Saturday, September 08, 2007

How I think the American League will finish

The New York Yankees are going to get into the playoffs with the AL Wildcard because the bottom three teams in the AL East are awful.

I did some computation and as of 4:10, Saturday September 8, the bottom 3 teams in the AL East have played 421 games and the bottom three teams in the AL Central have played 422 games. The winning percentage for the AL East teams is .391 and the winning percentage for the bottom three teams in the AL Central is .452.

What does this mean? It means that a good team in the AL East is going to get more wins. Playing against inferior competition means you will have more wins than other teams. Translation: the Yankees and the Red Sox have bloated wins totals.

This means that the New York Yankees can play 20+ consecutive games against teams with losing records, and climb the standings as a result. This means that a good team, like the Boston Red Sox can look like an awesome team because they are always playing awful teams.

As a Tigers fan I know my team has to gain 3 games on the Yankees if we want to get into the playoffs, but I look at the Yankee schedule and see lots of Baltimore and Toronto. The two teams with the highest payroll in the league (Boston and New York) play against the worst collection of losing teams in the league 19 times apiece.

The media, instead of crediting the horrible division that they play in, and the bloated payrolls of these two teams decides to focus on relief pitchers giving the teams a boost. Ha! That’s rich.

What is even worse, they ignore the best team in all of baseball-the Angels. Recently, they demolished the Yankees. They swept the Tigers. They are making work of the best division in the AL. I think the Angels are going to be in the World Series.

Here is how I think that the AL Playoff scene is going to work.

AL East: Boston
AL Central: Cleveland
AL West: Los Angeles
Wildcard: New York

Division Series:
Los Angeles vs. New York
Boston vs. Cleveland

Championship Series:
Boston vs. LA

Pennant Winner:
Los Angeles Angels