The 101-win Orioles, the top seed in the American League, are 0-2 in Tuesday’s ALDS Game 3 against the 90-win Rangers, the fifth seed. Unless Baltimore can come back and win three games in a row, which happens just 11% of the time when teams lose the first two of a best-of-five, the first place team goes home.
You can imagine what will happen next. Questions are raised about whether the layoff the Orioles suffered while waiting for the Wild Card Series hurt their chances (probably not), or how they blew their best chance to win in decades. In the books it is considered a “surprise”.
If we just look at the seeds, yes. (One is higher than five.) If we just look at the number of team wins, yes. (One hundred and one is more than ninety.) If we look at the head-to-head record this year, then no; Baltimore won the first two of three games in Texas in April, and Texas won the first two of three games in Baltimore in May, making the record even at 3-3. If we look at run differential, then no, as the Orioles outscored their opponents by 129 runs while the Rangers outscores their opponents by 165 runs.
There’s no denying that the Orioles have won 11 more games than the Rangers, but the flaw in all of this – in all of the data presented so far – is clear because it’s all based on a full season of play. While April’s wins are just as important in playoff placement as September’s, many of the players who contributed to those numbers are not here right now. Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Félix Bautista, John Means, Shintaro Fujinami and Ezequiel Durán are not on these rosters. Evan Carter, Jordan Montgomery, Brian Baker, Aaron Hicks and Heston Kjerstad are. The uniforms are the same. For some players this is not the case.
Even the players who are the same can be different – the Rangers’ Dane Dunning had a brilliant first half that carried over into a just-good second half, and Baltimore’s Grayson Rodriguez had a very tough debut early in the season leading up to this that he was sent back to Triple-A before returning in the second half and becoming one of the best starters in baseball.
Maybe then we should focus on the players who are actually participating and how they are playing now. So the better question is: Is there that much of a gap between the October Orioles and the October Rangers? And if not, how disturbing should it be that a team that sent six players to the All-Star Game could actually (gasp!) win two games in a row?
There’s no one right answer to this, although FanGraphs does provide two playoff odds predictions that, if we revisit what they said on Friday, October 6, before the series began, should help us…
… don’t clarify anything. The differences lie in the methodology (the ZiPS version uses more information about the planned starting players, for example), but even though they select different teams, they end up on slightly different sides of the “coin toss”. Baseball Prospectus also gave Texas a very slight lead here.
What if instead we looked at A) the players on the ALDS rosters and B) what they did in the final month of the season?
This is admittedly an imperfect view of the roster – certainly the Rangers didn’t expect Nathan Eovaldi’s 1.028 OPS disaster to continue in the playoffs in September, and that wasn’t the case against the Rays either – but what’s to be learned from it can if you compare players only on the side According to ALDS rosters, the Orioles’ pitchers were 44 points better and the Rangers’ hitters were 55 points better in September. So where exactly is the big edge here?
Maybe it’s better to find out how the losses actually occurred.
In Game 1, a mere 3-2 win at Texas, the Orioles fell because veteran outfielder Aaron Hicks missed a mark on a failed hit-and-run and future Hall of Fame manager Bruce Bochy made a tandem start Andrew Heaney before him masterfully mastered exhortation. In Game 2, they lost because rookie Rodriguez, who had been so strong for months, was unwilling or unable to throw breaking balls against one of baseball’s best fastball hitting teams and simply couldn’t throw strikes – and Bryan Baker could neither had been in the minors for most of the second half, nor had Jack Flaherty, whose unsuccessful midseason acquisition stands in stark contrast to Texas adding Montgomery.
The Orioles lost because Gunnar Henderson and Adleyrutschman combined to go 4 of 18 (plus two walks); They lost because their pitchers walked 16 Rangers batters in two games; They lost because a player who wasn’t with Texas for the first five months of the season – Carter – got off to one of the best starts in playoff history. They lost because this is the third time these clubs have met this year, and it is the third time the visiting team has won the first two games, and because they are two equal teams and because there are two good games between two are playoff teams.
As MLB.com’s Thomas Harrigan researched in 2012, the team with the better regular-season record went 48-39 in postseason series that were more than just a playoff game. (Six were excluded because the two teams had the same record.)
This record, 48-39, is also the same as 55/45. While it’s not exactly a coin toss, it’s as close as you can get.
In some ways, it’s similar to the discussion last year when the lower seeds Phillies and Padres shocked the higher seeds on their way to the NLCS because the emphasis ignored their relatively paltry win totals (both under 90), like yours Squads varied at this point in terms of the improvements that brought them closer to the Braves and Dodgers, respectively, at this point.
It’s a debate that’s playing out again in the Netherlands as the lower-ranked Phillies hold a 1-0 lead over the higher-ranked Braves, another result that would prove to be a “surprise” when it might not be Atlanta’s much-discussed pitching injuries and Philadelphia’s bullpen improvement late in the season. Can it really be a surprise if, just before the series began, six of the 11 MLB.com writers surveyed said the Phillies would actually emerge victorious?
The Orioles have lost so far because the Rangers have played better baseball in exactly two games. Given the similar talents of these teams, it shouldn’t be surprising – and it wouldn’t be surprising if the Orioles managed to win three straight, which they did on 15 different occasions in 2023. That’s not really a success upset. They are two equally good teams over 18 innings of baseball. After all, they each scored exactly 19 goals.