Baltimore and Texas will duke it out in a one-game playoff for honor of facing the Yanks in the ALDS. Who should Yankee fans be pulling for in the inaugural AL Wild Card dice-roll? Here are some things you are likely to hear from your local sports talk radio host or beat writer:

–The Yankees won the season series against Texas

–The Yankees split the season series against Baltimore

–Texas has no momentum after getting swept by Oakland to lose their once
insurmountable division lead

-Baltimore is magical, having gone 29-9 in one-run games and 16-2 in extra frames.

These are all true facts. However, they have little predictive power.

You know what a meaningful data point is? Over a 162-game sample, the Texas Rangers had a run differential of +101. That’s only behind your New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays (who got absolutely shafted this year, having underperformed their Pythagorean record AND still finishing with a better record than the ALDS-bound Tigers).

The Orioles, on the other hand, outscored their opponents by a total of…7 runs. They are basically a .500 team. You want to give them an extra game or two for wily managing and another couple games for a strong bullpen — that’s fine with us. But, they are clearly not in the same class as Nolan Ryan’s soliders.

The Orioles’ greatest strength all year has been their relief core, which helped them edge out a ton of games (since they were incapable of blowing teams away). They are a legitimately deep pen with Jim Johnson getting plenty of support from Darren
O’Day, Pedro Strop, Luis Ayala, Troy Patton, Matt Lindstrom, and others. Their bullpen ERA of 3.00 was 3rd-best in the AL.

Beneath the surface, their bullpen doesn’t appear as strong. Their bullpen xFIP of 3.89 is somewhat run-of-the-mill. This is worse than both the Rangers (3.63) and Yankees (3.64), and suggests some good fortune might have been at play here (or maybe Buck Showalter is capable of suppressing his relievers’ HR/FB and BABIP?).

Moreover, an elite set-up and closer crew is more important in the playoffs than a deep pen, since teams rely on their high leverage relievers to pitch more innings.

Take a look at those names above. Now compare them to the top few guys the Rangers can throw at you — Joe Nathan, Alexei Ogando, Mike Adams, Koji Uehara, and Roy Oswalt. There’s a good case to be made that the Rangers can beat the Orioles at their own bullpen game in the long run.

After that, it’s Texas in a landslide. The Rangers are once again an above-average fielding team according to UZR. And once again, the Orioles are one of the poorest fielding teams in the league. The Rangers had MLB’s second-best offense (.335 wOBA), behind the Yankees (.340). The Orioles were 12th (.316). If you want to go by good-old-fashioned runs scored — the Rangers, Yankees, and O’s rank 1st, 2nd, and 14th respectively.

The Rangers’ starters compiled an ERA of 4.26, a bit better than the Orioles 4.41. That’s pretty much a wash when you consider the divisions they play in. But digging a little deeper, we can see that the Texas pitchers are the much bigger threat. xFIP shows the Rangers (3.97) to be considerably better than the Orioles (4.30). And they sustained those skills despite pitching deeper into ballgames than the O’s pitchers (50 more innings over the season).

Finally, the same principle for the bullpen holds true for the rotation – having an ace who you can throw for two games in a series is much more important in the playoffs than the depth that gets you through 162 games.

The Rangers have that in Yu Darvish. Darvish’s 3.52 xFIP probably understates how good he really is. After taking some time to adjust to David Cone’s commentary, Darvish has really turned it on over the past couple of months. Since September, he’s struck out 30% of the batters he’s faced. That’s better than everybody except for Max Scherzer — and Darvish did it over 7 more innings than Scherzer. What’s really scary is that Darvish’s walk percentage dropped to 5% after September 1st. One month does not mean he’s solved his control issues, but Darvish was already a very good pitcher. If he can keep his walks down, it means he’s going to be among the very best in the world.

The Orioles’ best starting pitcher is… to be honest, I don’t really know. I can’t name any good pitchers on the Orioles, and I don’t really feel like flipping back to the Fangraphs tab to check it out. I know Jason Hammel was very good this year, but he’s still recovering from a gimpy knee and hasn’t pitched a full game in months.

They’ve got Wei-Yin Chen who gives up fly balls on everything put in play — probably not a great strategy against the Yankees in these stadiums. Their best healthy starter is probably Jake Arrieta, whom the genius Buck Showalter banished from the rotation back in June.

So the NoMaas staff will be breaking out our Mike Flanagan jerseys and rooting on our new Al East rivals this Friday. Bring on Buck.