Jay M. Nunez: Team Offense, Baltimore Orioles

Friday, March 18, 2016

Team Offense, Baltimore Orioles

The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles finished ninth in the majors and seventh in the American League in 2015 with 4.40 runs scored per game.

Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. There are minor differences between the two projected lineups, so I’m going with USA Today since it was published more recently. That Buck Showalter lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. Note that for Hyun Soo Kim, I did not want to use league averages for his projection. He is in his prime and had a long professional career. Instead, I knocked 50 points off his career OBP and 60 points off his career slugging percentage. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.84
Probable lineup: 4.81
Worst lineup: 4.55
Regressed lineup: 4.42

The probable lineup captures 89.7% of the value of the best lineup (the distance between the best and worst lineups). That’s the highest value seen so far this year. Note that the fifth best lineup put Kim and Manny Machado 1-2, but bats Chris Davis and Adam Jones 4-5 instead of 3-4. That one is pretty close to the Showalter lineup.

The LAT likes Matt Wieters batting ninth, and given that Wieters is back behind the plate this season, batting him at the bottom of the order seems like a good idea. It gives him more rest during the game, and he gets to serve as a secondary lead-off hitter.

Whatever top of the order the Orioles use should generate a lot of offense. Even the worst arrangement of these nine players looks like it will improve Baltimore’s run scoring compared to 2015.

Jay M. Nunez

Friday, March 18, 2016

Team Offense, Baltimore Orioles

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