Was there anything to suggest the pitching would regress so badly after last year?
I mean, it seems like the Orioles and those that support this past offseason dont have any answers for the pitching but all the answers for the hitting aspect.
Why did they do nothing to get better if they were an 83 win team that got lucky and over achieved?
There was reason to think several guys might get worse, but not to this degree. Last year Tillman, Chen, Norris, Gonzo, Ubaldo and Gausman (listed in order of GS) had ERAs of 3.34, 3.54, 3.65, 3.23, 4.81, and 3.57. If you want to look at FIP or xFIP as a projection of what they "should" have produced, the numbers are 4.01/4.20, 3.89/3.75, 4.22/3.98, 4.89/4.46, 4.67/4.48, and 3.41/3.93, so you might have expected the same cast of characters to pitch to about those numbers (but a bit lower considering our excellent defense that those stats attempt to isolate). Every pitcher except Chen this year has not only been worse in ERA, but they have a worse ERA than they did FIP or xFIP last year. ERAs of the same group are 5.15, 3.48, 6.69, 4.85, 4.24, and 4.59. Even the absolute biggest pessimist never would have predicted this level of terrible pitching from this group, even if they included a couple of them getting injured (which didn't happen, everyone's been healthy this year for the most part).
They should have expected a little bit of a step back form the SP and made a move to improve the offense to counteract. I don't think suggesting that they should ahve dumped 3 or 4 of the 2014 starters and replaced them with Guasman and 2-3 others is a reasonable suggestion. At most, you could say they should have traded away two guys and added Gausman and a FA or trade acquisition (but that'd be costly in terms of either money or talent). But even that plan would still have led to a disaster this season, because the complete meltdown (not just slight backslide) of 5 of the 6 SP we had in 2014 isn't something anyone could have really predicted..
