The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (And It’s Pretty Ugly): 2007 Orioles Offense, Position-by-Position

Lyrical, imaginative, beautifully crafted, and deeply intelligent…it’s Kerry’s Calculus and The Book of Dead Birds.

As bad as things have been for Orioles left fielders historically, 2007 represented a new low.  As mentioned above, Jay Payton had the lion’s share of the playing time in left field last year—roughly 2/3 of it—and Jay Gibbons had most of the rest.  Payton qualified for the major league left field grid with 470 plate appearances, far above the threshold of 300; Gibbons just barely missed (290 plate appearances).  Payton wasn’t on the bottom of the list, but he had far more plate appearances than anyone around him.  The player on the list closest to Payton with a PA total anywhere near his (or higher) was Jason Bay, who finished 136 OWP points higher than Payton.  The only players on the list below him were Reed Johnson, who was a baby step away from Jay Gibbons in terms of qualifying (17 more plate appearances—big deal) and Craig Monroe and his train wreck of a season.

How bad a season did Payton have?  Only three times in O’s history has a left fielder accumulated at least 300 plate appearances and finished the season with an OWP below .400.  B.J. Surhoff (.321 OWP in 324 PAs) did it in 2005 and Dick Williams (.261 OWP in 340 PAs) pulled it off in 1961.  So, Payton’s mark is the second worst in the history of the Orioles among these qualifiers.  Note that Payton played far more than either Surhoff or Williams.  He’s the only left fielder in club history to eclipse 350 plate appearances and finish with an OWP below .400.  In the history of the American League, among left fielders with at least 450 plate appearances, Payton’s 2007 season was the seventh worst all-time.  (The worst ever, by a significant margin, is Brian L. Hunter’s 1999 season, which he split between Detroit and Seattle—.256 OWP in 527 plate appearances.)