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2014 American League Championship Series

Why We Should Salute The Baltimore Orioles

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A simple rule of sports is that when you get to the postseason, your flaws are going to be exposed. No team is perfect, so whomever wins the World Series will survive in spite of it. But things that could be covered up in the regular season come to light in the heat of postseason competition. It’s true in every sport and it’s what is finally doing in the Baltimore Orioles in this American League Championship Series.


The Orioles were the betting line favorites in their ALCS matchup with the Kansas City Royals and now trail 3-0 in games. All invocations of the 2004 Boston Red Sox aside, this series is over. Boston had its home fans to rally behind for Games 4 & 5 that year. Baltimore does not. Whether it’s this afternoon or tomorrow night, the good people of Kansas City (and I mean that compliment sincerely) are going to celebrate a pennant.
But in spite of public perception, in spite of the pre-series betting lines, and in spite of Baltimore’s 96 regular season wins, the second-most in major league baseball, this Oriole team should be perceived as an underdog. The injuries and suspensions have simply taken too big a toll on this lineup and it’s finally coming home to roost.
It’s been so long since catcher Matt Wieters was injured that it’s barely registered in the public consciousness anymore, but Wieters is a significantly better hitter than either Nick Hundley or Caleb Joseph. To say injured third baseman Manny Machado is a better hitter than Ryan Flaherty is like saying Eddie Murray could hit better than I could. And while Flaherty is a good defender, Machado is an extraordinary defender.
Then there’s Chris Davis. The first baseman was having a bad year at the plate as it was, though he still hit 22 home runs and drew a lot of walks. He was suspended for PED use. I realize this is not a “bad break” in the sense that Davis has no one to blame but himself. But it is a bad break for his teammates and manager (to say nothing of the fan base) who were not at fault.
Officially, Steve Pearce replaced Davis at first base, but in practice, Pearce was already in the lineup in left field. In reality, the replacement is Alejandro de Aza, a nice leftfielder, but no Chris Davis—even Davis on a bad year.
To sum it up—the Baltimore lineup lost Wieters, Machado and Davis, and replaced with a Hundley/Joseph platoon, Ryan Flaherty and Alejandro de Aza.


Buck Showalter is one of the top two managers in baseball (rivaled only by Cleveland’s Terry Francona) and over the long season, his managerial skill, along with the real effort put forth by the substitutes who had to take on outsized roles, were able to cover up the huge production loss that injuries/bad years took.
But now it’s the postseason, we’re down to the last four teams left in baseball and the loss of the Wieters/Machado/Davis trio is being felt. We’ve had three straight games where one significant hit could have the Orioles being the team ahead 3-0 in games. By comparison, the Royals have everyone healthy.
Are you telling me that if Kansas City lost Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain and Norichika Aoki, while Baltimore had its three players available, that this series would still be the same? No sane person really believes that.
This should take nothing away from an achievement that the long-suffering Royals fans have been craving. Injuries are a part of sports. They’ve been deciding championships forever and will continue to do so. What I write here is not about demeaning KC—they’ve had a year where everything has come together at the right time and they’re taking advantage of it—but about making sure that Baltimore’s season is kept in proper perspective.
If anyone is asking what’s wrong with the Orioles in this ALCS, they should change the question. They should look at the huge talent loss that’s been, for the most part, there all season long. They should note the 96-66 record, and the victory over the Detroit Tigers in the Division Series.
The question should be how on earth this Oriole team achieved all that they did. And to salute the manager and the role players who stepped up and made it possible. If public perception was different prior to the ALCS, then it’s that perception which was misguided, not the play of this team.

The Baltimore Orioles Fight An Avalanche Of LCS History

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The Baltimore Orioles are really up against it tonight when the American League Championship Series resumes tonight in Kansas City. The Orioles are down 0-2 in games, which is serious enough, but those two losses have come at home. The number of teams that have rallied in such a circumstance to win a pennant? Zero.

The verdict of LCS history is bleak for Baltimore. So if you’re an Orioles fan where do you go from here? I think the answer is to turn some bad news into a positive.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, the teams that got out to a 2-0 series lead on the road were able to finish the job in the middle three games at their home park, which suggests that Kansas City will wrap it up at some point between now and the early evening on Wednesday when Game 5 would end.
BaseballThere’s only one case where a team dug out of the hole to at least come back home, and that’s the 1993 Chicago White Sox, who eventually succumbed to the Toronto Blue Jays.
So where’s the good news if you’re a Baltimore fan? It’s that the issue is not so much winning four games in five tries, a task that seems imposing when you think about it. It’s more about stopping the momentum and not allowing your own spirit to be broken.
If I’m in the Oriole clubhouse, my answer to the verdict of history is simply to focus on winning two of three in Kansas City—a tough task to be sure, but not anything that would be considered a Herculean feat if these teams met in August. And then to point out that there’s very little in the way of historical sample size for series like this that make their way to a Game 6.
Furthermore, homefield advantage in baseball tends not to be an issue…until the back end of a series. This record is very pronounced in the World Series. It’s a little less so in LCS play, but the track record shows that the hardest close-out win to get is the one that comes late in a series and away from home. So for Baltimore, the message is simple—just get the series back to your own fans and your own ballpark and make KC do it that way.
Do I think they’ll do it? Well, that’s where I can’t be the one to provide optimistic thoughts. I predicted the Orioles prior to this series, but I think that was more my regard for Buck Showalter, and not factoring in that managerial skill is much less likely to matter in a short series than it is over the long haul. I suspect historical form holds and Kansas City wraps it up at home.