or unlikely-to-be-sustained well. Over a full season, this gets washed out, but over a short sample, like the one we have, the effects can be notable.

FanGraphs’ Playoff Odds page is not reflective, as Pythagorean Win-Loss and BaseRuns are. It’s predictive. And here’s what it says about each team’s expected win percentage over the rest of the season, having accounted for schedule. In the right-most column, we’ve scaled the difference between win percentage to-date and expected rest-of-season win percentage to 24 games so it reads comparably to the tables above. As with the others, teams at the top of the table have overperformed, and teams at the bottom have underperformed.

Again, good news for the Angels. Hopeful news for the Nationals, Reds, and Mets. Fine news for the White Sox, given what their reasonable goals are. Bad news for the A’s. Bad news for the Marlins. Bad news for the Orioles.

The answer as to what will happen going forward is, as always, “we’ll see.” The Orioles and Marlins have placed themselves close enough to contention that it won’t take too outrageous of rest-of-season overperformance for them to make the playoff field. The A’s have grabbed a nice-enough lead in the AL West that they’re still more likely than not to win their division, even if their results these last few weeks have arguably exceeded their performance. As we’ve seen so far, 40% of a season isn’t a lot this year. 50% won’t be either. There will be over and underperformance the rest of the way—different in the specifics from what it’s been so far, but presumably comparable in the magnitude, and in the level of surprise.

We’ll see.