Looking back on Orioles teams of recent years shows how much better this group is.
There are lots of reasons to feel grateful about the 2024 Orioles: the AL’s best record (24-12), one of the game’s most dynamic offenses, consistent Top 3 placement in the power rankings. Baltimore has a bona fide ace in Corbin Burnes and several others convincingly playing one these days (Dean Kremer, John Means, Kyle Bradish and even Cole Irvin). Their young core of prospects is dynamic, making hard contact, and playing exciting baseball.
Here’s another reason to feel grateful: think back on where the team was this same point in the season a couple of years ago.
Actually, let’s do just that. Here is a quick look at Orioles teams of the recent past, with a focus on wins and losses, most valuable players, and league rank along several offensive and defensive metrics, through May 8.
On pitching, we’ll look at fielding-independent pitching (FIP), which is similar to ERA but focuses solely on events in the pitcher’s control (walks, strikeouts, etc). On offense, we’ll examine adjusted weighted runs created (wRC+) and home runs. wRC+ looks at a player’s total offense (things like walks, singles, doubles, steals, etc) to quantify how many runs a player is “worth” to his team in a year, adjusted for park factors.
A “Great” wRC+ is 140; an “Excellent” one is 160. We’ll measure top team players’ value using Fangraphs WAR (fWAR). Finally, we’ll look at Fangraphs’ “Def” metric, which measures defensive value in terms of defensive runs saved plus a positional adjustment.
2024
W-L Record: 24-12 (.657)
Best Position Player (WAR): SS Gunnar Henderson (2.2 WAR)
Best Pitcher (WAR): RHP Corbin Burnes (0.8 WAR)
FIP (MLB rank): 3.62(T-5th)
wRC+ (MLB rank): 115(T-4th)
Home Runs (MLB rank): 54(1st)
Defense (MLB rank): -0.4(11th)
Here is where we are right now, and here is the verdict: we are spoiled. The Orioles are playing great baseball, and they’re having fun doing it. Fans are mooing at games, players are chugging from the Hydration Station after long bombs, and each week it feels like there’s a different guy playing the hero.
The team’s best player, Gunnar Henderson, has a massive 2.2 WAR after just a month. He’s one of the hardest hitters in the league at the plate, an advanced base stealer, and is playing eye-popping defense. As with the rest of his team, though, Fangraphs metrics are not in love with the Orioles’ defense, about the only team weakness we can find, save the bullpen (more on that later).
Meanwhile, there’s no shame in Corbin Burnes being the team’s most valuable pitcher through one month. The 2021 Cy Young winner hasn’t been bulletproof in April/May, but at 3-2 with a 2.83 ERA and 47 K’s in 47.2 innings he’s been a strong #1.
Next, let’s go back in time to the worst of the recent Orioles teams, back in 2021.
2021
W-L Record: 15-18 (.454)
Best Position Player (WAR): OF Cedric Mullins (1.3)
Best Pitcher (WAR): LHP John Means (2.5 WAR)
FIP (MLB rank): 4.54(23rd)
wRC+ (MLB rank): 81(27th)
Home Runs (MLB rank): 34(22nd)
Defense (MLB rank): -12.4(30th)
It’s hard to remember now, because they eventually finished 52-110 (.321 win percentage), but this team had its moments. This was the season Cedric Mullins exploded, posting a .337 average with thirteen extra-base hits in the first month of the season and a .921 OPS in the first half. On May 5 of the season, John Means pitched one of the greatest games ever, a nine-inning shutout that ended up one dropped third strike away from being a perfect game.
After that—well, a dropoff in quality. After Mullins among the position players you had Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle (good), but also catcher Pedro Severino, third baseman Freddy Galvis and Pat Valaika, who led all second basemen with 72 games started. Among the pitchers, Means was followed by Cole Sulser, Chris Ellis and Matt Harvey. This team used 42 pitchers over the course of a season, many of whom I couldn’t recognize in a police lineup, let alone a baseball one: Adam Plutko, anyone? Marcos Diplán? Conner Greene? Konner Wade?
Overall, this team had a few stars but they played bad defense, hit badly and pitched quite poorly.
2022
W-L Record: 11-17 (.392)
Best Position Player (WAR): OF Austin Hays (1.0)
Best Pitcher (WAR): LHP Bruce Zimmermann (0.9)
FIP (MLB rank): 3.98(5th)
wRC+ (MLB rank): 91(21st)
Home Runs (MLB rank): 18(27th)
Defense (MLB rank): -6.9(22nd)
This is the team where it all started to come together, but it wasn’t obvious one month into the season yet. The current outfield (Mullins-Santander-Hays) was in place, and Ryan Mountcastle at 1B, too, but Adley Rutschman’s MLB debut was still several weeks out (May 21, 2022), and Gunnar’s several months later (Aug. 31). Replace our current crop of hot-hitting youngsters for Robinson Chirinos, Kelvin Gutiérrez and Rougned Odor, and you can see why the 2022 O’s were in the bottom third of teams in most offensive categories.
This was also the season where Austin Hays finally managed to stay healthy, but his tendency to fade down the stretch showed up in exaggerated form: he’d OPS .843 in the first month but slumped to a .626 mark in the second half of the season.
This was also a team carried by the bullpen. If this is difficult to believe, recall that John Means got injured in the first month, and after him, Bruce Zimmermann was the Orioles’ best pitcher in April before getting optioned to Triple-A Norfolk in June. Of the other O’s starters—Jordan Lyles, Spenser Watkins, Tyler Wells and Kyle Bradish—none was particularly good, especially in the first half. Both Wells and a rookie Bradish had ERA’s of over 4.79 in that stretch.
The team had a hot summer, going 33-19 in July/August, but they fell just short of a playoff berth down the stretch, finished 83-79 (a .512 win percentage). There were inspired moments but the team’s flat bats and weakness on defense (don’t blame glue guy Rougned Odor for all of it but he did make 16 errors on his own) really limited their ceiling.
2023
W-L Record: 22-13 (.629)
Best Position Player (WAR): SS Jorge Mateo (1.2)
Best Pitcher (WAR): RHP Yennier Cano (1.0 WAR)
FIP (MLB rank): 4.27(17th)
wRC+ (MLB rank): 111(6th)
Home Runs (MLB rank): 41(11th)
Defense (MLB rank): -6.2(18th)
2023 was the year the Tampa Bay Rays started the season with a 13-0 record, so it’s no surprise that the Orioles’ hot April was overlooked. Ultimately, the Rays’ hot April proved something of a mirage—and so, too, did a hot month at the plate for Jorge Mateo, who delivered his best single month as a big leaguer: a .347/.385/.606 slashline with six home runs. It’s hard to remember now, because he cratered to a .126 average in May and hit a single home run for the rest of the season.
There were other strong early performances: Yennier Cano was ridiculous, allowing no runs until his eighteenth appearance on May 19. Félix Bautista emerged as one of the best closers in the game. Tyler Wells was one of MLB’s best starters, pitching to a 2.79 ERA in March/April alone. Ryan O’Hearn announced himself as a power lefty bat, exploding for a .302 average in the first half of the season.
For some it was the opposite: Anthony Santander was ice cold in April (a .213 average) and Ryan Mountcastle’s struggles with vertigo weighed him down at the plate, too. Of the starters, Kyle Bradish had a 6.14 ERA in April, and Grayson Rodriguez’s first-half ERA was a bloated 7.35.
But eventually, all of them flipped the script, which was partly the reason the Orioles surged to an eventual 101-61 record. Bradish was incredible down the stretch: 7-3 with a 2.34 in his last 14 starts, and Rodriguez went 5-2 with a 2.58 ERA. Mountcastle averaged .322 and OPS’d .893 in the second half, too.
Some of the performances were surprising enough that they overshadowed perhaps more “expected” dominant performances from Adley Rutschman and the ’23 ROY Gunnar Henderson. Adley was so consistent that he had exactly one bad month at the plate. And at the age of 21, Gunnar led the team in runs, OPS, slugging and triples and tied Santander for the lead in home runs.
And even so, there was room for team improvement. The team was nothing to write home about in the power department. It lacked depth at the back of the starting rotation, with Jack Flaherty, Cole Irvin and to some extent Kyle Gibson proving dead weight. There were a lot of failed experiments in the bullpen, the boom-and-bust Shintaro Fujinami one example.
That’s the cool and the scary thing: the ’24 version of the team has power galore, and is getting surprisingly dominant starting pitching performances from unexpected contributors. This year’s Orioles are better than last year’s 101-win team in all senses except perhaps the bullpen. We should expect GM Mike Elias to swing a midseason trade for a reliever to push them over the hump. After that, who knows?