The Orioles and pre-season projections haven’t always jibed together. During the most recent “glory years,” aka the first half of this decade, Baltimore consistently outperformed projections on their way to multiple playoff appearances.
Neil Paine examined the anomaly in an article for FiveThirtyEight after several years of the Orioles eclipsing their predicted totals. On May 17, 2017, which feels like a lifetime ago in Birdland, Paine offered an answer to the question many people in baseball were wondering. How were the Orioles pulling this off? His answer— Buck Showalter.
“From 2010 (when Showalter took over the Baltimore job midseason) to 2016, the O’s won an average of nearly six extra games per season over expectation,” Paine said.