1998 Orioles
If only the 1998 Orioles were as good as they were old. This will be more of a fun piece than a serious one, and I will not track down every loose end. But as there is quite a bit of tabular information and related footnotes that just have to be allowed to flower, I thought it might work better as a post than a note.
The team was coming off of two playoff seasons under Davey Johnson. In both ‘96 and ‘97, they lost in the ALCS. In ‘98, Johnson was out, and his former pitching coach, Ray Miller, was in.
While the team advanced from ‘97 in weighted batting age1 from 31.7 to 33.3, they hardly went through a makeover in their lineup. Going by Baseball Reference’s tabular box, six of the nine starters were the same guys as in ‘97, and only 32-year-old designated hitter Geronimo Berroa (down to his last 118 MLB games) was off the team entirely.
The catcher situation of Chris Hoiles (technically the ‘97 starter) and Lenny Webster (technically the ‘98 starter) was really unchanged, and moreover, Hoiles and Webster were the same age.
Berroa’s replacement in the starting DH position was taken by the venerable Harold Baines.
Then the relative whiz kid Jeffrey Hammonds was out as an outfield starter in ‘98 (traded August 10) and replaced by Eric Davis, my favorite ballplayer as a kid.2
A Baines and Davis trade for Hammonds and Berroa was certainly a shove towards an older team, but what really happened was just that the playing time in the right field and DH spots shifted towards the older guys. Setting aside Berroa, this was not a matter of direct replacements (after all, with many old guys, Eric Davis especially, they can only play so much even when they are wanted!3). Baines and Davis combined for 325 plate appearances for the ‘97 Orioles, 836 for the ‘98 Orioles.
Another key addition towards baseball’s over-the-hill gang in ‘98 was 38-year-old Joe Carter. Also in the right field/DH mix, he totaled 303 plate appearances before heading to San Francisco in a trade on July 23.
A key fact in analyzing team age, of course, if the team doesn’t change much, is that the team becomes one year older in one year. This in fact explains all but 0.6 of the 1997 and 1998 age difference. But that these old 1997 players defied baseball mortality, (something, it must be said, that was not outside of the Orioles control)4 was unusual in and of itself.
Hanging on to old players makes more sense when a lineup has three Hall of Famers, though, as the Orioles did. Roberto Alomar5 and Cal Ripken Jr. were not only Hall of Famers, but good enough for Joe Posnanski’s top 100. That Harold Baines was the other Hall of Famer in the starting nine, and not Rafael Palmeiro, might strike some as an injustice, but the total of three seems right, anyway.
From catcher on out, the Orioles’ Baseball Reference 1998 starters were Lenny Webster (33), C; Rafael Palmeiro (33), 1B; Roberto Alomar (30), 2B; Mike Bordick (32), SS; Cal Ripken Jr. (37), 3B; B.J. Surhoff (33), LF; Brady Anderson (34), CF; Eric Davis (36), RF; Harold Baines (39), DH.
Keeping it fun, I wanted to avoid getting into “where does this team rank among the oldest teams ever?”, but I do find the group just remarkable. This fascination lies for me in the weighted average number (both from what I have seen of other teams, and from my intuitive sense of it), in the all-30+ factoid, in the age at key defensive positions, and for the seeming contrast with the game today.
Part of the reason I did this project was to gain some insight into the latter. The common thinking is that players were able to play well longer circa 19986 because of the help they got from steroids. Theories aside, the ‘98 Orioles seem to reveal the difference, whatever its origin.
I obtained the major league rank by age of each starter. I was interested in it for its own sake on its own terms, but then I did the same thing as if we were in 2024, comparing the player to the 2024 field of starters.
1998 was our last expansion, so the number of teams hasn’t changed, but as a player can’t be pitted versus himself, the 2024 comparisons run one higher.
Additionally, a quirk is that the 1998 comparisons couldn’t avail themselves of a National League DH. Note that we were in the period of 14 American League teams and 16 National League ones then, so the 1998 DH comparison uses only 13 players.
There could be lots of ways to represent a player’s age ranking, but the way I did it was in the manner of a won-loss record, where, if he was older than a player, that was represented as a “win,” and if he was younger, that was represented as a “loss.” So Mike Bordick’s being older than 26 other starting shortstops in 1998, and younger than three, was represented as “26-3.”
For each starter, I have given his age position for 1998 first, and then for where he would have stood in 2024 if born 26 years later.
C Lenny Webster: 27-2, 26-4
1B Rafael Palmeiro: 22-7, 26-4
2B Roberto Alomar: 21-8, 23-7
SS Mike Bordick: 26-3, 29-1
3B Cal Ripken Jr.: 28-1, 30-0
LF B.J. Surhoff: 26-3, 30-0
CF Brady Anderson: 26-3, 30-0
RF Eric Davis: 28-1, 30-0
DH Harold Baines: 12-1, 29-1
The Orioles checked out as extremely baseball old, even by 1998 standards. However, particularly when we don’t run into a ceiling effect, the difference between 1998 and 2024 stands out as remarkable. We can sum the second number, the “losses,” in each case. This gives us 29 position-aligned players in 1998 older than the Orioles, and 17 position-aligned players in 2024 older than the Orioles. That’s a reduction of 41%. The Orioles didn’t have one of the game’s oldest starters in 1998,7 but they would have had four in 2024.
Surhoff was 33 in 1998,8 and that we had no starting left fielders of that age last year is a shock. I would have to say it was a fluke, although broadly revealing of the young state of the game. My opinion that it was a fluke is based on the fact that the young left fielder group was not comprised of speed merchants: by stolen bases last year, they were smack dab in the middle of positions, with their 415 swiped bags ranking 5th of 9.
The 1998 Orioles made for a clean sweep across the outfield in terms of having the top projected 2024 age ranking, and that may tell us something in terms of the nature of the current youth movement’s particularly applying to the positions farthest away from home plate. Since Eric Davis was the oldest of the O’s outfielders at 36, this means that no starting outfielder last year was older than 35. I’m not sure if he had company, but the oldest starting outfielder last year may have been the Mets’ Starling Marte,9 who was 35.
What I really noticed going player by player through age, though, was how young the current shortstops are. Teams are really throwing out their best, youngest guys at shortstop, and letting them sink or swim, and for the most part, they are swimming. It’s striking, but seems to be a model that means that the players must be “moved off of short” if it is to continue into the future.
A few odds and ends.
Jose Altuve, who will be 35 on May 6, will advance the age of 2025 left fielders, if all goes according to plan.
The 1998 Orioles went 79-83. I haven’t looked at pitching here, and that’s a good part of the game as well, but the Orioles’ win totals declined further in each of the next three seasons, something that everyone must have more or less seen coming, given the age of the lineup.
Owning easily the best record and run differential, the 1997 Orioles were the best of the three teams, but the 1996 Orioles might have been most extreme and most fun. They were certainly heavy on ex-Mets. In terms of age, they have a leg up in the comparisons, claiming the only 40-year-old starter in Eddie Murray, although it wasn’t until July 21 that he was acquired. Mike Bordick, a relatively “young guy” then, wasn’t on the ‘96 team, and B.J. Surhoff was in the infield. Bobby Bonilla, surprisingly only 33, was in right, and he was also surprisingly a participant in 159 games.
Bordick for Bonilla certainly helped the home run total. And with Brady Anderson swatting 50, the Orioles hit 257 as a team and broke the ‘61 Yankees old record,10 which transcended anything that had been done in the National League as well. The ‘96 Orioles scored 949 runs, 137 more than the ‘97 team.11
In the bullpen, the Orioles could boast of not just Jesse Orosco, not just Roger McDowell, and not just Randy Myers, but all three of them, meaning they invested 169 games on a triumvirate that had contributed 168 games for the 1987 Mets. What could possibly go wrong? It is true that the team’s pitching and defense were both below average, but the New York three amigos really weren’t to blame: while their combined strikeouts decreased from the 202 of their 1987 glory day to 146, they posted ERA+s of 147, 117, and 141, respectively.
Baseball Reference shows that the weighting uses games played and at-bats.
A nice connection here, as Hammonds was traded to the Reds. At 60-56, the Orioles were closer to playoff contention than the Reds, so this was not a sell-off, but an exchange of decent players young enough to have upside. The Orioles got Willie Greene, who unfortunately suddenly forgot how to play baseball upon acquisition. He came to the team with a career .250 average and a .789 OPS in 445 games, but would post just a .198 average and a .654 OPS over his remaining 210 games.
Can you imagine a Byron Buxton, with some fraction of the Real McCoy’s defensive skill, playing more outfield than DH in 5 or 6 years? That’s what having Davis as a significant part of the outfield puzzle at 36 amounted to. Then again, people do live to 100, so you can never predict the future when it comes to durability.
When it comes to players’ careers, teams kill them more than they die of their own accord.
Posnanski gives a thorough explanation of his choice of Alomar, #97, over Barry Larkin, who was left on the outside looking in.
Thank ChatGPT for “circa 1998.” All I could come up was “thereabouts,” but that’s a place approximation.
Who were Ripken, Davis, and Baines beaten out by? I believe by Gary Gaetti, Tony Gwynn, and Paul Molitor, respectively. Gaetti as a 39-year-old starter was certainly a surprise for me, because I don’t remember him aging well. In fact, I remember a Sports Illustrated profile bemoaning his abrupt decline (a “what is wrong with Gary Gaetti?” piece) and wondering if it was because he had lost his fire having become a born-again Christian mid-career. But looking at his stats, he pulled off a real revival in the steroids era, even hitting 35 home runs for the Royals in the strike-shortened 1995.
You may be wondering what I did in the case of players of the same age. I looked them up, silly! I split ties based on actual age for common date in the respective seasons. But in the case of 2024 left fielders, no one was even 33, so this wasn’t necessary.
Hello, MOM! Marte spent much of 2024 as her favorite player, although he was overtaken by Nimmo when Brandon charmed her in a TV interview during the playoffs.
By the way, why was it always “Hi, Mom!” in Monday Night Football games back in the day, and not “Hello, Mom!”? Given my baroque tendencies, I would have been lucky to have stopped at hello, and not ejaculated a “Greetings and Salutations”….O.k., not original. Straight from “Seinfeld", 1991.
With the 1997 Mariners hitting 264 home runs, it lasted one year.
A bit of duplicity without the footnote, as the American League as a whole averaged 73 more runs a team in 1996 than 1997. The Mariners and Indians ranked ahead of the Orioles in runs.