⚾ Baseball Bytes: Busted O's and Killer B's

Has the shine already come off the Orioles' potential? Plus, a tribute to the Astros' classic Killer B's, and a haiku about Kris Bryant.

Welcome to Baseball Bytes¹ — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

⚾ Baltimore Is Less?

Baltimore Orioles SS Gunnar Henderson looks on during a baseball game against the Chicago Cubs, Thursday, July 11, 2024, in Baltimore. (Nick Wass/AP Photo)

Well, so much for my fun World Series pick of the Orioles. Baltimore has started the season off at 6-10 — entering Wednesday’s play having lost 8 of 11 games in April so far — and they sit dead last in the American League East. Per my ⚾ 2025 MLB Elo ratings and win projections📈, the O’s rank 15th in the latest power rankings, down to a win projection of just 80.0 with only a 38 percent chance of making the playoffs.

It’s still quite early, as we are legally obligated to say at this stage of the season. April is barely halfway over; there are still 5½ months left in the regular season. But as always, it’s surprising how quickly things can spiral out of a team’s control even after a few weeks. In full seasons since the 1994 strike, there have been 104 teams who started exactly 6-10; on average those teams ended up winning 75.3 games, with just 31 percent getting to a winning record by season’s end and only 11 percent winning 90+ (as the O’s did last year):

(Also notable? Zero of the 104 teams won 100+ games, which Baltimore did two seasons ago.)

Yes, we know that this exercise isn’t completely fair to the 2025 Orioles, who went into the season with more talent than most teams in the sample above — they won 91 games, as opposed to the historical list’s average of 78.3 wins per 162 in the previous season.² We’d expect those other teams to have a lower chance of overcoming a rough start than a team with Baltimore’s track record. But in addition to Elo’s forecast, FanGraphs also projects the O’s to finish with just 80.4 wins.

It’s an outcome that would have been considered disastrous from the perspective of just a few years earlier, when Baltimore broke out to win 101 games behind one of the game’s most promising young cores. As I wrote after they were eliminated by the eventual champion Texas Rangers in the ALDS, the future tended to be bright for similar teams over the next handful of years:

If Baltimore has indeed derailed itself from that track, a lot of fingers will be pointed at owner David Rubenstein and general manager Mike Elias for not upgrading around the team’s emerging core enough since the 2023 breakout campaign. There was already a narrative going into this season that the franchise was either unwilling to spend enough to improve, or unable to make the right deals to accomplish that goal. For one thing, the O’s reportedly insulted Corbin Burnes with a lowball year number (four versus the six he ended up signing for with Arizona), helping to gut a rotation that now ranks last in Wins Above Replacement.³

And in general, they probably haven’t ramped up their spending enough, fast enough, to follow the most optimal rebuilding blueprint. Back in 2018, I studied the arcs modern rebuild jobs tended to follow, finding that the most successful ones — like those of the Astros, Cubs, and later the Phillies — didn’t simply stockpile prospects. They also knew when to pivot, aggressively adding veteran talent once the young foundation was in place. The biggest gains came not from staying cheap and patient forever, but from knowing when to spend big and go for it:

In Baltimore’s case, they had the No. 1 farm system (per Baseball America), the 10th-youngest roster and ranked 25th in payroll in 2023. Then, they remained the No. 1 system in 2024, with the 11th-youngest roster and the No. 22 payroll. This season, they have the No. 18 farm system and the 22nd-youngest roster — the hallmarks of a team shedding its commitment to purely rebuilding through youth — but they rank just 16th in payroll and are on pace for just 6.5 WAR from non-homegrown players. So far, those are the missing ingredients in Baltimore’s transition from a young, up-and-coming core to a complete contender.

The good news is that there’s still plenty of untapped potential for this year’s Orioles. Gunnar Henderson started the season on the IL and hasn’t gotten hot yet, but he had 8.5 WAR last year and should be much better going forward. Ditto Adley Rutschman, who’s gotten off to an OK but not amazing start behind the plate. Morton and Dean Kremer have to pitch better in the rotation. And Colton Cowser’s return from injury can’t come soon enough.

Until then, the O’s will have to lean on what they’ve already built and hope for a turnaround to arrive soon. But if it doesn’t come, the narrative will shift quickly from exciting potential to missed opportunities — and from “the best is yet to come” to wondering whether it is already starting to pass them by.

⚾ Killer B’s on the Loose

Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio see a swarm of Killer B’s on the horizon. (Louis DeLuca/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

I tend to dislike most of MLB’s City Connect uniforms — they’re garish, gimmicky and fugly in most cases (sorry, it’s true!) — but the Astros’ new ones immediately drew my attention for attempting to unify the franchise’s original/current orange-and-blue color scheme with some of its 1990s-era design sensibilities. This, in turn, made me think back to what is a weirdly underrated run in recent baseball history: the Astros’ Killer B’s era.

Wikipedia considers that stretch to begin in 1997, when Houston made the playoffs for the first time since 1986 — losing to the Braves, of course⁴ — but if we’re basing it on the eponymous “B’s” themselves, Craig Biggio made his MLB debut with the club in 1988. If we go back to then, here’s a yearly accounting of how many WAR (per 162 team games) the Astros got from players whose names began with “B” each season until later-stage Killer B Lance Berkman left the club in 2010:

This funny story by

Dayn Perry

from 2012 notes that the trio of Biggio, Jeff Bagwell (arguably my favorite player ever) and Derek Bell had the most combined WAR of any trio of teammates whose last names started with the same letter in a multi-year span. But what I love is that the Astros always found a new way to churn through new Killer B’s whenever the need arose:

That included pivoting to Berkman as the dominant member of the core in the 2000s, enjoying a half-season of Carlos Beltrán that nearly led to a World Series appearance, and adding some good seasons by Michael Bourn and Geoff Blum to the mix as well.

The Killer B’s era in its original concept did technically end with Berkman being traded at the 2010 deadline to the New York Yankees, but that wasn’t exactly the end of the Astros relying on “B”-named stars. The team’s quasi-dynasty of the mid-2010s into the 2020s (however you feel about it) re-formed some of the Killer B attack with Alex Bregman and Michael Brantley playing key roles alongside, yes, some non-B stars like Jose Altuve, George Springer, Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez.

But with Bregman leaving Houston for the Boston Red Sox this past offseason, the Killer B’s are down to Hunter Brown and Ronel Blanco, with Juan Bello on the way. It’s just not the same — even if the uniforms vaguely recall the heyday of the original Killer B’s.

⚾ Baseball Haiku: Kris Bryant edition

Once an MVP
Injured List is his home now
Rockie road, indeed.

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Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes

1. Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.

2. Excluding teams from 2021, who were coming off the weird shortened 2020 campaign.

3. It hasn’t helped that cheaper, older replacement Charlie Morton has been horrible so far, with an 8.84 ERA in 4 starts.

4. This would become a recurring theme.