Baltimore Orioles: Best Late-Season Players

As the Baltimore Orioles are now into the final third of the 2016 season, who are the offensive players on this team who have historically performed the best in the months of August and September?

The O’s are going to need a lot of clutch performances and players at the top of their game through the end of the regular season if they are to hold off the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox. Baltimore probably has the arguably most difficult schedule of the three teams. The Birds are going to have to earn it. Who can they most count upon?

Many factors go into why players perform better from year to year, or from one part of a season as compared to another. But there is something to be said positively for a baseball player who fairly regularly puts up good numbers at the most critical time of the season.

So let’s divide the career statistics of Orioles players by the first four months of a season (April thru July) and the last two months of the season (August and September). We’ll include the few games of either March or October with the nearby month, thus giving us a rather definitive first two-thirds of seasons versus final one-thirds. We’ll look at batting averages for each division, as well as home run frequency of plate appearances per homer hit. And the final column will highlight each player’s historically best month of the year over his career.

Ranking the current Orioles, here we go from best to worst …

With this being the first year for Hyun Soo Kim, he does not have late-season statistics yet. I was unable to find splits for his KBO years, but I think we can surmise that he was a rather consistent hitter throughout seasons.

So what we can take from these numbers? It is not terribly encouraging. I did not enter this exercise with the thought that it would be surprisingly good, but it is worse than I imagined.

The stats would seem to indicate that Chris Davis has to come alive. And it is surprising to see Matt Wieters and Nolan Reimold near the top. One would presume the wear and tear of catching would cause Wieters to wear down over the course of a season. We remember the good start Reimold had a few years ago before the serious injury took him out.

The bulk of the Orioles lineup is rather consistent overall, including players like J.J. Hardy and Jonathan Schoop. Manny Machado’s numbers are lower for the final third by a slight amount, though he may have made up for all of this over just the past couple of games!

And finally, it is no surprise at all to see that Adam Jones’ numbers are quite lower in the final third of a season. We have seen him wear down over the past couple of years as the season wore on. And more than a few folks have noticed the severe splits disparity for Mark Trumbo from early season to late season.

None of this is encouraging for a team that has over the past number of weeks often had trouble scoring, like last evening again for example … failing once more to give Kevin Gausman sufficient run support in a 3-2 loss to Oakland. Toronto won, so we are back with a tie.

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The pitching staff is another factor of course. But again, a number of the pitchers being heavily relied upon do not have a long record to establish any sort of trends.

In any event, the Orioles are going to have to have more than a couple of players to step up and play at a level near the top of their historical record for the O’s to have a chance at playing significant October baseball.