Turns Out The Orioles Are Pretty Effective With Runners In Scoring Position

I’m never worried about the Orioles offense. In Houston the O’s beat Bud Norris, but lost to Dallas Keuchel, the difference between those two games were the starts by Freddy Garcia (3 IP, 6 ER) and Miguel Gonzalez (6 IP, 1 ER). Baltimore’s offense ranks 2nd in runs scored (301), second in batting average (.276) and 1st in slugging percentage (.463).

Yeah, but they should have signed Josh Hamilton, right?

Runners left on base, especially in scoring position, frustrate the hell out of fans. I can understand their anger. The Orioles leave an average of 3.50 runners in scoring scoring position per game and rank 20th in that particular column.

Redditor Eastern_Cyborg researched the Orioles effectiveness with ducks on the pond and found out their team batting average with RISP ranks 7th with three points separating 4-7 on that list.

But average isn’t everything, so I looked deeper into some numbers. I’m not a stats guru, so I could not find all situational numbers, but I found the O’s are 19th out of 30 teams in leaving RISP on per game. That sounds bad at first, but if you look closely at those rankings, you’ll see that teams near the bottom are the better hitting teams, meaning that leaving men in scoring position is a function of getting more men on in the first place. But what about the number of men left on in scoring position versus the number of runs scored? After all, when you have RISP, your goal is to get them home, even if that means hitting a double and getting stranded yourself.

Eastern_Cyborg took it one step further a created a spreadsheet that calculates runs scored per game and divides by runners left in scoring position per game. The Orioles are second behind the Rays, scoring 1.46 runs per every man they leave in scoring position.

The bottom line (as Ray Lewis would say) is that the Orioles leave a lot of guys on base because they get a lot of guys on base. As long as they’re scoring runs (and they’re averaging 5.01 per game through 60 games), they’ll be just fine — assuming the starting pitching doesn’t kill them.