The Orioles are no strangers to low win total forecasts in their best seasons. Is this another of those?
An Orioles team with high hopes is projected pretty much everywhere with a win total in the mid-70s. Sound familiar? What's different from recent history, and what's not?
The parallels have been there for a little bit. Perhaps now they’re solidified. An Orioles team that surpassed expectations last year thanks to some surprising starting pitching, a lockdown bullpen, and timely hitting enter spring training with hope for better, only to have the damn computers throw cold water on them.
Most betting sites have the team’s over-under win total at 76.5, and on Tuesday the good folks at Baseball Prospectus put out their PECOTA forecasts that project the Orioles at 74-88, a nine-win downgrade from what they did last season.
These aren’t the old days where spring training report days will be full of players and a manager running down analytics and data forecasts considering, well, pretty much everything the Orioles do is informed by that same information. (At least hopefully not).
But there are lessons to be learned from why the Orioles were always projected in this range in the Buck Showalter era, what drove their frequent outperformance, and what it means for the 2023 Orioles that they’re probably in the same boat.