Another Nobody Beat Us: The Impact of Sequence Effects

Last night, the Baltimore Orioles were beat in a 4-2 game by Roenis Elias.  WHO?!?!?  During the game, Elias went 7.2 IP yielding only six hits with four strikeouts and no walks.  The plate discipline at the plate certainly made it seem once again as if the Orioles had been dominated by a nobody.  This seems to be a common trend for the Orioles.

As fans, we have often lumped certain scenarios as being games where the Orioles would surely lose. Last year, it was day games and Sunday baseball.  This year, we’ve lumped in Friday games at home with the alternate uniforms as the Orioles have gone 10-20 since last year.  The above scenario with the Orioles getting dominated by nobodies has been around for a few years now.  Does it make sense?  Using Baseball Reference data, the Orioles hitting statistics have been split into three categories defining the consistency of pitchers to be dominant for either strikeout and walks in MLB.  Power pitchers are in the top third of the league in strikeouts plus walks. Finesse are in the bottom third of the league in strikeouts plus walks.

I want to focus on the last statistic in that column called sOPS+.   This is a split OPS in reference to how the team has performed in reference to the rest of the league.  For example against Power pitchers, the Orioles with a 125 performed about 25% better than the rest of MLB.  In comparison though against Finesse pitchers, they have fallen to 98 sOPS+ which is slightly below average.  Interesting, but not the definitive terrible play that we’ve constituted in our minds.  In addition if we go back to previous seasons, the trend doesn’t standout as has been in many fans minds:

2014:

2013:
2012:

So why does it feel as if every time we come across a player that doesn’t have dominating stuff that the Orioles don’t crush him.  It likely has to do with sequence effects.  The term sequence effects describes the phenomena in which the dependent measure appears to be systematically influences by prior events such as the stimulus from the previous trial.

WHAT?!?!?

To clarify, imagine an experiment where subjects are asked to pick up and guess the weight of different objects on multiple daily sessions. A sequence effect would be the perceived weight of a given object being influenced by whether a light or heavy object was handled just before.  In the case of the Orioles, they were just coming off a big offensive victory the night prior with a 9-4 win.  One would perceive that the Orioles dominance  would continue on the next night.   However, it’s baseball so things often change due to the multitude of factors including some decent command and good use of the sinker to induce groundballs.  Sometimes it’s best to tip the cap and know that in the course of the season that all things will balance out regardless who the Orioles are playing.  Talent and performance will rise to the top over a long enough sample size.