AL EastI don’t mean to steal my BSL colleague Gary Armida‘s thunder with this article, seeing as how he puts out a terrific AL East writeup every week. However, we’re just about a quarter of the way through the season, just beginning the point in summer when the baseball season seems to stretch on forever, and it’s hot and don’t you just want to know who wins? Well good news, everyone! I’ve climbed to the top of the quarter post and my eyesight is just good enough to make out some figures on the horizon – I’ll tell you who is where after the next 107-or-so games.

Share your predictions for the AL East on the BSL Forums.

But first, let’s start with where we are right now.

The Blue Jays (seriously?) are on an absolute tear, Boston followed up an awesome 10-game losing streak with an awful 7-game winning streak, Tampa Bay is struggling to stay relevant, New York is holding its own, but like the Orioles, aren’t really stringing together many wins.

I’ll tell you what happens to each team, in the order they’re in now, and then I’ll spoil the rest of the season by telling you where they are in October.

Toronto Blue Jays

Is this real life? The Toronto Blue Jays, winners of 74 games in 2013, and nearly halfway to that point in early June, have held on to compete for a playoff spot. Predictably, Mark Buehrle has cooled off from his 10-1 start that saw him carrying an ERA of 2.10 and an FIP of 3.06, but he’s still having one of the best seasons of his career. The line drives he gives up will start coming back to hurt him eventually, but he’s effective enough at 35 to maintain an ERA in the low 3s. On this team, that’s good enough to get him to 18 wins, but not to a new career high of 20. After weathering a rash of home runs against them for a change – especially against Buehrle, who is currently giving up a home run on just 1.6% of fly balls – the Blue Jays have come back to earth in a very real way.

Edwin+Encarnacion+Boston+Red+Sox+v+Toronto+tDwilA-QGKxlEdwin Encarnacion, a household name for years in fantasy baseball households, will further cement his status as a stud power hitter and get noticed by casual fans of the game for yet another 40+ homer season. It won’t hurt that he participates in, and wins, the Home Run Derby.

The Blue Jays are still in contention for a playoff spot, but their situation is going to be similar to the Orioles’ in 2013: they’ll control their destiny for a bit but need to win at an incredible clip to give themselves a playoff berth. Instead, they’ll spend the last few weeks of the season needing things to break their way to add another game to the calendar. Still, this is not a team I’d want to be facing in a single-elimination contest.

New York Yankees

ny_u_masahiro-tanaka_mb_1296x729Not long ago on BSL Radio, I said that the Yankees looked like the team to beat in the AL East. I can make out a blurry grey figure at the finish line now, and I can say that I was right. Despite early injuries to Sabathia and Piñeda, this Yankees team has ridden the K train of Masahiro Tanaka and the unlikely consistent contributions of Yangervis Solarte to contend for yet another AL East title. This team could seemingly field beer league softball players and nursing home residents and still put a winning team out there every night. It’s horrifying.

The Yankees were treading water for much of the summer, waiting for Sabathia’s return from stem cell treatment to put another recognizable name into the rotation and Michael Pineda’s shoulder to allow him back onto the field. They both get there around the All Star Break, but Pineda struggles to make every start for the rest of 2014. Such is the life of a pitcher returning from labrum surgery and a few strained shoulders. For fans of the game, it’s a bit of a shame, since Pineda is a star when he’s healthy.

This team is putting itself in position for a playoff spot, and ESPN is writing hundreds of headlines for Derek Jeter’s exit from baseball being stalled until after a ticker tape parade. To hear Rick Reilly tell it, Jeter will stand on top of a literal mountain as the clouds part and he is ascended into baseball heaven, being made a baseball god in much the same way that Hercules was allowed to return to Olympus after his time on Earth. You’ll be happy to know that, despite Buck’s history as a Yankee co-captain to Jeter, the Orioles’ parting gift is wonderfully lame. Like, gift card to Applebee’s lame.

Baltimore Orioles

If this team could just put it all together for a few weeks at a time, the year might have ended differently. It wasn’t a bad season, but it definitely wasn’t what fans had hoped for when Cruz and Jimenez were brought on board. On paper, this was the best team in the AL East. Between injuries and aggressive bats with not much else to do besides hit home runs, the Orioles suffered a number of Could’ve Should’ve Losses. During the season, the pitching gets a little worse and the bats get a little better, but this remains a risk/reward team. When they’re great, they can beat anyone. The trouble is making sure the bats and arms are great at the same time.

(August 8, 2013 - Source: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images North America)

(August 8, 2013 – Source: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images North America)

Chris Tillman continued to dominate through the majority of his starts, with the occasional implosion every few weeks. The fans want him to be an ace, but in a great rotation, he’s really a very good #2 or #3, if you’re the Tigers. Jimenez… did not inspire optimism. Erratic and wild, Jimenez matched nearly every great start with a poor one. Now, the results didn’t always show it – he often went deep into games and left the game winning or keeping the bats within striking distance, but he looked like a regular Philippe Petit doing it. To the surprise of many, the rotation stays relatively stable until Gausman is injected, to mixed results. The ability is there, but it’s not always easy for the young pitcher to achieve the outcomes. His marginal helpfulness fuels the debate: would it have been better to keep him learning in the minors while Gonzalez was providing a similar performance for the Orioles? Or does he need Major League experience to take the next step? Still, 2014 leaves fans with hope for Gausman’s future. Through my binoculars, I can see that he ends up being the team’s next Matt Wieters – very good, but never lives up to expectations.

Speaking of Matt Wieters: during his best offensive season ever, Wieters’ elbow issues linger. He can bat just fine, especially from the left side of the plate, but he DHs quite a bit and sits occasionally against lefties. His trade value is diminished as teams fear that they’d be taking on a Tommy John surgery in the near future, and Wieters sticks around to play another year in Baltimore.

Technically, the Orioles are in the playoff hunt, but that’s only because they haven’t been mathematically eliminated from the second wild card. Like the Blue Jays, things will have to break right for this team to even think about pushing their vacations back a few weeks. After two great seasons, the Orioles are starting to look like the team that analysts have expected them to be. They’re not a pumpkin, but they’re not a beautiful carriage either. They’re a mid-2000s Toyota Corolla. It’s good, but nobody’s really sure if that’s a great thing to be.

Boston Red Sox

Look, the Red Sox got lucky in 2013. They were less so in 2014, but their finish this season has a lot of Bahston fans looking forward to the next few years. The team punted on retaining free agents like Jacoby Ellsbury, who was undoubtedly still very effective, and opted to bring in nearly all of the players marked to be the future of this team. Results were encouraging, but not outstanding.

David Ortiz continues to be a bright spot for a middling Red Sox team that’s stuck between older players that would fit well into a contender and young players that the team continues its future. It’s a season of streaks for this team from New England, as the young players occasionally put it together for long stretches and make this group look like a wild card contender, only for the wheels to come off as they run into the problems that rookies regularly face. 

The Red Sox aren’t in contention for a playoff spot, even though ESPN would have you believe otherwise. When this team gets hot, it wins in bunches and appears primed to surge to the top of the winnable AL East. Then it gets cold, and plummets again. When they’re hot, they’re the popular dark horse to take a wild card spot and ride it deep into October. When they’re cold, a new steam of Twitter jokes pops up.

Tampa Bay Rays

What could have been. The Rays’ rash of early pitching injuries doomed this team from the start. Even David Price’s excellence isn’t as excellent as usual, and the rest of the team is just not good enough to scrape by. The bullpen, usually a bright spot of smart investment on this team, fails to live up to the lofty expectations that Joe Maddon and Andrew Friedman have established. I guess that the buy low, sell high strategy for most relievers wasn’t going to work out every time.

Wil Meyers’ disappointing start to the season recovers some, but most Tampa Bay fans will be happy to write it off as Murphy’s Law and start with a fresh slate – and some arms – in 2015. It’s just a down year for everyone, Evan Longoria and Ben Zobrist included.

You can probably see it from the base of the quarter post, but the Rays aren’t contending for a playoff spot this year.

The Finish Line

As the teams all reach game 162, they cross the finish line in this order:

  1. New York Yankees
  2. Toronto Blue Jays/Baltimore Orioles
  3. Baltimore Orioles/Toronto Blue Jays
  4. Boston Red Sox
  5. Tampa Bay Rays

It’s tough to call it for the Blue Jays and Orioles, and I’ll need to get a pair of binoculars and 5 minutes of instant replay to call that one from here. Either way, both have eyes on the second wild card spot, and I can’t see the AL West from here, so I can’t say if either of them get it.

Patrick Dougherty
Patrick Dougherty

Patrick was the co-founder of Observational Studies, a blog which focused on the analysis and economics of professional sports. The native of Carroll County graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Loyola University Maryland. Patrick works at a regional economic development and marketing firm in Baltimore, and in his free time plays lacrosse.

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