The Baltimore Orioles: Some Further Anylisis

I wrote about the Baltimore Orioles on Monday. As it turns out, people have strong feelings about the Orioles. Most of the comments I got fell into one of these categories:

– The writer is an ass-clown, the Orioles are winning with hustle and poise and grit and spunk, and you “pencil neck baseball anylists” can take your WAR and shove it somewhere dark and humid.

– The writer is dead-on, the Orioles are winning with a dwindling stash of magic pixie dust, and you O’s fans better enjoy it now before your team CRASHES AND BURNS SUCKERS!!!1

– The writer is engaging in something called ‘satire,’ and evidently it worked.

For the record, I really like the Orioles. Clearly they are experiencing some luck, and they are also doing a lot of things well. I think they are an interesting outlier and I hope they continue to, um, outlie. It’s fun and interesting when our best knowledge turns out to be not perfect. Right?

So how far out are they lying, really? Well, here is what I did, and I can get away with it because, see, I’m on Notgraphs. What I did was, I went back ten years and looked at the difference between every team’s WAR and its actual wins. The MLB average figure for this difference — the replacement-level record, you might say, for a given year — is always between 42 and 44 wins. (Which kind of speaks well for WAR, right?) So for the average team, you take 42-44 wins, depending on the yearly average, and tack on its total WAR, and you get something very close to its actual record. But teams very often overperform or underperform that number by a little bit, thanks to managing and pixie dust and whatever else. Every year, a couple of teams deviate from that number by a good bit, winding up with 5-10 wins more or less than what they “deserve” based on WAR. (I’ll call that number WTSNHW, or Wins They Should Not Have Won, in keeping humorously with my last post.*) And once in a while, a team really overachieves and ends up with a WTSNHW of 10+. Here is that list, for the last decade: