Texas Rangers vs. Baltimore Orioles ALDS Preview
Four sweeps in the MLB Wild Card Round left us without baseball on both Thursday and Friday, but action begins really early (at least for us West Coasters) with Game 1 between the Rangers and Orioles. It will be a 1 p.m. start to kick off the series that features the No. 1 seed AL East champs against the No. 5 Wild Card team that lost out on the AL West Division on the final day of the regular season.
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Credit to the Rangers for not sulking or having a hangover from that, as they went on the road and squeezed the Rays into submission, winning the series by a combined score of 11-1. The Orioles won’t have played since Sunday, so while their rotation is intact and their relievers have had a lot of downtime, teams aren’t used to have five full days off during the MLB grind, so it will be interesting to see how it affects them and all the teams that were good enough in the regular season to secure a bye.
The O’s have participated in one playoff game since 2014 and this will be their first multi-game series and first home playoff game since then. The 2016 Wild Card game ended when Buck Showalter, who has been in the news for other reasons himself, did not use super closer Zach Britton and Edwin Encarnacion hit a ball that is still orbiting the earth off of Ubaldo Jimenez to win the game for the Jays in 11 innings.
MLB Odds | MLB Betting Splits | MLB Matchups
MLB Playoffs Odds from DraftKings Sportsbook
Rangers -110 / Orioles -110
Rangers vs. Orioles schedule and how to watch
Game 1 (@ BAL): Saturday October 7, 1 p.m. ET (FS1)
Game 2 (@ BAL): Sunday October 8, 4 p.m. ET (FS1)
Game 3 (@ TEX): Tuesday October 10, 8 p.m. ET (FOX)
Game 4 (@ TEX): Wednesday October 11, TBD (FOX/FS1) (if necessary)
Game 5 (@ BAL): Friday October 13, TBD (FOX/FS1) (if necessary)
Pitching Matchups
(based on announcements and my guesses)
Game 1: Andrew Heaney vs. Kyle Bradish
Game 2: Jordan Montgomery vs. Grayson Rodriguez
Game 3: Dean Kremer vs. Nathan Eovaldi
Game 4: John Means vs. Dane Dunning
Game 5: Jordan Montgomery vs. Kyle Bradish
My thought here is that the Orioles would want Rodriguez to start at home, even though his stuff probably plays better in road parks more so than Kremer or Means. Montgomery would pitch Sunday and then Friday in a Game 5 elimination game scenario thanks to the Thursday off day.
Rangers vs. Orioles series preview
The Rangers had an interesting second half. Some days, they looked like a world-class thoroughbred. Other days, they looked like a newborn foal trying to learn how to walk. In the two games against the Rays, the Rangers looked as buttoned up as they possibly could. They gave up one run, played better defense, touched up two good starters in Tyler Glasnow and Zach Eflin, and rolled into the ALDS riding quite a high.
Baltimore’s young roster and heavily-worked bullpen would’ve enjoyed maybe two or three days off before getting the playoffs going, but the way that the schedule shakes out now with a best-of-three Wild Card series meant waiting around for quite a while. For a team that hasn’t seen playoff baseball yet, that had to be a long and anxious wait. We’ll see if it negatively affects them with their Game 1 performance, but the bullpen getting a rest is huge, especially with Felix Bautista trying valiantly to come back, but ultimately succumbing to his UCL injury and Tommy John surgery.
I’m not saying that the Rangers aren’t a “smart” organization. I’m sure they use analytics to their advantage like most every other team in MLB does, but the Orioles take it to another level. Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal had a front-row look at how the Astros conducted themselves in the postseason. Elias and Mejdal joined the Orioles in 2019 and were with the Astros for several years prior, with Mejdal as the “Director of Decision Sciences” and Elias wearing a few hats, including Scouting Director and then Assistant GM.
I would fully expect the Orioles to have meticulously studied every Rangers hitter. They already knew the Rays well from their head-to-head meetings over the last few regular seasons. Baltimore wins because of advantages at the margins that impact the pitching and the hitting. The roster has greatly improved, but they are very skilled and adept at maximizing each individual player’s talent.
They’ll need that because the Rangers ranked fourth in wRC+ on offense at 114 and the Orioles ranked 11th at 105. The Rangers hit 50 more home runs, which, as I’ve pointed out a lot in the postseason, is a huge deal when you consider the run environment. The Rangers graded slightly better in Defensive Runs Saved, but substantially better in Statcast’s Outs Above Average metric, being +20 in that department while the Orioles were -16.
Baltimore’s big advantage in this series is pitching. Even without Bautista, the O’s have a top-10 bullpen, which we cannot say about Texas. The Rangers didn’t really need to rely on the pen with Montgomery’s exceptional Game 1 start and seven runs worth of offense in Game 2, but they will here and that may be where the Orioles are able to take advantage.
Beyond Montgomery, the Rangers rotation is very weak. Eovaldi pitched great in Game 2 against Tampa, but was a liability throughout September as he returned from injury. In the second half, Rodriguez had a 2.58 ERA with a 2.76 FIP over 76.2 innings, while Bradish had a 2.34 ERA with a 2.96 FIP, Kremer had a 3.25 ERA with a 3.98 FIP, and Means had a 2.66 ERA with a 5.24 FIP over his four starts.
If Max Scherzer can somehow return for the Rangers, he would provide a huge boost. He had a 3.20 ERA with a 3.41 FIP in eight starts after the All-Star Break. Montgomery has been elite, but Dunning has a 3.94 ERA with a 4.42 FIP in his last 14 starts and guys like Heaney and Jon Gray have been largely unreliable.
Add it all up and I lean slightly towards the Orioles because of their big pitching advantage. I do like Texas’s offense more due to the power production, but their bullpen scares me and the Orioles are prone to playing a lot of close games where they can leverage relievers and win tight ones. I think this will be a great series and I may have some game-by-game bets, but I don’t have a series position.
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