Last year, I said that it would be fair to expect the Oriole offense to be significantly better than they were in 2010, by something like 100 runs or so. And that basically happened, as the '11 Orioles scored 95 runs more than their previous iteration. In fact, no other team in the sport improved their offense as much as the Orioles from 2010 to 2011. So much for all of the frustration caused by soul-killing strikeouts and Vladimir Guerrero's poor cleanup hitting, huh?

I've already taken a look at the 2012 bench and made an estimation of it collectively scoring 80 to 100 runs, for a relatively large improvement over the poor bench performance in 2011. Today our focus moves to the starting lineup. This is the performance breakdown of last year's starters:

*As I normally do, I refer to weighted on base average (wOBA), the all-encompassing offensive statistic of choice. Runs Created is derived from it and plate appearances. All data can be found on fangraphs.com.

While Reynolds actually spent time at first and Davis at third, but from an offensive point of view, their position is meaningless. Davis replaced Lee in the lineup. All other players, besides pitchers (who, led by Zach Britton, created 5 runs of their own), figured into the bench part of this project. As a group, the starters totaled 657 runs in 5385 plate appearances.

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There has been much lamenting the loss of Jeremy Guthrie and a lot of head scratching regarding the return on the trade, but the fact is that Jason Hammel and Matt Lindstrom are Orioles now, so let's cross our fingers they play well and that Dan Duquette knows something we don't.

Andrew Fisher from Purple Row, the SB Nation Rockies blog, was kind enough to send us a few observations on the two newest Orioles. First up, Jason Hammel (Andrew's comments are in block quotes, mine are not):

Hammel is one of my favorite players to ever put on a Rockies' uniform. In a field where athletes are likely not even conscious during interviews, Hammel provides unique dry wit and self-deprecating honesty in interviews. His dorky humor is enough to make a fan chuckle even after a tough loss. When he pitches well, he says so. When he pitches like dog excrement, he says so. When he pitches well and is undone by rotten luck, he says that too. (He has one memorable quote about being undone by a 27-hop home run...an inside the parker that was grounded down the 1B line.)

If there is one thing we like here at Camden Chat, it's dorky humor. Hopefully we'll be laughing along with Hammel instead of throwing things at our TV.

He's a fascinating player to analyze, as his 2009 and 2010 seasons rank #1 and #2 in Rockies' franchise history in terms of K/BB rate. He hit a home run off Zack Greinke. As a fan of baseball analysis, he has been an ideal case study to parse through. His 2009 and 2010 were nearly identical seasons in every statistical way...except for an ERA of a half run higher in 2010. And yet in well over 700 IP, his career ERA is much much higher than his FIP/'xFIP etc.

If his career ERA is much higher than his FIP then he's basically the opposite of Jeremy Guthrie, who always performed better than his FIP. I guess there's hope that Hammel might even out here in Baltimore. I mean, we have to hope for something, don't we?

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As you have by now read on this site and elsewhere, Jeremy Guthrie was traded by the Orioles to Colorado. In exchange, the O's received a starter, Jason Hammel, who is 29, and a reliever, Matt Lindstrom, who is 31. At 12:30pm today the O's had a conference call for the media with Dan Duquette and also the two newest members of the O's. Yours truly had the opportunity to listen in. The conference lasted about half an hour. There's a lot of stuff that gets asked and answered that I get the feeling is boilerplate stuff. Here are some of the highlights:

* Duquette cited several times that both Hammel and Lindstrom can be under team control for 2013 as a reason in favor of making the trade.

* He was asked if, while exploring trades, he had the opportunity to get young and upcoming prospects instead. "We didn't have any offers of young prospects."

* Duquette likes calling everyone "a dependable pitcher"; he referred to Guthrie this way as well as Hammel and Lindstrom. Then he mentioned Hammel's past 3 years of 177, 178 and 170 IP. Is that where the bar is set for dependable? Hammel doesn't seem to have spent time on the DL. He makes starts, just doesn't average 6+ IP.

* At one point, Duquette cited K/BB ratios as being a strength of the players acquired. He described them as having ratios "approaching" 3:1. Hammel's career K/BB is 2.01. Lindstrom's career K/BB is 2.12. Guthrie's career K/BB is 2.06. I am not sure that is how I would deploy the word "approaching."

* This fact was not referenced on the conference call (probably because the players themselves were also listening), but Guthrie has settled for $8.2M with Colorado. The combinination of the salaries of Hammel and Lindstrom is $8.35M.

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I'll be the first to admit, this isn't an exact science. Projecting a baseball team's expected performance over 162 games requires making accurate assumptions about a dozen or more different contributing factors per player, not to mention taking into account how the competition has changed. There are a lot of balls in the air, and if you drop one it can throw the entire calculation off wildly. Last year, I spent a ton of time projecting the Orioles to win about 81 games. They did not even come remotely close.

But I do still think projecting the Orioles is an important game to play. Firstly it puts some critical thinking towards how the team is built. I made several mistakes last year, clearly, and now it is challenge for me to get smarter about it and try and view the team more accurately. Secondly, even when I am wrong about a projected win total - even wildly wrong - when you compare what I thought would happen with what actually did happen, you can learn things. For example, I wasn't alone when I talked about the young pitchers building off their strong run in late 2010, but now I've learned the hard lesson about how September stats and young pitchers have a tendency to break your heart. Or at least, I think I've learned that lesson.

My thesis remains the same this year as it was last year: if we project improvement in terms of runs scored and runs allowed relative to 2011's levels, we should have as strong a picture of what to expect as is possible. Today in Part One, we're talking about the runs scored half of that equation, and specifically we're focusing on the bench.

Our baseline: the 2011 Orioles scored 708 runs.

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Saturday morning saw a steady stream of Orioles fans picking their way across the salted sidewalks and parking lots of downtown Baltimore, nine thousand in all, on their way to the Convention Center to participate in FanFest, the annual celebration by the Orioles for those fans who have still stuck with the team through all the years of losing.

Shortly before the doors were scheduled to open to season ticket holders at 10am, a small group crossed Howard Street heading towards the entrance, myself among them: just an anonymous face in the crowd. One lone street vendor had braved the cold and the ice to set up a canopy and peddle merchandise along the sidewalk of Conway.

My fellow fans headed past the canopy, but I turned to go up the steps to the entrance for media. Where most days I am just another idiot with a keyboard and an opinion, for FanFest I was to be set up with a press pass for the day, not quite a somebody and not quite a nobody.

The door for the media entrance was locked when I got to the top. In the back of my mind, I was still waiting for the part where someone jumped out of nowhere with a camera and told me it was all a joke. Good one, guys! You got the blogger real good. Outside of the confines of my mind where the grim scenarios incubate and hatch, an Orioles employee walked over and opened the door for me.

"Hi," I said, "I'm Mark," fully expecting the response to be, "Who?"

"Welcome, Mark! We've been waiting for you. What took you so long?"

Contrary to my dire imaginings, my name was on the paper and there was a pass for me as there was supposed to be. Just like that, my day as a sorta-somebody at FanFest was underway.

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Dan Duquette's tenure in Baltimore hasn't been especially awe-inspiring so far. You can expect the 2012 Orioles to look a lot like the 2011 Orioles, but with more pitching and bench depth. The one eye-catching difference on the roster is the two new starting pitchers from Nippon Professional Baseball. The NPB usually requires players making the jump to the big leagues to do it through the complicated posting system (made famous by Daisuke Matsuzaka, and this winter by Yu Darvish), but the O's picked up lefties Tsuyoshi Wada and Wei-Yin Chen through simple free agency.

Wada and Chen were two of the best pitchers in Japan. They both started game one of the championship Nippon Series, Wada for the Softbank Hawks and Chen for the Chunichi Dragons. To us though they are just names. Enigmas even. I don't think I could even name all of the NPB teams (I get tripped up on the Buffaloes and BayStars). Patrick Newman, though, is exactly the man to ask about the new faces on the Orioles. He already knew about Wada and Chen long before the first rumor linking them to Baltimore, because he runs NPB Tracker, the website for baseball news from Japan. You can also find him on the twitter at @npbtracker.

After the jump comes my interview with him. After that, do what I do and go spend your browsing time on his website. There's a tremendous amount of information to be gleaned from it. You can even search just for Chen info or just for Wada info.

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Last night, MLB.com's Britt Ghiroli passed along a few words from Buck Showalter:

You are going to see Mark start out at third base in the spring. That's where we would like for him to play. We think Mark is a lot better than he's shown statistically. I think he's going to come in [to camp] lighter and little more nimble.

[snip]

We know Chris can play a plus first base and we think Mark is a lot better than he showed last year. There are still some things we are looking at [this offseason], but right now, I think that's the plan.

Right, so, my immediate reaction on reading this was to literally yell out loud in my office at work. Which is admittedly not very mature of me, but, gosh, do we all remember Mark Reynolds 2011? Defensive statistics are a difficult thing to really grasp, but Reynolds as a third baseman registered the fourth worst season by Defensive Runs Saved (the Baseball Info Solutions' advanced defensive metric) in fangraphs' entire database at -29. In English: Mark Reynolds cost the Orioles 29 runs compared to an average defensive third baseman. The last third baseman to showcase himself that poorly was Ryan Braun in 2007 (-32 in comparable innings). Ryan Braun is now a mediocre left fielder.

I watched him all summer, and those numbers seem pretty dead on to me. Awful. Just awful.

That was the gist of what flashed through my brain when I heard that it was the Orioles' big plan to just send Reynolds right back out for 2012. Well, that and some sarcastic ideas about the efforts the O's have undergone to improve their rotation while basically completing ignoring their league-worst defense.

But then I actually spent more than half a second thinking about it.

Okay, so the first we have to do here is banish all variations on the phrase "His bat plays at the position". That phrase is highly relevant when talking about total value of a player and it is particularly relevant when talking about free agency. It is irrelevant for this problem, because the O's already have their principle players. They simply need to find the optimal configuration for them.

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Bottom of the second, one out, no score.

Adam Jones digs into the box, spits, twirls his bat into his set stance. All the while he looks out at the mound, preparing himself. He lays off the first pitch high and away, not even close. It is the last day of another forgettably terrible season, and I can't help but wonder how motivated he could possibly be in this at-bat. But he looks as locked in as he always does. The second pitch he rips down the line, foul. The third is a breaking ball, the classic down-and-away changeup that has always and will always fool him. The pitcher is lefty Jon Lester; Jones stepped into the box in trouble. Now he has two strikes and he's really in trouble. With two strikes he's just a .180 hitter.

Lester threads another changeup down and away, but Jones adjusts. He lunges, cutting his swing down, and puts wood on ball. The ball squibs out towards secondbase. The Boston shortstop, Marco Scutaro, fields it nimbly and throws to first, but far too late. Adam Jones has an infield single. The crowd claps but does not appreciate the moment for what it is. It will be the last time he stands on first base as a Baltimore Oriole.

Or at least I believe so. While the actual moves made by the Orioles this winter could at best be characterized as tepid roster tweaks, there have been a good number of interesting rumors surrounding the team. At the center of good ones sits Adam Jones. Which makes a ton of sense. Jones is one of the team's best players, but is in his arbitration years, is only two seasons away from free agency, and appears in many ways to have plateaued developmentally. His value to a bad team like the Orioles before he reaches free agency is significantly lower than his value to a competitive team in need of a good center fielder.

When it became clear towards the end of the season that the Orioles would have a new de facto General Manager for this offseason, I asked myself what I wanted to see from him or her. The answer I ended with was that I wanted to see a clear strong direction, either legitimately building or legitimately rebuilding. And, really, what I want is rebuilding. I have made the case more than a few times that the Orioles right now are not built primed to jump into competitive baseball.

There just isn't enough upside on the roster, and Adam Jones is a big part of that. He's a good player who I like, and I think he's got plenty of trade value, but the way the development of his production has stopped has me believing he isn't going to get much better. If the Orioles are going to take a huge step forward soon, "much better" is exactly what Jones (among others) needs to be. As evidence, I submit to you his career .319 on-base percentage, and his 2011 on-base percentage that matched it.

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