No team with the name "Sox" in it will be playing baseball tonight, due to the impending arrival of Hurricane Earl in the area. That means Manny-Fenway Reunion 2010 Part Deux will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon, weather permitting, in a day-night double-header. Oh goody, another day game. Earl is clearly not a Red Sox fan.
Just how tough is the AL East? Put it this way, the Red Sox are the best third-place team in baseball, with a .567 winning percentage and, if they were in the AL West, they'd be in first place, ahead of the Rangers and their .564. If they were in the AL Central, they would be in second, but only a game out of first behind the .575 Twins.
Moving over to the NL, the Phillies have an identical winning percentage to the Red Sox. They sit in the wild-card position and are second in the NL East, 2 games out of first. The wild-card leaders for the AL, by comparison, are the .617 Rays. Divisions play a huge part in who makes the playoffs and who ends their season October 3. It's quite possible that a team with a worse record than the Red Sox will make the playoffs as a division winner. Even the creation of the wild card can't make up for the gap in competitiveness between the AL East and the AL West.
The divisions were created for geographic reasons and the schedule is intra-division loaded. Time zone differences and travel distance likely play a role in the unbalanced schedule. The biggest problem with the divisions as they stand now is that good teams (not just the Red Sox, as could be the case this year) may miss the playoffs due to being third place in a killer division. The fact that the Tampa Bay Rays, once they got the Devil out of their name, soared up the ladder from worst to first in one year, topping the decade's two powerhouses in the Red Sox and the Yankees, is a testament to how good that team really was. Now, with those high draft picks who have matured to become stars, the Rays are one of the league's powerhouses in their own right.
The Red Sox, had they remained healthy and had Beckett and Lackey performed closer to their capabilities and career norms, could have been a powerhouse this year as well. Unfortunately, there's not enough room for three teams from the same division in the current post-season structure, regardless of what their records are relative to teams in other divisions. Those who complain about the wild card rewarding mediocrity haven't taken a look at the the disparity in competition among the divisions. Some wild card teams would be in first place in another division.
So, is a division realignment by MLB in order? Should the Red Sox, Yankees, and Rays be split up so there's one in each division? That could give an unfair advantage to the team that gets to remain in the East, since they would have to travel a lot less to play teams within their own division. And what of the team that gets reassigned to the West, who has to fly cross-country for their intra-divisional away games? Talk about jet lag! No, that kind of realignment would be a big mess. Plus, the Rays' window of being a top team could be limited by both their star players becoming free agents and no longer having those top draft picks to fill in the gaps. In the meantime, a team like the Orioles could, with Buck Showalter at the helm and all the young talent they have, soar to the top in the near future, just like the Rays did in 2008. Leveling the playing field among the divisions is not an easy task with all the moving parts and the realities of geography and travel.
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