AL East race might be closest ever

[Terminator]

AL East race might be closest ever

Projections have all five teams finishing within two games of one another

Updated: May 6, 2014, 3:30 PM ET

By Dan Szymborski | ESPN Insider

 

 

Sometimes our expectations are thwarted by reality, as Arizona Diamondbacks fans and Pittsburgh Pirates fans looking forward to October baseball have found. In the case of the AL East, the expectations coming into the season were that of a brutal melee, a yearlong war of attrition that left all five teams beaten, battered and bloodied in its aftermath. So far, these predictions have come true.

 

As of Monday morning, a scant 2 1/2 games separate the AL East leader, the New York Yankees, from the AL East cellar dweller, the Toronto Blue Jays. While that's a larger number than the separation between first and last in the NL East, the difference is that nobody really considers the Mets, Marlins and Phillies to be in the same tier of ability as the Braves and Nationals. The AL East is a different story.

 

Five competitive teams

In the preseason, the ESPN Forecaster panel picked the Blue Jays to win 77 games on average, the best predicted record of any last-place team in baseball. The ZiPS projection system saw the AL East as excruciatingly close. The difference in average expectation between best (Boston) and worst (Toronto) was only seven wins over a 162-game season, the smallest spread in the 11 years ZiPS has projected the leagues.

 

Photo finish?

Every team is projected to have at least 80 wins and an 11 percent chance of winning the division.

 

Team W L GB DIV%

Boston 83 79 -- 22.7

Tampa 83 79 -- 22.2

Baltimore 83 79 -- 21.9

New York 83 79 -- 21.6

Toronto 81 81 2 11.6

 

Since the end of March, that race has gotten even tighter. The two teams projected to be at the top of a very tight division, the Red Sox and Rays, have been treading water so far, and those mediocre Aprils are baked into the final record. The closeness of the race now is almost shocking, as can be seen in the ZiPS mean projections for the five teams for the rest of the season (see table).

 

ZiPS projects four of the five teams in the AL East to have a mean projection of finishing at 83 wins, with Toronto only a couple of games back. Now, that doesn't mean that 84 wins will win the AL East; it just means that, according to the projections, no single team in the division is more likely to finish with more than 84 games than not. In other words, the AL East isn't likely to come down to who has the most talented team, but simply luck and which of the very evenly matched teams play above their expectations.

 

Historically close

In the million simulations that make up the ZiPS final projections, the eventual AL East winner ended with just 89 wins. That's an unusually low number for a division that features some of baseball's most talented and wealthiest teams. Not counting the years shortened due to strikes, for obvious reasons, 89 wins won the AL East outright on only three occasions during the divisional era: 1972, 1990 and 2000.

 

Among tight races, where does this possible one rank historically? Going through the million sims of the ZiPS-projected AL East final standings for 2014, the average standard deviation for the teams in the division is 3.27 wins. To compare this historically, I repeated this simple measure of spread for the top five teams in every divisional and league race going back to 1901 and found that, yes, this projects to be an unusually open race.

 

Of the 354 races looked at -- the strike-shortened 1981 and 1994 seasons are excluded, and 2014 projections for the other divisions are included -- the 2014 AL East projects to rank sixth among all races in tightness of the top five teams, and the tightest race of the wild-card era.

 

Smallest standard deviation among top five teams

1. 1988 AL East, 1.48

2. 1973 NL East, 1.92

3. 1964 NL, 2.00

4. 1967 AL, 3.21

5. 1915 Federal League, 3.24

6. 2014 AL East, 3.27 (projected)

7. 1987 AL West, 3.35

8. 1933 NL, 3.56

9. 2005 NL East, 3.81

10. 1940 AL 3.90

 

Not surprisingly, the most wide-open races by this methodology include some of the most storied races in baseball history. The 1988 AL East was a three-way battle between the Red Sox, Yankees and Tigers until the Red Sox built a five-game lead that they nearly blew in the final week. The 1973 Mets pulled out the pennant in a weak division after being in last place as late as Aug. 30 that year. The 1967 American League race is still known as the "Impossible Dream" year by Red Sox fans; it featured a final day of the season in which three teams had an opportunity to be the sole first-place team, and the race was decided only when Twins starter Dean Chance melted down in the sixth inning of the Twins-Red Sox game.

 

If early results are any indication, this year's AL East race could end up being an all-time classic. It's rare we see a true five-team race, but this is shaping up to be one of them.