Identifying the Orioles Lineup’s Secret Sauce
At any given time, the list of MLB teams that are perfectly set up for both short-and-long-term success is always a short one, but it looks like the Baltimore Orioles are going to be a fixture in that conversation for a very long time. They were recently subject to one of the most bleak and painful rebuilding periods in all of sports, but it has ended in cathartic fashion — they finished with the AL’s best record in 2023 and are off to a similarly torrid start in 2024, thanks to an exciting young core that includes former first overall pick Adley Rutschman, reigning Rookie of the Year Gunnar Henderson, wipeout starting pitchers Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez, and soon enough, uber-talented prospect Jackson Holliday.
It’s tough to say whether rebuilding teams in the future will emulate the blueprint used in Baltimore due to the sheer amount of games they lost to get to where they are now — there are moral and economic complications raised by a baseball team that, in a recent four-year stretch, lost at least 105 games in three of those seasons, and probably would have in all four if it weren’t for the pandemic. However, there is no denying that the architects of these Orioles are some of the smartest people working in sports today. Mike Elias, their GM, was also the front-man of the Houston Astros rebuild in the early 2010s, the same one that eventually bred a core that has reached the ALCS in every season since 2017. He has two assistant GMs that, by no coincidence, were his proteges in Houston: Sig Mejdal, who integrated analytics into all levels of the Astros’ player evaluation processes, and Eve Rosenbaum, who was an executive in their international scouting department at the same time that they recruited some of their current core pieces such as Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier from outside the U.S. Matt Blood, their VP of player development, oversees the internal strategies used by the organization to develop players like Rutschman and Henderson as they come up through the farm system, which is still pegged as the best one in baseball by MLB.com despite a ton of its talent already having graduated to the big-league roster.
Losing as much as they did in the late 2010s and the early 2020s may have given them more chances than anyone else to acquire premium talent through the draft, but high-round draft picks don’t always pan out. Teams need to be able to hire good talent evaluators and developers, and in that regard, the Orioles have arguably the most impressive brain trust in baseball. What was a consistently pitiful on-field product for half a decade has turned into one that appears to be built for sustainable excellence in the foreseeable future.
For a machine as well-oiled as this team is, it’s hard to pick just one area of strength that stands out compared to the rest of the organization. Although their pitching has taken a big step this year, with their 3.31 team ERA placing 4th in the Majors, many believe their biggest weapon is their unparalleled position-player depth. Baltimore is currently sporting MLB’s 6th-best offense with a 111 team-level wRC+ and 263 runs scored, and they have an unusually long list of hitters to thank for that. If the season’s end was imminent, Gunnar Henderson would be a favourite for AL MVP — his 17 home runs are tied for second in the junior circuit, his 163 wRC+ is 5th-best, and he was recently recognized for his scorching start to the year with AL Player of the Month honours for March/April. Rutschman (132 wRC+) has been among the league’s most productive catchers as he always has. Ryan Mountcastle (123 wRC+) continues to provide a steady blend of plus-average and plus-power from first base. This year, two new young stars have burst onto the scene in the positionally versatile Jordan Westburg (142 wRC+) and outfielder Colton Cowser (127 wRC+, AL Rookie of the Month in March/April). Slow starts from Anthony Santander and Cedric Mullins are responsible for the only weak links in this lineup, but Cowser has hit so well that the Orioles have barely lost any production from their left-handed bats compared to last year.
It’s a marvelous group of young players, and the depth of this lineup could go pound-for-pound with any other one in baseball. These are talented hitters that can attack pitchers from every angle — contact, power, and speed, from both sides of the plate — and will continue to project as one of the best groups of hitters in the game as long as this core stays together. There is something specific, though, that the Orioles lineup does that I don’t believe they’re given enough credit for, partially because it’s a newer revelation, but it goes such a long way in making an offense tough to beat. Let’s talk about it.
Whether you’re trying to be aggressive on the first pitch or not (for what it’s worth, the Orioles aren’t; they swing at the first pitch 30.4% of the time, just under the league average of 31.5%), most hitters will tell you that it’s a good thing to be in a deep count because your chances of getting a good pitch to hit increase the farther ahead you are in the count, as pitchers will generally start throwing more strikes to avoid allowing walks. On the flip side, hitting with 2 strikes isn’t as fun because you’re on the defensive, trying to avoid the strikeout. So far in 2024, MLB hitters have posted a .437 wOBA (or a .928 OPS if that’s more your style) in 3-ball counts, getting on base more than half the time. In 2-strike counts, they’re doing a lot worse — their wOBA is .236, their OPS is .514, and they’re striking out over 40% of the time. If you’ve ever heard or read someone who works in baseball stressing the fact that “the percentages change with every pitch”, this is why. Essentially, your average player will hit at an MVP level in 3-ball counts, and a minor-league level in 2-strike counts. It really is a herculean difference.
Yet, two-strike counts are inevitable, so how does one plan to attack them as a hitter? Baltimore has been quite innovative in that regard with their current core of position players. The thing that opened the rabbit hole that eventually led me to writing this piece was a conversation between two popular baseball content creators, known on the internet as Foolish Baseball and Talkin’ Jake, on the latter’s podcast “Wake & Jake”. With the recent public release of bat-tracking stats, Foolish Baseball was quick to point out on this show that the Orioles are outliers in terms of their collective swing profile. There is no golden key that lies within bat-tracking metrics that unlocks a definitive answer to hitting strategy, but a few general conclusions can be drawn. Swinging fast can be seen as a high-risk, high-reward strategy: it increases your chances of missing the ball, but with more power behind the swing, it makes a hard-hit ball more likely if contact is successfully made. Swinging slow makes one less likely to barrel a ball up, but the longer their bat path stays in the strike zone, the more likely they are to make solid contact. The same logic applies to swing length — a short, compact swing is a great strategy if you’re trying to explicitly avoid whiffs, but not so much if you’re trying to rack up extra base hits. What’s so interesting about the Orioles, you might then ask? They swing fast, yet they also swing short. See below:
From this graph, we can see that no other team has a collection of hitters that swing fast, yet short, to the extent that Baltimore does. It’s contradictory from a logical standpoint, but the Orioles are hitting for both average and power using a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone process (apologies for using such an expression to reference a team named after a bird). This apt observation by Foolish Baseball got me thinking, though, about how bat speed and swing length are naturally heavily dependent on what I previously mentioned: the count. As seen on the graph, league-average bat speed is a little over 71.4 MPH, while league-average swing length is a little over 7.3 feet. Intuitively, both these figures decrease when the count includes 2 strikes — hitters will slow and shorten their swings to increase their odds of making contact and decrease their odds of striking out in this situation. The Orioles already feature very short swings, though, so what changes within their approach when faced with a 2-strike count?
Absolutely nothing. The way Baltimore’s hitters swing is inherently almost like a cheat code for hitting with two strikes — they know how to swing fast and short, so why bother sacrificing speed on 2-strike swings when their lengths are rigidly under control? In a circumstance that, again, results in a strikeout over 40% of the time, Baltimore’s hitters aren’t just theoretically decreasing their risk of that happening, they’re also putting themselves in a better position to belt the two-strike pitches they do swing at. The way they stand out here is worth mentioning, but all it does is describe the “how” behind the way they swing the bat in the least advantageous situation for hitters. We would be onto something if they were actually getting good results when put in that spot.
They are! The Orioles rank 2nd in MLB with a .375 wOBACON (wOBA on contact) in 2-strike counts, behind only the Milwaukee Brewers, who have had an impressive first couple months of the season in their own right. Their two-strike wOBA on all pitches, not just the ones that result in contact, is still an admirable .249 (7th in MLB). As well, they do indeed generate 2-strike power compared to the rest of the league; their 2-strike slugging percentage is .316, 2nd behind the Kansas City Royals. The Orioles have established themselves as having one of the best multi-faceted offenses in the game, and through the unique structure of their swings, they have built a group of hitters that is better equipped to flip the script in 2-strike counts than anyone else. As I alluded to earlier, it’s the homegrown talent under the Mike Elias regime that is leading that charge.
When he has elected to swing, Gunnar Henderson has been the best 2-strike hitter in baseball in 2024 and it isn’t close. In those counts, his .665 wOBACON and 1.178 SLGCON (slugging percentage on contact) lead baseball, and his .572 xwOBACON is 3rd. I was particularly amused by this: Henderson has put 47 balls in play on 2-strike counts this year. 21 of them have gone for hits. That’s a .467 BABIP, and it’s no accident. On 2-strike counts! Jordan Westburg has been outstanding in these situations as well, as his .505 2-strike wOBACON is 17th. Lefty platoon maestro Ryan O’Hearn is 44th at .443. Jorge Mateo, known more for his speed and defense than his hitting, is surprisingly the next Oriole on the list, placing 64th at .421, although unlike his teammates, he has a very long 2-strike swing which makes me wonder how sustainable that is. In any case, next up is Colton Cowser in 85th at .397. This is all among a sample of 292 MLB hitters who have put at least 25 balls in play in 2-strike counts, by the way. The Orioles have *5* hitters in the top third of that group in terms of productivity.
What all these O’s hitters have in common (besides Mateo, of course) is the fact that they can execute short swings without slowing them down. Henderson has one of the fastest swings in baseball in 2-strike counts, but so does Giancarlo Stanton, Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Miguel Sano, just to name a few. Henderson executes better than anyone when his back is against the wall because unlike those guys, who do at least deserve credit for being powerful hitters, his swing is short and sweet. Bat tracking data is only available for this season, which in itself is only a third of the way through, but logic states the uncommon way Orioles hitters in particular swing the bat gives them an inherent advantage with 2 strikes, and the early results dictate that hypothesis is absolutely true.
At some point in every long-winded sabermetric train of thought, I have to stop and ask myself: “Why does this matter?”. 2-strike success is important in a good lineup, but it’s only one of many elements of hitting. However, I have watched a lot of the Orioles as a baseball fan in an AL East market, especially the past couple years since they turned the corner, and for such a young lineup, they seem awfully relentless and tough to put away, even in games where they don’t end up scoring a ton. That’s essentially what this piece is about — I’ve just quantified and explained (in a very inefficient way) the “how” and the “what” behind the relentlessness of the Baltimore Orioles offense, and the reason there never seems to be an easy out within any given lineup combination they may deploy.
Another question worth asking is if this whole thing was intentional, if the top brass set out to construct a lineup full of hitters with this kind of swing. It’s tough to say for certain, but I have a hard time chalking up the fact that there are very few good hitters in baseball who can pull off a fast-and-short swing archetype and most of them play for Baltimore, to coincidence, and MLB teams have had access to bat-tracking data for years already. It’s not hard to get excited if you’re an Orioles fan about the notion of having even more of these unicorns in your lineup after peeking into the limited batted-ball data that exists in the minor leagues. Top-100 prospects Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad, as well as outfielder Kyle Stowers, all have 90th-percentile exit velocities that rank in the 70th percentile or better in AAA, and Kjerstad is striking out in less than 20% of his plate appearances this year. Could these hitters be on the way to join an already-large collection of expert two-strike swing approaches in the big leagues?
One of the most most innovative front offices in sports calls Baltimore home, and they may have developed a world-beating core of young, controllable position players that suddenly burst onto the scene and helped them win 101 games and a division title last year, but it goes so much deeper than that. The public release of bat-tracking stats have allowed fans to notice that the Orioles are stacking up on some of the most advanced swing profiles in baseball, and it seems to have had a significantly positive impact on their ability to neutralize what is usually the least hitter-friendly circumstance in baseball: the 2-strike count. Being a tough out even in a pitcher-friendly count can separate good hitters from great hitters, and in Baltimore, so much of the reasoning behind the immense degree of young talent and lineup chemistry can be attributed to the rare fashion in which they swing the bat. If their recent track record is any indication, they will only continue to churn out more dynamic and skilled hitters like the ones they have now.
Thanks for reading, and if you read the whole thing, double-thanks for paying attention to my rambling! If you liked this article and want to see more baseball writing from me in the future, please share with your network and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and provide feedback!
All stats entering May 28, 2024. Sources: FanGraphs, BaseballReference, BaseballSavant, Robert Orr, LinkedIn, Baltimore Orioles Front Office Directory.
