So i decided that this year I was going to keep track of the Most Birdland Player Awards. Apparently I chose the

wrong year to do so. There were a number of games without MBP polls, partially because the Orioles were losing so badly (BAD!) and partially because a number of non-admins did  write-ups (GOOD). I didn't check all the fanposts for MBP polls since i know that at least one or two got mainpaged (I think) so i didn't want to double count them. Table and observations after the jump.

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So normally I'd post this as a fanshot, but since everyone is depressed right now, I doubt anybody is looking that far down the page. So in order to cheer everyone up I thought I'd post a video of Baltimore's favorite city-hater Aubrey Huff.

Aubrey Huff's inside the park homerun: here

For me Aubrey Huff brings up fond memories of his double-fistpump, his winning a Silver Slugger and now this: An inside the park home run complete with a Huff-esque slide (prompted by DeRosa's slide signal). Also make sure to watch him getting

I think the best part is watching this knowing he's barely mobile enough to play first base.

Hopefully this cheers you up. It helped me. Well I watched the video 5 times laughing the entire time if that counts

So I've been playing around with the MLB Gameday BIP Location app since finding via Baseball Analysts

For those who don't want to click the link it's basically a java? app that allows somebody to find out where all the balls put into play were fielded. Currently one can sort by individual pitcher/hitter, by ballpark and can overlay a player's hits from one ballpark to another (like maybe Atkins although that's another post) and can be sorted by type of batted ball such as ground out, fly out, single, double etc.

One limitation that this data has is that it marks the point where the ball was FIELDED not where it was hit. Hence if you fool around the site you're going to see a lot of singles located where the outfielders would be positioned. These are probably balls that got through the infield defense.

I wanted to take a look at Jeremy Guthrie, see if maybe there was something obvious about the hits he gave up last year.

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John Sickles recently put up a list of sleeper prospects here. It was a fairly substantial list but not a huge one. I thought I'd take a quick look at the two O's he marked.  The two Baltimore sleepers are Brandon Cooney and Ashur Tolliver.

Brandon Cooney: Started 10 games in 2007 at the rookie level with one relief appearance. He had a so-so year but with a very high Babip (Batted Balls in Play). As a starter he had a very strikeouts per nine innings rate of 6.11 (It's extremely hard to survive in the majors with a K/9 lower than 6) but with solid control 2-something. He became a fulltime reliever after that doing very well.  He had a 13.15 k/9 in 2008 but with worse control at short-season A. 2009 he split time between A and advanced A but his k/9 innings was mid 7s but with good control. I don't see much coming out from him unlike Sickels but he definitely knows more than I do. If he's using a sinker it could just be a matter of having an improved defense behind him.

Ashur Tolliver: He signed in 2009 as an overslot signee in the fifth round making three scoreless appearances striking out 7 in eight innings of work.  According to the scouting report he has an 88-93 fastball, a change-up and a slider.  As a lefty the fastball is in the right range, so it should be at least average to above-average.  It apparently hit 96 early in the college season which means he could become a second power lefty after Matusz. According to Baseball America his change-up is his best secondary pitch. He played for NAIA power Oklahoma City after transferring from Arkansas-Little Rock and posting an ERA of 2.17 in relief in the Cape Cod league.  Apparently he's pretty small listed as 6 ft and 170 pounds. He will need to either improve or develop a good breaking ball if he wants to make it as a starter.  Either way he could very easily end up in the top 10 next season with a power fastball and a good changeup and whatever he settles on as his breaking ball.

So I decided it was time to take a look at how lucky or unlucky the Orioles were on balls in play.  So I decided to take a look at each player's BABIP and compare it to their simple xBABIP (expected BABIP although this version is the quick version)

This fanpost was inspiredon Andy Hellicksonstine's article at DRayBays xBABIP Adjusted Lines for Rays Batters in 2009. So after reading it I figured it would be interesting to try and do the same thing for the Orioles. And so I did...in my own way.  I ended up using Chris Dutton and Derek Carty's simple xbabip because I do have excel on my computer and mainly because I'm not ready to try using Google Docs.  If somebody were to use B Ray's translation it probably would end up slightly different.

So basically I calculated each batter's xBabip (the quick version which uses easily accessible stats to compute) and compared it to the player's actual babip.  The results went under the difference column.  Than to calculate the number of hits a player gained or lost due to luck you multiply the difference by the at bats. So which players were the unluckiest on the Orioles?

The top 3 unluckiest players were Lou, Robert Andino,Cesar Izturis .  However Lou and Andino both had very small sample sizes which means that they are more likely to have more variation with their luck. Anyway I created a table with all the 2009 Orioles players with 30+ at bats. This arbitrary cutoff removed all the pitchers as well as players like Ryan Freel, Justin Turner and Guillermo Rodriguez who all had fewer than twenty at-bats.  Table after the jump.

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Well I've been holding onto to this for a while, adding small things but considering Stacey's story on the Os pitching next year I decided to finish this up

Jeremy Guthrie had a horrible year in 2009. The only good thing that can be said is that he pitched 200 innings.  However the two years before that he was an above-average pitcher at the MLB level.  The obvious stipulation was that his FIP (fielding independent pitching or basically era with defense factored out) were over half a run higher than his ERA in both 2007 and 2008.  Some sites were pointing at Guthrie regressing based just on the difference between FIP and ERA although that does not seem to have been the primary reason. 

via vivalavidro.files.wordpress.com

So what exactly happened and what can we expect looking forward?

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The popular options at third are currently Garrett Atkins, Ty Wigginton both acting as placeholders for Joshua Bell.  Most people have pretty much decided that the best action would be to use Atkins as the starting third baseman with Wiggy or Justin Turner as backup until Josh Bell comes up midseason where then Atkins can be traded or released as seen fit.

Now that is a pretty good plan depending on whether Atkins can provide value at third.  Josh Bell had a dominating year last year at Double-A in both the Dodgers and the Orioles systems.  His wOBA (This is a players offensive value translated into OBP numbers so a wOBA of .340 should be around average) was higher than .390 at both stops. The year before was still very good at .368.  That's one year of being pretty good and one year of dominating double-A the first time he's been there. Granted that's built on good BABIP's but with the exception of a short 20-game stint at Advanced A, Bell has posted BABIP's over .320 every year suggesting that he has good speed.  Bell is a very good prospect.  He will probably regress somewhat next year as he backs down from his dominating season, but he should still be above-average as his lowest wRC+ (same as with OPS+ anying above 100 is good, below is bad.  For the minor leagues the stat is adjusted for the league averages but is NOT park neutral) is 119 in 2008.  To be above-average in one's worst year says something about a player.

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So recently I've been looking at catcher defense articles due in large extent to Dan Turkenkopf's articles at Beyond the Box Score.  Most catcher defense articles have scored Gregg Zaun extremely high at his ability to block balls.  It also appears that Matt Wieters picked up on that skill with most rating him very good at it although not quite elite.

Anyway I'd thought I'd share some of the information I had found on catcher defense and how Wieters stacks up (pretty darn good) Some of you have undoubtedly seen some of these articles but hopefully I have some new information to share.  This is going to focus only on blocking balls so I may do a follow-up article at some point.

If you're interested in game-calling there's an article examining Posada's game-calling vs. Jose Molina's gamecalling looking at C.C. Sabathia here at the hardballtimes (boo Yankees! Well it tells us that Posada ain't the best defensive catcher. So ummm yay?)

Anyway analysis after the jump

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While taking a brief break from dying of overwork, I saw that the 2010 CHONE projections for hitters was up.  For those who don't know Chone is a projection system like ZIPS or Bill James' which Stacey used for her 3-part articles projecting, except  probably more accurate (at least compared to bill James).  Granted these projection systems are all projects or estimates that will vary due to injuries and other factors.the

So without further ado I present the CHONE projections: http://www.baseballprojection.com/2010/BAL2010.htm

Interesting tidbits are:

The highest OBP will be from Nick

No Oriole will slug 500 although four are projected for slugging percentages in the .470s

Our leader in homeruns will be Luke Scott with 21

Nobody will break 100 RBIs or Runs.

These projections seem fairly pessimistic to me and I have the feeling that the true outcome will be somewhere inbetween CHONE and Bill James. Anyway discuss the projections as you will, maybe you can find more interesting tidbits. Or maybe just tell us all who all the nonames are near the bottom of the list. I recognize a handful of players including possible backup catcher Robby Hammock.

After spending a little bit of time looking through Baseball America's site, I stumbled upon a new name among their prospects of the week (Prospect Hot Sheet). Richard Zagone.  A left-handed pitcher out of Missouri, he had a 3.88 FIP cumulative this year with an FIP of 3.38 for his minor league career.  So who is he and why hasn't his name been mentioned before?

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In honor of the Orioles playing with a 25-man team in October I figured it was time to take a look at who could be called up for the 3 games in October.  Basically players need to be on the 40-man roster to be called up, and the only way to create more roster space is for somebody to go on the 60-day DL. Nobody's that injured (knock on wood)

Currently the outfield is the area taking a major beating. The outfield on the 40-man roster consists of six players plus Luuuke! who's listed as DH.  As of tonight only three of them can take the field: Screech, Lou and Markickass. Unfortunately everyone on the list is already up and injured. The lone reserves will be Wiggy and maybe one more infielder (I'd guess Andino or Turner)

Let's be honest, the real reason we're in this horrible slide is because our bullpen is breaking down as we've shut down out starting pitching and Jim Johnson. Oh yeah and they may have been overworked from throughout the season as we had our starting pitching frequently fail to make it out of the 5th.

So who's available on the 40-man roster?

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This is the second of my Oriole prospect breakdowns.  This one is going to focus on bullpen prospects.  My main reason for looking at the bullpen prospects is that I know we have a lot of bullpen prospects thanks to Andy MacPhail's decisions to ask for bullpen prospects as throw-ins. Currently only one of them has really developed into a MLB bullpen piece in Kam Mickolio. So now it's time to take a look at who could be the next bullpen pieces coming into the team over the next few years.

Now a word of caution about this breakdown.  The minor leagues don't have pitch fx so I can't tell just how good their pitches are. Pitchers tend to try out new pitches while pitching so these tend to get hit up and inflate pitchers hits. However since most relievers tend to focus on two pitches this will be limited. Relievers typically have fewer innings so there is much more variance.

Anyway, sorry about taking so long with the write-up. Things came up.  Bad news showed up about a classmate which made baseball seem trivial by comparison.

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Since the minor league seasons are ending, I figure now is a good time to take a look at some of our lesser-known prospects. Besides with school starting up again, I want to get this published before next summer.  Some of these players people will know but most fans aren't quite as familiar with them as they are with, say, our big pitching prospects.  In this edition I'm taking a look at Caleb Joseph, Brandon Waring, Matt Angle, Billy Rowell, Robert Widlansky and Pedro Florimon Jr.

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Michael Flacco and Pedro Florimon, Jr. won MILB's players of the week.

So what did they have to say about the two players?

Down in Bluefield Flacco went on a hot streak hitting .480 to get on base at a .500 clip. That's almost Wieters-esque. Anyway he also had three doubles, which as a develops should start becoming homeruns.

.480 (12-25), 1 R, 3 2B, 0 3B, 0 HR, 6 RBI, 1 BB, 6 SO, 0 SB, .600 SLG
Michael Flacco, who was taken by the Orioles in the late rounds of this year's Draft, showed what he's capable of this week, lifting his batting average from last week's .240 mark to .270 by Sunday. He knocked in a run in every Bluefield game but one, and even in that one -- Saturday's -- he was 2-for-4 with a double. Flacco turned in two three-hit games this week, and it appears he's getting the hang of hitting consistently against professional pitching.

Meanwhile over at class-A Frederick Pedro Florimon Jr. decided to go Ichoro on us. His batting average for the week is slightly worse than Flacco's so he "only" hit .462.  However he did it by hitting more one more double and triple than Flacco to give Florimon the higher slugging percentage. Oh yeah, he also stole 2 bases so presuming he stole second he was in scoring position over half the time he was on base. Leadoff man of the future?

.462 (12-26), 3 R, 4 2B, 1 3B, 0 HR, 6 RBI, 1 BB, 4 SO, 2 SB, .692 SLG
Pedro Florimon Jr., who came to the Orioles system as a 17-year-old in 2004, turned it on this week, hitting safely multiple times in his first three games and then singling in each of his last three. In a Tuesday doubleheader, Florimon combined to go 4-for-6 with three RBIs, three doubles and a run scored. He fell a home run short of the cycle on Wednesday -- the 165-pounder can be forgiven for only knocking eight longballs all season, and his 5-for-5 day with two RBIs and a run scored illustrates just how perfectly he can do the job without 400-foot blasts. Through the end of the week, he added three more hits, a sacrifice fly and a pair of stolen bases.

Thr Orioles currently have two relievers in the top 10 of groundball percentage. Essentially they have two pitchers most likely to produce a groundball when it is hit.  The two pitchers are Brian Bass and Cla Meredith who rank 7th and 8th respectively. Cla Meredith is, I believe, the pitcher who came over from the Oscar Salazar trade. If so, the Orioles have gotten a more valuable bullpen arm then first believed.  Interestingly there's a third Baltimore reliever who's among the top 20, coming in at 12th in GB%. Danys Baez has a GB% of 59.6 %.  Together this triumvirate are helping to lead the Orioles to first in reliever GB% with a team rate of 50.2%. 

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With Koji currently on the DL and the Orioles already declaring it most likely he will return as a member of the bullpen, I started wondering what kind of bullpen role he should have.  Assuming there are no set-backs in his rehab Koji will return late in the season for the Orioles.

Koji has experience closing so it is possible he could close for the Orioles.  This would seem unlikely as the Orioles will be using Jim Johnson as their closer and then probably Danys Baez as the back-up. However if either are injured or Baez is traded, it is fairly likely he could be the back-up closer.

Koji as a set-up man, probably in the eight-inning role is the most likely role.  As a former closer Koji has had to deal with high-leverage situations and with another closer on the team he's unlikely to be closing.  This role would allow Koji to go all out like his fellow Japanese counterpart Takashi Saito is doing for the Red Sox.  This runs the risk of Koji blowing his arm out as he overdoes his pitches. It also potentially doesn't allow him to fully use his starter's reportoire. However, Koji this year has suffered from fatigue. Keeping him to one inning should prevent this

Koji as a long-man is another likely possibility.  Most likely he would be a two-inning pitcher like Baez is or Mark Hendrickson.  This role may be predicated on the Orioles trading either Baez or Hendrickson because as it is the Orioles have three (3!) longmen the most on any team. Of course they actually need the multiple long men as starters like Jason Berken and Rich Hill have had trouble making it through five innings consistently. This would allow Koji to use all his pitches including his change-up and hopefully maximize his value. This situation seems to presume that some reliever gets traded.

So what do you guys think? What bullpen role do you believe Koji would best serve in? My vote is for long man. What's yours?

I'm not sure how this one got posted on Sickles before here but it's time to rectify that situation.  Chris Tillman will allegedly be up Wed to start.

They didn't officially confirm who would be up but they did say

 Orioles manager Dave Trembley wouldn't officially announce Tillman as Wednesday's pitcher, but he said the club will call up somebody from the minors to make that start and who it is won't come as a surprise. It has been speculated for weeks that the major league debut of Tillman, who is 8-6 with a 2.70 ERA for Triple-A Norfolk, is imminent...Trembley said the Orioles have no plans to go with a six-man rotation, and he expects Wednesday's starter to remain with the club.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/orioles/bal-osnotes725,0,5713223.story

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