Oriole Offense is Unlucky So Far

"I'm very sad about that, but some fellas are lucky and some ain't."
- Mr. Pink, Reservoir Dogs

Yes, Mr. Pink, some fellas are lucky. But those fellas aren't swinging bats for the Baltimore Orioles. Quite frankly, this lineup is looking more like Mr. Orange than anything else.

So I bring you the good news. The Orioles are swinging decent bats. The bad news is they are unlucky and all that good work isn't showing up in the boxscore. Using their line drive percentage thus far, I calculated an expected BABIP (adding .120 to the LD% is a quick and easy way to calculate expected BABIP) and compared it to their actual BABIP to see how good or bad things look right now among the full time players.

Name            BABIP     LD%     xBABIP    Dif
Brian Roberts   0.286   26.00%    0.380   -.094
Nick Markakis   0.206   17.10%    0.291   -.085
Derrek Lee      0.259   22.00%    0.340   -.081
Luke Scott      0.250   20.60%    0.326   -.076
Mark Reynolds   0.222   14.90%    0.269   -.047
Matt Wieters    0.262   17.80%    0.298   -.036
Adam Jones      0.226    9.10%    0.211   +.015
V Guerrero      0.284   14.30%    0.263   +.021

Roberts, Markakis, Lee and Scott are getting hosed right now. Reynolds and Wieters are slightly unlucky. The good news is if they keep hitting the ball hard, those BABIP numbers will regress to the mean (around .300 for most hitters) and those offensive numbers will improve.

Jones and Guerrero are another matter. Jones truly is hitting just as poorly as his batting line looks. And Vlad? He's been the luckiest guy on the team and is still just OPSing .663. Hoo boy.

But overall, it looks like the offense will see better days. They just have to keep hitting the ball hard...and hit 'em where they ain't.