Enter your Orioles playing time forecasts here. Suffice to say, the fans have lived up to the charges of optimism bias: 1,587 innings pitched (162 x 9 = 1,458) and 1,800 batter games played are predicted for the Orioles.. The pitching forecast ranks 13th, above the 1,571 IP average, while the hitting forecast is 15th, just above the 1,787 game average. Only one team, the Cardinals, comes in below the 1,458 inning number. Pirates fans are the most optimistic, scoring 55 OptiPoints on my proprietary scale [31 minus Rank(PA) plus 31 minus Rank (IP)]. The Orioles are 8th, scoring 39 OptiPoints. There is no correlation (R^2 = 0.001) between hitting and pitching optimism (Graph 1), nor between projected wins and OptiPoints (R^2 = 0.039).
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2 comments:
How easy fans forget that if you are losing after your at-bat in the 9th inning on the road then you don't pitch in the 9th... The last time the Orioles pitched more than 1,458 innings was in 1997, which, oh by the way, was the last time they had a winning season.
Clearly the Orioles fans are either betting on winning some more games this year or...lots of extra innings, many losses coming in the bottom of the 9th, and a 163rd game tiebreaker to decide 4th place in the AL East (do they have that yet?).
Without taking the time to look up the data (always a good strategy), I'll bet that it's very difficult for a team to go markedly over 1,458 innings. At home, you'll always pitch nine innings (unless there is rain). On the road, though, you do so only if the home team is tied or losing (we'll ignore partial innings here). Since home teams win about 54% of the time, the average team is at a deficit of about 43 or 44 innings. That seems like an awful lot of extra innings.
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