One of the ongoing themes of the Buck Showalter/Dan Duquette era of the Orioles has been that they have succeeded without ever getting much, or any, love from the cottage industry of preseason prognosticators. If the 2017 Orioles are at all decent, Birdland will be able to line up for another round of projection bashing. The venerable PECOTA has taken its swing at this year’s team and spit out a 72-90 projected record.
This is the exact record that PECOTA had projected for the 2016 team that went on to win 89 games and make it into the playoffs, succeeding in spite of a starting rotation that was, for a lot of the season, really, really bad.