Season Preview: Orioles



Photo by Steve Nesius/Reuters



I don't think anyone will be surprised that the Orioles are projected to come in 5th place in the AL East this season by my method or by anyone else's method of projecting team records this season.  The AL East has 3 of the best teams in baseball in the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays and another in the Blue Jays that is quickly taking the steps to get to their level.  Unfortunately, that leaves the Orioles in last place for the foreseeable future.  With a terribly tough division, the Orioles just don't have enough talent to seriously compete.  But let's see what they project to bring to the table this year.  The fielding component is from the Fangraphs fan projections, so it has the least amount of reliability of all the projections.  The hitting projections are from Dan Szymborski's ZIPS system.  To see how I compiled these projections and analysis, see my introduction to the series here.

Catcher

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPS BA	ZIPS OBP	ZIPS SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Matt Wieters	S	600	0.268	0.334	0.429	5	4.5
Reserve	Taylor Teagarden	R	100	0.197	0.264	0.345	0	0

Wieters is projected to have a very strong season at catcher for the Orioles this year with 4.5 WAR, which is actually a little bit lower than last season's 5.0 WAR.  The hitting projections are similar to his season last year, while the defense projects him to be closer to human after being other worldly last year.  I think this projection could actually underrate Wieters for the upcoming season as he could easily improve further in what will be his age 26 season.  The power really started to emerge towards the end of 2011, as he hit 12 home runs in August and September combined. If he carries his power surge over into 2012, Wieters could actually come close to all of the crazy expectations he had when he was coming up through the minors. 

As long as Teagarden's back injury doesn't sideline him too long, he should see about 100 pretty dull plate appearances.  If he misses time, odds are Ronny Paulino will fill in as Matt Wieters' caddy and provide similar nondescript performance.  This is the only position where the Orioles are projected to get the most WAR in the division. 

First Base

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPs BA	ZIPs OBP	ZIPs SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Chris Davis	L	450	0.250	0.299	0.440	0	0.5
3B Relief	Mark Reynolds	R	220	0.218	0.320	0.361	0	0.5
C Relief	Matt Wieters	B	10	0.268	0.334	0.429	0	0
Depth	Nick Johnson	L	20	0.223	0.350	0.318	0	0
Prospect	Joe Mahoney	L	20	0.254	0.299	0.380	0	0

The team is only projected to get 1.0 WAR out of first base this season.  Largely, that is the result of a poor season being projected for Chris Davis.  ZIPS does project him to hit 23 home runs with 72 RBI's so the projection isn't all terrible.  However, he'll really have to bring his thunder stick to the plate if he wants to make up for his projected .299 OBP.  The playing time projections imply that Davis loses his job at some point to Mark Reynolds, likely in August or so.  The only way that happens is if the O's find someone else to play 3B.  Maybe they could move Betemit to 3B and find someone else to DH, whether that's Reimold, Davis himself or maybe even Nick Johnson.  That is providing that Johnson makes it to August in one piece; realizing with his history that's pretty unlikely.

Second Base

Role	Player	Bats	PA	ZIPS BA	ZIPS OBP	ZIPS SLG	Fielding	WAR
Starter	Robert Andino	R	500	0.249	0.301	0.358	3	1.5
Reserve	Brian Roberts	S	150	0.265	0.332	0.411	-1	0.5
Prospect	Ryan Adams	R	50	0.260	0.307	0.381	-1	0

Brian Roberts is still recovering from his concussion problems, though he recently began taking batting practice and fielding ground balls. Still, there isn't a time frame for him to return to action so 150 plate appearances is all we can reasonably project at this point and even that is just a guess. The projected starter at the position, Robert Andino is projected to be slightly below average and accumulate 1.5 WAR. As the Orioles second baseman, his triple slash is projected to be .249/.301/.358 with a positive fielding number. The 28 year old is more than adequate as a back up infielder at 3 positions, but he's stretched a little bit in a full time role. Though his game winning hit to end the season against the Red Sox last season was a sublime moment for Orioles fans.

Intro to Team Previews

Last week, Fangraphs ran a great series called Positional Power Rankings where they ranked each position by organization one by one.  The series analyzed the entire position for each organization including the projected reserves playing time as well as any minor leaguers who are projected to get called up.  ZIPS projections were used to project the offense, while the expected fielding ratings came from the FAN's projections.  These numbers were mashed together with each writer's expected plate appearances and a rough approximation of expected WAR was created.  They were then ranked and each position was given its own post.  I thoroughly enjoyed the series, but wanted to take it a step further.

Since I am a one man operation, I don't have the time to put together a projection for each player on each team.  And since Fangraphs just did that, I don't see any value in re-creating it.  What I do think could be interesting is to take these WAR projections from the Fangraphs series and use them to create a projected WAR for each team.  By doing that we should be able to project the number of wins for each team for the upcoming season.  Considering that a team full of replacement level players would win about 48 games, we'll use that as our baseline.  Every WAR that is projected to be earned by a team will be added to our baseline to come to our projection of wins for each team.

There are a lot of season previews out there.  Some go team by team, and others go by division or league but I haven't seen one that tries to project the WAR for each team to figure out their projected place in the standings.  I will admit before going into this that things usually don't go as planned and I don't have any idea how accurate these projections will turn out to be.  But I think it will give us a good idea of where each team stands at this point in time.

I'm going to start with the AL East to get an idea of where the Orioles stack up.  After that, we'll see how much of the AL we can get through.  Please provide any feedback in the comments.