In the wake of the Orioles' recent 1-9 skein, Michael (a.k.a. nothingman) posed the following question in a Birdseed message board note:

So, is this a 500 team or are the last 10 games more indicative of the talent on this team?

Because it was something I'd been thinking about myself lately, I decided to try and formulate an answer.  Because it became a rather lengthy exercise, I decided to put that response in Calculus form.  The short story is, I'm still not sure what the correct answer is.

Remember those manual pencil sharpeners each classroom had in elementary school?  I'm talking about the ones where you had to turn the crank to sharpen the pencil.  Surely everyone has had some experience with them.  Right now, following the Orioles is a lot like sticking your finger in the sharpener and slowly turning the handle:  extremely painful and seemingly remarkably stupid.

For a lot of reasons--human nature, an inclination to mistake the forest for the trees, a miserable decade-long history--there's a tendency for most of us to see the worst in whatever happens regarding things Oriole.  And nine losses in ten games provides plenty of grist for the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" mill.  And deservedly so.

Nevertheless, I always try--I don't always succeed, but I always try--to let the dust settle and try to assess things in as calm a manner as possible.

And so...

On the one hand, in this 10-game stretch resulting in a 1-9 record, it's perhaps worth noting that the Orioles haven't been blown off the field at all.  More accurately they've been finding ways to lose virtually every day.  On the other hand, I wouldn't say that they haven't deserved to lose most of those games.  I'm as sick and tired of searching through the haystack for moral victories as anyone else, but...

In the last ten games, the Orioles have lost four games by one run and another by two...for what that's worth. 

They've scored 34 runs while yielding 52.  Now, allowing 5.2 runs per game isn't anything to jump up and down with glee about, but it's not horrendous.  3.4 runs per game, in today's American League...that's pretty horrendous.  So I toss the lion's share of the blame for the last ten games on the offense.  An average performance from the offense coupled with what the pitching staff actually yielded over these past ten games probably result in a record of 4-6.

In the past ten games, the Orioles have scored more than five runs exactly once...and that's the sole game they won.  They've scored more than four runs only twice...and in that game they scored four of their five runs in the final two innings after falling behind 5-1 (this was the first game of the ten, against Oakland).  In half of the five games, they scored two runs or fewer.  Even if you pitch well, you're not going to win very many games if you can't score more than four runs a contest. 

Looking at the offense, the team is averaging 4.25 runs per game for the season thus far...the AL as a whole is averaging just under 4.7 runs per game in its normal underperforming early season mode.  4.25 is 11th in the AL.  Over their first 18 games, the O's were averaging a shade under five runs per game.  If they were still doing that, they'd be sixth in the league and they'd probably still be over .500.  More on the offense in a moment.

The pitching staff is also below average, but if you break down the stats categorically, you see that the Orioles have one problem--they're walking too many batters.  That's it.  It's a big "it," but there's only the one "it."  They're 10th in the derivative ERA stat.  But...they're fifth in the league in OppBA (at .248, their opponents have a lower batting average than the poor-hitting O's offense); they lead the league in strikeouts; they lead the league in HR/9IP (i.e. they have the best mark in the league...again, the Orioles have hit more HRs than they've allowed, and they haven't hit many).  What's more, they have the lowest overall Slugging Percentage Against in the American League.  They're doing everything right, essentially, except walking batters.  They're 10th in the league in OBP Against despite being fifth in OppBA...and they're .001 away from being 12th in OBPA.  They're walking better than 4.6 batters per nine innings and are on pace to walk roughly 750 batters for the season.  If this were to continue until season's end, this would be the worst walk rate in Orioles history.  In short, if the Orioles could get a handle on this problem, they still have the stuff to be a solid staff.  Maybe more than a solid staff.  Admittedly, doing something about a problem this glaring isn't going to be easy and, of course, the team has to deal with the fact that the staff is beginning to fracture with injuries.  But the tools appear to be there.

The offense...well, that's another story entirely.  While probably not this bad in reality, there isn't very much to be encouraged about here.  First, not a single player on the entire team is really having a good year thus far with the bat.  Not Miguel Tejada and his .345 batting average (it's pretty empty--Tejada's Isolated Power mark is exactly.100...in effect, he's hitting a lot of singles), not Melvin Mora with his team-leading .477 slugging percentage.  The biggest culprit is Jay Gibbons (.185/.224/.284 in 81 ABs), but one miserable performance could probably be overcome if it weren't for at least a half a dozen other subpar ones.  Tejada and Mora are the only players on the team with an OPS over .800 (.845 and .815 respectively; Ramon Herandez is at .800 on the dot, but he's only played six games).  Kevin Millar has the third highest mark on the team at .744.  Aubrey Huff, Corey Patterson and Gibbons are all below .650 and all have been playing regularly.  The Paul Bako/Alberto Castillo tandem that combined to be the regular catcher before Hernandez was activated had a combined OPS below .600.  So, basically, before Hernandez came back, you had four lineup slots that were hitting at or below replacement level, three that were mediocre and two decent.  That's really poor production, to put it mildly.

As a group, the Orioles are tied for 11th in the AL in home runs per game.  They're 10th in batting average at .250; they're 12th in slugging percentage (.385), they're 10th in OBP, they're 12th in runners left on base.  They're 11th in OPS (.707).  They have been by far the worst offensive team in the AL East; the Devil Rays are next worst and they're scoring nearly 2/3 of a run per game more than the Orioles.

As I mentioned earlier, this lineup probably isn't legitimately this bad and it will almost certainly improve to some degree.  But I'm not sure how high that improvement ceiling is.  I don't think any of us expected this team to generate a lot of runs this year based on what these players had done in the past.  Tejada's probably a little bit better than this, but not much.  Mora has, arguably, surpassed expectations thus far; he's certainly been more productive than he was last year.  Millar's probably pretty close to what could be expected of him; perhaps he's underperforming to some degree.  Hernandez has played very little, so it's hard to say.  Almost everyone else is underperforming to some extent.  Roberts has drawn more walks than usual, but the rest of his performance is off.  Overall, he's been mildly disappointing to date; if you consider 2005 to be anything other than a complete fluke, Roberts has been very disappointing thus far.  Nick Markakis, I think it's fair to say, has been highly unsatisfactory across the board.  Huff has been extremely disappointing.  Patterson has been the "bad Corey" he's been through much of his big league career.  Not much was expected, I wouldn't think, of Jay Payton to begin with, but he's been a significant underperformer as well.  When you underperform already low expectations, you're having a bad year.  Gibbons has just been an unworldly flavor of bad.

Despite being near the league lead in runners left on base, the O's problem doesn't appear to be hitting with runners in scoring position. In fact, they're sixth in the league in OPS with RISP at .764 (AL:  753).  Their problem, really, is hitting with the bases empty.  They're 12th in the league in OPS with no one on base at .672 (the league is .724 in such situations).  So there's no "clutch correction" to make here.  If anything, this facet of things is more likely to get worse, as things even themselves out, than better.

Overall, I still think the chances are that, assuming some natural offensive regression (or progression) to the mean and at least some mitigation of the walk problem, the Orioles have the makings of a .500 team.  But if these two things don't improve in some significance sense--if they continue to be as inept offensively as they have been thus far, if they're really going to walk 750 batters this season, and if injuries to the pitching staff really mean that Steve Trachsel (as effectively as he's pitched thus far this year notwithstanding) is really going to be the rotation's #2 starter--look out below.  Again.

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