Orioles' true weakness is hiding in plain sight (but fixing it is anything but simple)

The Baltimore Orioles are in a vicious cycle of their defense letting down their pitching. Errors and Earned Runs are not exactly the cutting edge of statistical analysis, but the fact that the Orioles are sixth in the league with 18 errors and first in the league with 19 unearned runs tells a story. There are a few teams as sloppy defensively as the Orioles, but nobody pays for those mistakes like the Orioles.

Looking first at the Orioles defense. There is not a single metric that would tell you this Orioles defense is good, but they're not a tire fire. Looking at some modern metrics, the Orioles rate out as well below average defensively by DRA, OAA, and FRV, but they are not in the bottom five in any of those stats. As mentioned above, they are sixth in the league in errors, which sounds bad, but it's a tight cluster. The Mets have just four fewer errors, and they rank 18th.

The Baltimore Orioles are allowing their opponents to make the most of their mistakes

The point here is that the defense is not so bad that leading the league in unearned runs is an inevitability. Plenty of teams are similarly defensively challenged, and their defensive miscues don't result in a tidal wave of runs.

The difference between those teams and the Orioles is that the Orioles pitchers have really struggled to pick up their defense following their mistakes. When your defense makes an error and allows an extra base runner, in a perfect world, their pitcher will buckle down and induce a double play or strikeout the next batter, and as far as the scoreboard is concerned, it's a no-harm, no-foul type of incident. The defense is still bad, and the error counts and metrics will reflect that, but as far as the team's chances of winning that day, there's no real impact. That has not been the case for the Orioles this year. When a man is put on base by way of defensive mistakes, that guy almost always comes in to score.

So what's to be done about this? There are a few things they can do.

The first thing is the easiest: the Orioles need to prioritize their defensive alignment and put their best defenders on the field at their natural positions. This means no more infielders in the outfield, no more Dylan Beavers in centerfield, and as little Tyler O'Neill in the field as possible.

The next thing is that their pitching needs to be mentally tougher. The term unearned runs makes it sound like it's all on the defense, but the Orioles have had multiple instances where they've allowed a made error on what should have been out number three, and then their pitcher gave up a bomb to the very next batter. Yes, it's the defense's fault that that batter even came to the plate, but there's not much the defense can do to make up for it if the next pitch goes over the fence. Don't hang your head and give in; buckle down and get that out back, and minimize the damage.

The last thing is that the Orioles need to get a little luckier. Both the defense and the pitching should strive to improve, but it's not too big of an ask of Lady Luck for not every single batter that reaches via error to come in to score. If even in the percentage of errors resulting in runs went from almost all of them to just most of them, that would make a tangible difference in the Orioles' ability to hang in close games and scratch out a few more wins.

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