Dan Moroz

@danmoroz.bsky.social

515 Followers 1095 Following

Orioles (wrote about baseball in the before before times), Ravens, movies.

Trevor Rogers with a 5.01 ERA and 3.99 FIP
Photo of the top floor of a house surrounded by trees.
Stunning Steve Austin in the Hollywood Blonds is a concept that always makes me laugh.
Death (as DFA) at a claw machine, saying Dietrich Enns?? Is Keegan Akin even in this thing?
A cat with a perfect slide into second base.
Man with somewhat disturbing glass eye make-up.
Baseball fan rules: Everyone is allowed to hate 3 teams as a baseline. The Yankees, 1 team from your division, and a rotating list of part playoff opponents. Outside of that, we're all friends
Tommy Lee Jones at a Spurs game looking... not ungrumpy.
Acting the Fulemin @ATFulemin I think a lot of people think the point of sports is that your team will win and then you will be happy. That is not the point of sports. The point of sports is to be sad in a group
Posts saying "Rico Garcia is a Guy" and "Rico is the fucking man".
Paul Bettany in A Knight's Tale wearing an Orioles hat.
Guy in an episode of Elementary.
Al Pacino reading the winner for Best Picture.
Jose Altuve swinging at a pitch *juuuust* a bit outside.
Magna Carta, with some helpful advice for the Orioles owner.
Movie poster for The Electric Horseman.
Alex Garland sounds like a guy who hits a double. Not a homerun Just a bread and butter guy Good, but no steroids or cow or big butt or whatever you freaks are into this year.
Added three ovals for the eyes and mouth to make it look like the Moon is the Earth's nose.
Jake writing an equation on the chalk board.
Movie posters for Sanjuro and Lady Snowblood.
Most watch director: Steven Spielberg
Simpsons image of Kirk Van Houten saying "so that's it - after 20 years so long, good luck?" and the boss saying "I don't recall saying good luck".
I think a lot of people think the point of sports is that your team will win and then you will be happy. That is not the point of sports. The point of sports is to be sad in a group
1. Sinners 2. One Battle After Another 3. Sorry, Baby 4. It Was Just An Accident 5. The Life of Chuck 6. Splitsville 7. Superman 8. Weapons 9. Wake Up Dead Man 10. Sentimental Value
The Chinese Rest. assoc. of the United States would like to extend our thanks to The Jewish People. We do not completely understand your dietary customs... But we are proud and grateful that your god insists you eat our food on Christmas. Happy holidays.
Goal completed
Guy with beard and glasses.
1. The Big Lebowski 2. True Grit 3. No Country for Old Men 4. O Brother, Where Art Thou? 5. Miller's Crossing 6. Raising Arizona 7. A Serious Man 8. Inside Llewyn Davis 9. Fargo 10. Barton Fink 11. The Hudsucker Proxy 12. Intolerable Cruelty 13. Burn After Reading 14. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 15. Blood Simple 16. Hail, Caesar! 17. The Tragedy of Macbeth 18. The Man Who Wasn't There 19. Drive-Away Dolls 20. Honey Don't! 21. The Ladykillers
Rasputin Dreamweaver
Skeet saying "sucks" in response to one saying "man this team blows".
Word cloud visualization for 2025 showing your 50 most-used words, sized by frequency. Top 10: "game" (84×), "orioles" (50×), "team" (41×), "movie" (35×), "ravens" (30×), "fans" (28×), "baseball" (25×), "jays" (24×), "season" (23×), "least" (23×) (from Anisota's Annual Bluesky Harvest)
2131 films
Movie poster for Nobody's Fool
Footnote on odds image saying Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Odds and Lines Subject to Change.
Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs Destroyer - Streethawk: A Seduction The National - Boxer Songs: Ohia - The Magnolia Electric Co. The Decemberists - Picaresque Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - The Tyranny of Distance Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress The New Pornographers - Electric Version My Morning Jacket - It Still Moves
Arrested Development "It might work for us" meme about teams having pitchers rehab to avoid Tommy John surgery.
The Orioles are currently 27th in baseball in total fWAR as a team at 3.1. You can’t just add all the pieces together because, for example, if Rodriguez and Bradish are healthy then they are replacing Gibson instead of another free agent. But adding 2.3 wins from the offense playing to expectations and a few for the rotation would have the Orioles around the Blue Jays, Royals, Braves, and Guardians (average record; 25-23). Should a team that’s coming off of a rebuild, with some (theoretically) good young talent, following seasons of 101 and 91 win, still only be looking at sneaking into a third Wild Card slot unless they have a collection of good luck (or, I suppose, the players out-performing their projections by making adjustments or for other reasons)? I would hope not. But that does appear to be where the Orioles were heading into 2025, and the failure to do even that can be blamed on a number of factors.
Tomoyuki Sugano and Charlie Morton being the O’s big pitching additions didn’t sit well with pretty much anybody, and while Sugano has been a bit of a pleasant surprise, Morton has struggled so much he’s been moved to the bullpen. Combined they’ve allowed 53 earned runs in 93.2 innings pitched, compared to the 47 earned runs they’d have been projected to allow in those innings. (I’m not sure you can completely blame the front office for Morton without giving them any credit for Sugano.) Some of the free agent starters signed this off-season: Nathan Eovaldi (TX, 3 yrs, $75M) – 2.1 fWAR Max Fried (NYY, 8 yrs, $218M) – 1.7 fWAR Nick Martinez (CIN, 1 yr, $21.05M) – 1.3 fWAR Nick Pivetta (SDP, 4 yrs, $55M) – 1.2 fWAR Luis Severino (A’s, 3 yrs, $67M) – 1.2 fWAR Clay Holmes (NYM, 3 yrs, $38M) – 1.1 fWAR Corbin Burnes (ARI, 6 yrs, $210M) – 0.3 fWAR Jack Flaherty (DET, 2 yrs, $35M) – 0.2 fWAR Blake Snell (LAD, 5 yrs, $182M) – 0.0 fWAR (60-day IL) If you assume that signing one of the pitchers in the middle here would have prevented Kyle Gibson from being given 12 innings to give up 23 runs, you can tack on another 0.7 WAR. Total: ~2.6 wins.
Regardless of the other quibbles with the team, everyone still thought this Orioles squad would be buoyed by its offense. That hasn’t happened, with several players performing worse than expected. Here’s how thing have shaken out, relative to the pre-season projections: [Table] An argument I’ve seen is that O'Hearn and Mullins are veterans so they’re doing their own thing and Holliday is listening to his dad, while everyone else is being ruined by the hitting coaches. Maybe! Some of it is also bad luck (when things are going terribly some of it is invariably bad luck). But they’re also 26th in baseball in walk rate, 28th in strike-out rate, and being 11th in isolated power isn’t enough to make up for it. Are the hitters pressing because the pitching staff is terrible? Maybe! At least they have a few guys producing to keep this from being a total disaster. One thing that stood out when comparing the pre-season projections to the actuals was that a lot of players are being dinged for their base-running. FanGraphs has the Orioles as by far the worst base-running team in baseball at -5 runs. Last year they were middle of the pack. Another demerit for the coaching? Maybe! Total: ~2.3 wins.
The front office and its defenders will surely point to the rash of injuries the team has suffered, attributing it to bad luck. I won’t go into things like health being a skill or the way the team has the players train or focus on certain things potentially increasing their injury risk, but if you need some else to yell at them about you could make the arguments. Colton Cowser had a very nice rookie season and was expected to hit at around the same (above average) level this year. He’s played in 4 games and is on the 60-day IL. Orioles’ left-fielders have collectively hit about league average this year, so replacing them all with Cowser about have netted about +4 runs. Grayson Rodriguez was looked at as a potential top-of-the-rotation started if he could take some additional steps forward and stay healthy. He’s also on 60-day IL. The projections had him as an above average pitcher but topping out at 23 starts. If you assume he’d stayed healthy all year, the expectation was that he’d be around 9 runs better than a replacement level pitcher. Kyle Bradish is also on the 60-day IL. He had an even better projection than Rodriguez; good for around 11 runs better than replacement. There have been other injuries – and you could maybe blame Jordan Westburg’s struggles (as you can see below) on not being 100% – but these seem like the biggest losses. Total: ~2.4 wins.
This Orioles season has been… disappointing, frustrating, rage-inducing… pretty gosh darn bad. There were definitely complaints about the way the team handled the off-season, but nobody coming into 2025 expected anything approaching this. Constantly seeing people arguing about what happened had me wanting to take a closer look, to try to spread the blame out (and there’s plenty of things that have gone wrong), so for the first time in years I decided to break out the old blogging fingers. For the projected stats I’m using FanGraphs, which has a number of projection systems on their site, so I’m generally deferring to the one that’s closest to what we’ve actually seen. I’m also ignoring defense because 45 games of those stats for individual players isn’t necessarily going to be the most revealing – overall the O’s defense has been below average (that’s been the case for a few years now, but so far 2025 has been even worse).
Search result for "normal fun": Normal Distribution - Math is Fun.
Favorite films: The Fellowship of the Ring and Ocean's Eleven
Fortune cookie fortune that says "Prioritize your mental health and seek help if necessary."
Slightly disheveled man yells "phooey!" at wealthy woman.
Movie posters for Ball of Fire, Rififi, The Wedding Banquet, The Wild Bunch, The Cranes are Flying.
Screenshot from Odd Man Out of a bunch of paintings of people's faces