I was scanning back to see if I could find some pages of old threads with record predictions but got lazy and gave up. I'm mildly optimistic for the future -- it will depend a lot on whether we see the small aggression that (in fairness) was shown last winter stepped up more. Most teams can't pull off the kind of meteoric rise that the Orioles have gone through and likely are still going to display if they get good injury luck.
Orioles went from 52-110 to 83-79 and now 102=60 if they win today.
We were 62-100 and can be 76-86 if we win today.
There's no way to deny that a 14 or 15-game improvement, fueled largely by young players finding their footing, is a solid season in general. I think this is so in two regards: you have very young players getting a taste of a full season, with positive signs but still very much question marks all around. You also have established young players finding or maintaining high gears as they step forward to cement themselves as core players. Next year, Reynolds is 29, Hayes is 27, and Keller is 28.
Assuming you get the latter extended this winter, those are positive building blocks who demonstrated it with performance. I don't think it needs to be said that Cruz having 2023 completely wiped is an enormous blow, because not only would we likely be right around .500, but it would also probably be even more optimistic to count him firmly in that group of more established MLBers, whereas now his 2024 may vary between the ups and downs we can expect to see more of from Davis, Endy, etc., and the "this guy is a building block" that we have in Keller starting, and so on. Of course, Cruz is a pretty volatile player and only has a small track record, so it's not worth pushing too much into this, but even with all of the frustrating things that have happened on the field throughout 2023, his whole season being wiped is far and away the biggest blow.
All of this is to say that 2023 was really a mixed bag at the end for me. Hayes clicking in this fashion, along with Keller rebounding from the post-ASB hiccup and finishing strong with 194 innings, really helped to "salvage" what it many ways looks like continued missed opportunity, which I think will still loom in 2024, because the most optimism I can muster about free agency is that we'll run back what we did last winter with some small variations and maybe, maybe a surprise trade.
I think we can look no further at this missed opportunity than across the dugout for the final game today. Miami is headed to the playoffs with 84 wins. Their active AAV in 2023 is about 110M, ours is 75M. They made a modest signing of Jorge Soler for 3/36 a few years back and some tactical trades to boost a team that consistently plugged away this season. Most tellingly, perhaps, is this anecdote: both of our teams traded Starling Marte. The one who is going to the playoffs has the player they received from that trade starting the first wild card game this week, while the one hoping for 76 wins instead of 75, who also had multiple years of control on Marte when they traded him, got back a question mark MIF prospect and a guy who might be out of baseball soon.
I don't want to leave it on a sour note with Peguero, since I still think there's some reasons to be positive about him, but I guess this is all to say that as solid as a +15 win improvement is from 20,000 feet, there are still a lot more reasons to be pessimistic until proven otherwise.
Finally, I am hoping for a win to close out 2023, but there is a bit of tank jockeying that could happen today. If we lose and the Mets win, then I think we can end up in the 7th position, which not for nothing is where the Rangers were last year to move up to 3rd. If we win and the Guardians lose, we might fall to 9th. That said, I think 7-9th is really marginal with lots of weird luck involved, so it's not really worth being too hung up on any of this. I thought maybe Jared Jones would get an MLB cameo, but it seems like we'll probably just go with a bullpen game today.
