Does the Orioles on-field performance match the results?

I think it was the first game of the series against the Yankees that I started thinking that the Orioles seemed to be getting a lot of hits, but had more trouble putting up runs then their opponent. They lost that game after just losing two of three to the Blue Jays, so perhaps there was some "glass half empty" aspect to the idea, but still I thought I'd look into if maybe this was the case.

I remember reading a little bit about sequencing and cluster luck last year and I immediately thought of that. Basically, one part of this idea says that two teams could put up almost the exact same offensive numbers but produce two totally different scores based on the sequencing of the events. A team that hits single, single, and home run in one inning could score three runs (assuming no outs in between). A team that hits single, home run, single in one inning may only score two runs. A team that hits single, single, and home run spread across multiple innings may score only one run. This is one of those things (like countless others) subject to random variation in baseball...a team or player probably doesn't have any kind of repeatable skill that may help cluster hits together to score runs, it just happens or it doesn't.

There's a good article by Jonah Keri on FiveThirtyEight you can read more for information, as well as this one by Dave Cameron on Fangraphs. It's this second one that gave me a way to measure whether or not the Orioles this year were in fact suffering from a lack of cluster luck, which as I described above is what it seemed like to me at first. By simply comparing two stats on Fangraphs, Batting and RE24, you can tell if a team has been lucky or not. Here's what this looks like as of Monday afternoon (NOTE: I don't think these include numbers from the rain-shortened loss to the Red Sox, but the timing of it made it hard to be sure):

A positive number indicates a team has scored more runs than they might have been expected to thus far, a negative value indicates they've scored less. As you can see, the Orioles have been slightly lucky scoring 2.64 more runs than may have been otherwise expected based on their context-neutral offensive performance. So my initial observation was wrong, the Orioles haven't had bad luck, they've had good. So why did I think that wasn't the case?

Take a look at where some of their opponents are on that table. Sure, the Rays are in the negative, but the Yankees, Red Sox, and Blue Jays have been some of the luckiest teams in the majors so far. So in a way, the Orioles have been unlucky in their contests to date - they've had to play some very lucky teams.

In that same Fangraphs article, Dave Cameron discusses how you have to adjust a team's actual record not just based on its pythagorean expectation, but to use the expected runs scored (as opposed to the actual) when doing so. I decided to try this for all the teams in the AL East (as of results before any games on Monday):