Paper Orioles (4/21/14): A Brand New Season

Orange Phoenix from the Ashes

In the previous installment of Paper Orioles on April 8th, we talked a number of Orioles' fans down off the ledge.  Some were questioning their faith that on Opening Day was kept afloat by the Depot's projection of Baltimore taking a Wild Card this year.  We noted then that no one was doing anything exceptionally different from what we would expect on the team, so this was probably just a simple bump in the road.  Two weeks later, our metric as well as Baseball Prospectus' has basically erased the previous three weeks.  In fact, the Orioles now sit at their highest playoff percentage on BP's Playoff Odds system at 15.1%.

Here is how the projection models have performed so far (before the games on 4/21):

	mJS	PWE	mBP	Parcells	fWAR	Mean
3/31/2014	85.7	81.0	78.0	81.0	81.0	81.3
4/8/2014	84.8	52.3	76.9	54.0	47.3	63.0
4/14/2014	84.6	65.4	76.9	67.5	61.0	71.1
4/21/2014	85.2	80.5	78.0	76.2	71.4	78.3

Perhaps even more exciting for the club is that Manny Machado is getting closer to being ready to play in a MLB game.  His bat was largely uneven and is a rather large question mark, but it is hard to think his performance would be worse than what Ryan Flaherty and Jonathan Schoop have done so far.  However, his glove is light years better than either of theirs at the hot corner.  With him in the lineup, you should start to see the PWE, Parcells and fWAR models to nudge higher by a few games.