AL East lays waste to opponents
BALTIMORE — As Danny Couloumbe packed his bags and prepared to join the Baltimore Orioles after they purchased his contract from the Minnesota Twins just before Opening Day, his now former teammate Emilio Pagan dispensed some last-minute words of wisdom.
“When I got traded here,” Couloumbe said Monday, recounting his conversation with the former Tampa Bay Ray, “Emilio Pagan was like ‘You ready for the AL Beast?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? He said, ‘Just wait. It’s a gantlet.’
“And he said, you’re lucky there’s less (divisional) games this year.”
That good fortune has been bad news for the rest of Major League Baseball.
The league’s decision to cut the number of intradivisional games from 19 to 13 per opponent will offer relief for a division long dominated by the big-revenue New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. This year, the East rolls five deep, thanks to the Toronto Blue Jays aiming to exploit the prime years of stars Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, and the Rays and Orioles toting the best records in the AL as both near a possible apex in their buildups. Instead, the AL East is operating a virtual slaughterhouse.
AL East teams are 85-39 (a .686 winning percentage) against out-of-division opponents, and all five clubs are better than .500; no division in major league history ever finished the year with every team above water.
Yeah, yeah, it’s not yet Mother’s Day, the sample size is still taking shape and nearly five months remain. Yet that record encompasses more than 120 games, and there’s evidence both anecdotal and otherwise suggesting this unfair fight may not even out:
The Rays’ 29-7 start is the best in club history h and matched by just five teams since 1901. They are out-homering opponents 73-23 and ace Shane McClanahan is now 7-0 — two more wins than any big league starter — with a 1.76 ERA after throwing six shutout innings in a 3-0 win against the Orioles on Monday.
“We’re good at staying in the moment,” says McClanahan, who has struck out 58 in 46 innings this season. “It’s, ‘All right, what do I have to do right now to help this team win,’ myself included. If something happens, it doesn’t matter. Respond.
“You know what? Move on. And that’s one thing I see with this team – at bat after at bat, play after play, they’re in the moment.”
Baltimore is 22-13, the third-best record in h baseball. Perhaps more significantly, they are 70-50 since last July 1, a more representative sample that this youth movement is paying dividends, now.
The Red Sox started 5-8 but have climbed h out of the cellar by winning 16 of 23, claiming series victories over first-place Minnesota and Milwaukee and their first four-game sweep of the Blue Jays since 2002.
The East is where cute stories go to die, h such as a Pittsburgh Pirates club that started 20-9 — only to lose six consecutive games to the Rays and Blue Jays by a combined 37-7.
Not for the faint of heart.
“Every single team, they’re just loaded,” says Rays right-hander Zach Eflin, whose Phillies team faced similar uphill battles in the NL East. “Even the Orioles are loaded with young talent and hungry guys that are trying to get better every day.
“Every team’s winning. It’s going to be a dogfight throughout the entire AL East.”
And a significant competitive imbalance for everyone else.
No easy games
The track record does not lie: No team from the AL or NL Central has advanced to the AL or NL championship series since 2016, when the Cubs and Cleveland met for the World Series. Since then, the coastal elites have dominated, with every pennant winner coming from an
East or West division, where budgets are bigger — as is the motivation to win.
That trend was exacerbated when the Cubs adopted the stance of a small-market team as their championship core dissolved. Now, with $177 million shortstop Dansby Swanson as the centerpiece, the Cubs are trending up again, even if only .500 for the moment.
Now, though, competing means playing roughly a dozen fewer games against division rivals who are in the throes of a rebuild or aiming to win at far less than any cost.
Says Couloumbe: “Nothing against these (teams), but there’s a lot of divisions that have one or two teams where you’re probably going to win the series. There’s none of that here. It’s definitely different than playing in the AL Central.”
And good luck to Central clubs jockeying for a wild card spot.
In the first year of MLB’s expanded playoffs, the middle of the country was shut out entirely: The Blue Jays and Rays snagged AL wild-card berths out of the East, with the Seattle Mariners qualifying for the third; Philadelphia, the New York Mets and San Diego filled the NL field.
This year looks no different.
‘Absolutely an advantage for us’
While admittedly premature, FanGraphs’ playoff probabilities give the second-place Guardians (25.4%) and Cubs (25.1%) extremely long shots to claim a playoff berth from the AL or NL Central. Perhaps more telling, the AL Central is 50-81 in non-divisional games, the NL Central 64-72.
And against the AL East? It’s a bit like a Sun Belt football team trying to win a nonconference game in the SEC.
Come October, a college hoops analogy might be more apropos for a quintet of winning ballclubs welcoming regular-season relief.
“It’s absolutely an advantage for us, not having to play (19) games against every single team,” says Couloumbe. “I think it helps us playing each division because you’re battletested.
“You think of teams like Gonzaga, they might struggle in the tournament because they’re not battle-tested. When every team in your division knows they have a chance to win the World Series, they keep adding. No team is rebuilding or resetting.”
And the rest of the league has experienced that the hard way.