How Did This Happen and What Do We Do Now? Part 1 (The hitting part)

This Orioles season has been like if you had a brother who was a UFC fighter and he had a big title fight coming up. 

You buy the pay-per-view well in advance, you invite people over to watch the fight and you prepare a bunch of fun snacks for people to eat. 

While the undercards are fighting you’re busy telling everyone how good your brother is and how he’s going to win and how he’s got great reach and he’s lethal if he gets the other guy on the ground. 

Then the fight starts and you watch as your brother gets knocked unconscious by a flying knee 20 seconds into round 1 and the fight is over before it’s even begun. 

You stare at the TV as your brother lies unconscious while his opponent dances around the ring with the flag of an Eastern European country you don’t recognize draped around his shoulders. 

Your friends come up and pat you on the shoulder and say things like “I’m sorry dude” and “That’s rough buddy” and then slowly filter out of your house leaving you alone to wallow in your disappointment. 

Over the next few days people that weren’t able to make it to your place that night will text you and say things like “Hey I saw the fight on TikTok are you doing alright?” and the answer is of course no. 

Just like watching doctors attend to your brother’s slumped over body in the ring makes it unmistakable that the fight is over, watching the Orioles get swept by the Twins for the second time in a week has made it undeniable that this season is over for the Baltimore Orioles. 

Chris Paddack and Byron Buxton essentially delivered a spinning backfist to the Orioles season and now the only thing that matters in Baltimore are 2 questions. 

How did this happen and what do we do now? 

How did this Happen?

Maybe I should have seen this coming, after all I wrote multiple blogs about how badly the Orioles offseason was going while it was happening and they didn’t do any of the things that I said they should do but I just thought that there was too much talent on the position player side for them to be bad even if they were going to have an underwhelming rotation. 

What I convinced myself before the season started (and what Mike Elias must have also convinced himself) was that this rotation could survive until the trade dead where they could make deal for another starter and then towards the end of the season get Kyle Bradish back and with Rodruguez, Eflin, Bradish and trade deadline acquisition X they’d have a pretty sturdy rotation when it mattered down the stretch. 

A big part of the rotation being “good enough” was based on the idea that even if 4 out of 5 starters had an ERA in the 4s the offense would score enough runs that the Orioles would still win most of their games and that just hasn’t been the case. 

Yes the starters are giving up too many runs but a lot of these games end with scores like 9-0, 4-0, or 4-1 and you’re not going to beat anyone scoring 0-1 runs.

The Orioles have played 42 games this season and they have scores 2 or fewer runs in 17 of them, that is 40 percent of the games. 

Here’s a scenario that will give you an idea of how bad this is. 

Jacob Degrom has a career ERA of 2.51 so even if the Orioles had 5 Jacob Degroms starting every game this season and going 9 innings every game without getting tired they still would have lost 40% of their games. (I know that with averages that’s not quite how it works and if the Orioles really did have 5 magical Degrom clones all pitching to a 2.51 ERA going 9 innings every start there would be nights were one of the clones would throw a shutout and nights where another clone would give up 5 runs but when the Orioles aren’t scoring 2 or fewer runs they are frequently scoring 3 or fewer runs so let’s say for each time these hypothetical Orioles were to win 1-0 courtesy of the Degrom shutout then they would lose 4-3 courtesy of a Degrom “blow up”) 

The offense being this bad is truly shocking. The rotation has been worse than you could possibly imagine but if you told me at the start of spring training that Grayson Rodriguez would be out for the first half of the season and Zach Eflin would hit the 15 day IL after just 3 starts I could have guessed that the rotation would be struggling but even with injuries to Cowser and Westburg I would have thought there would be enough offensive talent on the roster to keep the offense among the best in the league. 

Here is where the Orioles rank in several important offensive stats this seasons 

AVG: 26

OBP: 26

SLG: 19

WAR: 24

BB%: 25

K%: 28

wRC+: 19

2B: 28 (real hitters hit doubles)

GDP: 5 (that’s bad)

And here are some advanced stats I think are telling

Average Exit Velocity: 6

Barrel %: 8

Hard Hit %: 4

Fly Ball %: 8

Home Run to Fly Ball Ratio: 12

Line Drive %: 29

Why do those particular metrics interest me? 

Good questions reader! These numbers interest me because the Orioles offense did not get this way by accident. There is a strategy coming down from the front office and being pushed by the hitting strategists, or offensive coordinators or plate mentality coaches or whatever they are calling themselves this year and the players (especially the younger players) are buying into this strategy and are reaping the results. 

These numbers show us that the Orioles’ hitters are being coached to prioritize barreling up the ball to create elite exit velocities while hitting the ball in the air. On its face this is a good thing hard hits balls in the air is a recipe for a great offense just look at the teams next to the Orioles in the rankings on those stats and look at the MLB standings. 

Top Ten in Hard Hit % (where they rank in Wins)

1. Red Sox (16th)
2. Mets (3rd)
3. Yankees (5th)
4. Orioles (27th)
5. Phillies (5th)
6. Dodgers (2nd)
7. Braves (16th)
8. Diamondbacks (14th)
9. Twins (11th)
10. Mariners (14th)

So the Orioles hitters are being coached to chase barrels and they are succeeding at that task but in doing so they are striking out too much, walking too little and have really struggled in situations where all they need to do is make contact. 

I am not a hater of the many advanced stats that baseball offers us. Hitting the ball hard is better than hitting the ball soft, hitting the ball in the air is better than hitting the ball on the ground. Everyone has always known this we just have numbers that tell us more exactly what is going on. 

Players and coaches should be trying to figure out how they can hit the ball as hard as possible at the most optimal angle possible but in the never ending battle between pitchers and hitters if you are a one trick pony then you can be exploited and that is what I am worried has happened with the Orioles. 

Clearly they are still succeeding at coaching the hitters on how get a barrel and they’ll be able to point towards the Orioles ranking in hard hit percentage and barrel rate and say our strategy is working we’ve just been unlucky and that may be partially true but when you are at the bottom of the league in K% and BB% that points to a flaw in the process being coached that goes beyond luck. 

The fact that the Orioles rank so poorly in those 2 stats is especially damning because all of their young prospects (with the partial exception of Jordan Westburg) came up through the minors with exceptional K/BB ratios and reputations for having excellent plate discipline so the talent and ability to draw walks and avoid strikeouts is there. The hitting coaches are working with excellent clay and they are forming it into a hideous statue. 

It’s not like you have to choose between hard contact and good plate discipline let’s look at that same list of league leaders for hard hit % and see where they rank in K/BB

1. Red Sox (23rd)

2. Mets (4th)

3. Yankees (9th)

4. Orioles (27th)

5. Phillies (5th)

6. Dodgers (7th)

7. Braves (18th)

8. Diamondbacks (1st)

9. Twins (25th)

10. Mariners (8th)

Once again the Orioles stand out for the wrong reasons. The Orioles’ hitters are getting hard contact at the expense of their plate discipline while these other teams get to have it all. 

So how do the Orioles get closer to where the Diamondbacks are? 

It has to start with the front office realizing that what has happened to the Orioles offense is not bad luck but rather the natural consequence of deploying a strategy that opposing teams have clearly figured out. 

When you look at the Orioles young hitters (I reference the young hitters because I believe that they buy in the most) heat charts for batting average you’ll see that most of these guys have huge holes in their swings and if you are an opposing pitcher that makes it really easy to pitch through a lineup if there are large chunks of the strike zone where these hitters are ineffective. 

Runners in scoring position and Adley Rutschman at the plate? 

Just pound the outside corners of the plate and he can’t touch it. Look at the chart, opposing pitchers have a 100% success rate throwing to the outside corners against Adley. If they miss and throw it outside middle he will crush it so that is nice, but if you can hit your spot you can get him out. 

Even the best hitters have cool zones but as I flipped through the Orioles data I was stunned at the amount of zones where they are hitting a crisp .000. 

I thought to myself perhaps it’s more normal than I think to have multiple zones in the strike zone where you are hitting .000 so I clicked through the Phillies and Diamondbacks’ heat zones and NOPE it is not normal for all your best players to have multiple parts of the strike zone where they are hitting .000. 

For reference here are the young Orioles hitter heat zones. I’m only including the young guys so O’Hearn and Cedric aren’t here so that makes it look worse but I did Elias a big favor by not including any of his “Big Free Agent Acquisitions” on here because their heat zones are a shade of dark blue that doesn’t occur in nature. 

Adley Rutschman

Ryan Mountcastle

Jackson Holliday

Gunnar Henderson

Jordan Westburg

Heston Kjerstad 

It just looks too easy and too predictable. 

So how do you fix this? 

Cody Asche recently gave a quote about how everyday Adley comes in willing to do whatever it takes to get out of his slump and my main takeaway is that if the talented multi time all star slumps for a calendar year and you tell me the whole time he’s been coming to you for help and doing whatever you tell him and he’s still struggling it sound like you are perfectly useless.

Additionally the broadcast can’t stop talking about how Jackson Holliday is hitting better because of a tip he got from his dad and my main takeaway on that story is if Matt Holliday can improve Jackson Holliday’s batting average 60 points by picking up on something while watching the game on TV why can’t our coaches figure something like that out.

So I am on board with shipping these guys off but I don’t think that’s going to be enough.

The Orioles hitting coaches did not get their jobs because they had awesome success somewhere and the Orioles felt the need to bring in their powerful hitting minds to lead their offense, they got their jobs because they were willing to coach the way the front office wants them to coach. 

So even if they fire Asche and Joseph it’s not like they are going to hire Brian Roberts and say “Show em how you hit .314 in ‘05!” They are just going to replace them with more guys that will coach the same philosophy and the problem will persist. 

The issue comes from much higher and this is where it is especially tricky to decide who deserves the blame. Obviously the man at the top is Mike Elias but as much as I blame him for other things going wrong in Baltimore he doesn’t seem like he is as involved on the baseball strategy front. When it comes to analytics and strategy I think the name we are searching for is Assistant General Manager Sig Mejdal. 

Maybe it is unfair for me to point the finger at Sig, maybe the fault lies with Brendan Fournie or Devan Fink or someone else in the Orioles analytics department but I don’t really know much about those people and I do know some things about Sig. 

If you read the various books and articles about the rise of the Houston Astros Sig Mejdal’s name comes up quite a lot, more than Mike Elias’ name even I would say and it is undeniable that Sig played a big role in creating the Houston Astros as we know them now the same way he played a big role in creating the Baltimore Orioles as they now exist. 

However when you read the stories about the Astros it gets to a point where Sig had to be pushed out of an important decision making role because (let me know if this sounds familiar) he was too beholden to his analytical systems even as those systems became outdated and he was always on the side of hoarding prospects and not paying free agents because his models told him those were inefficient means of team building. 

Eventually the Astros had to move on from Sig’s leadership and do things that Sig was against like trading for starting pitching at a steep cost and signing free agents to bolster the team’s needs and it was those decisions that took the Astros from the fun rebuilding team that they were to the Dynasty that they became.

The Orioles have reached a similar point, it is possible that Elias and Mejdal have taken them as far as they can take them and now their inability to adapt to being a contender is holding the team back. If the Orioles want to see things get better at the plate then they need to fix the problem in the warehouse.