It's hardly surprising that there is now serious speculation swirling around Orioles manager Sam Perlozzo and the likelihood of him retaining his job.

I mused in a recent message board thread that the only clearly compelling reason to keep Sam Perlozzo on as manager--unless you simply feel that the revolving door has to stop now, regardless of who's spinning around in it-- is his umbilical-like relationship with pitching coach Leo Mazzone.  It's long been presumed that if Perlozzo goes, Mazzone will go with him and that presumption is pretty solidly rooted.  After all, Mazzone only took the job with the Orioles because the team hired Perlozzo in the first place.

For all the teeth-gnashing about the bullpen, the blown games and the like, a glance at the numbers show just how dramatically the Orioles' pitching has improved this year, and this in spite of several serious injuries to key members of the team's starting rotation.  The relief corps personnel was upgraded, of course, in the off-season, but there are a lot of familiar faces on the current 2007 staff and none of the new ones are going to enter the Hall of Fame without ponying up the cost of a ticket.  And yet the improvement is substantial and undeniable.

Consider the following table:

Let's get the bad news out of the way first.  The walk situation, which was awful last year, has actually gotten worse in 2007.  The team is walking 0.44 more batters per nine innings thus far in 2007 and has bottomed out to last in the league in that category.  Texas ranks 13th in the American League at 4.19; no other team is above four.  There's obvious room for improvement here.

That constitutes the negative information.  Everything else is positive; in some cases, it's wildly positive.  A caveat:  the 2007 Orioles' season has 118 games remaining.  Things may not hold up.  

Having said that...

The ERA has dropped by a run a game and the ranking has improved by seven slots.  From a whisper above the AL cellar, the team has moved into the upper half of the league.  Remember the big step forward we all wanted to see the pitching staff take this year?  So far they've taken it.  The league ERA, while down thus far this season to about 4.30 from last year's finish of 4.56 is a factor here, but there's real improvement as well--on the order of 3/4 of a run, even after accounting for the drop in ERA league-wide.  That's a bunch.  And the ranking, of course, is exclusive of league-wide seasonal trends; going from 13th to sixth is going from 13th to sixth.

Hits allowed have declined approximately 15% and the ranking has gone from a tie for 10th to sixth.

Strikeouts are up by nearly one per nine innings--another 15% improvement.  Last year the K/9 ranking--a solid sixth--was one of the few relative bright spots in a dismal season.  This year's mark is tops in the American League to date.

The HR/9 improvement is the most dramatic of all--a 50% decline in rate and a remarkable worst to first turnaround in ranking.  (Given the fact that, as usual, the HR/9 rate is lower in the first couple of months of the season than it is subsequently, the ranking improvement is the thing to focus on.)

How much of what we're seeing is Leo Mazzone?  I don't know.  But the step forward is so widespread and so dramatic, it would be folly not to consider him a large part of the equation.  There's one other more nuanced reason to see Mazzone's hand in all of this:  the increase in walks combined with the dramatic decrease in home runs imply--they don't explicitly underlie, but they do imply--the influence of the Mazzone factor on this staff.  Mazzone has long been known for preaching the low outside fastball as the key to pitching success.  Shooting for that corner would seem to have two mutually reinforcing outcomes:  missing, leading to walks, and keeping the ball in the ballpark when the ball is put into play.  The data support both outcomes.

A lot of what's being accomplished by this pitching staff is being lost in the fury surrounding several spectacular blown games and the truly pitiful performance of the team's offense.  (I will leave the detailing of that travesty for another time.)  If the offense was performing merely in its projected subpar fashion (instead of its present state as very, very close to the bottom of the league), we'd be following a team well over .500, solidly in the wildcard chase.  Perlozzo is getting--and justifiably so, in my estimation--little personal heat for the poor offensive performance.  Most of the criticism (and I think this is just as well) he's facing deals with his handling of the pitching staff.  But in spite of that handling, as documented, the pitching staff is performing quite well.  I think, thus far, if you examine the above numbers, this is as good as or better than most of us really hoped it would perform in our most optimistic moments--walks notwithstanding.  

So, if Perlozzo's dismissal means Mazzone goes with him, is it worth it?  Do we advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

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