Throughout the entire MLB season, the AL East has stood out as the strongest division. For a big part of the year, all five teams had winning records. Currently four out of the five teams have a winning record, and Baltimore sits at five games under .500.
More important, the race to win the division is more exciting this year because of the Tampa Bay Rays. Not only have the Rays competed with the traditional powerhouse out of Boston and New York, but they currently lead the division by two-and-a-half games.
There are three very strong teams playing for a maximum of two playoff spots, with Toronto trying to join the sprint to the finish.
For those of us that are anxious to see how this race plays out, I have calculated projected standings for the teams involved.
The methodology was actually rather simple. I only looked at Tampa Bay, Boston, New York, and Toronto because Baltimore is currently out of reach. It’s clearly possible that the Orioles could have a hot streak and make a run at the playoffs, but it would be impossible to project that sort of results.
For each team, I listed out all remaining games. I then calculated the probability for that team to win each game.
To do this, I took into account whether the game was at home or away, and then averaged the appropriate winning percentages for the two competing teams.
Here is an example for Tampa Bay’s next game at Seattle:
Seattle has won 40.7% of their home games this year. This means their opponents have won 59.3% of games at Seattle.
Tampa Bay has won 44.2% of their road games this year.
So essentially Seattle is giving teams, on average, a 59.3% winning percentage and Tampa Bay is taking, on average, a 44.2% winning percentage (since the game is in Seattle). I average these two numbers to come up with a compromised probability that Tampa Bay will win.
The average is a 51.8% chance that Tampa Bay will beat Seattle. Tampa Bay loses most of their games on the road, but since Seattle loses a lot at home, the Rays chances of winning is boosted.
Now I repeated this process for each team for each remaining game. I took the final win probabilities and took that as a fractional win for the team in question. So, from the example, Tampa Bay gets .518 wins for that one game against Seattle.
This is a common practice in statistical projections and actuarial work. If there are questions about the process and it’s validity I would be more than happy to answer them in the comments section.
After a fractional amount of wins is assigned for each team for each game, all I had to do was add these together to get the total wins and losses for the remaining games. The losses are just the compliment of the wins.
I added the records for teams to date to the projected records to get final standings for these four teams. I show both the record rounded to two decimal places and the record rounded to the nearest whole numbers for comparison.
1st Place: Tampa Bay Rays: 92.44 – 69.56 (92-70)
2nd Place: Boston Red Sox: 91.08 – 70.92 (91-71)
3rd Place: New York Yankees: 86.53 – 74.57 (87-75)
4th Place: Toronto Blue Jays: 81.86 – 80.14 (82-80)
As you can see, the spread of teams is very similar to what the standings look like today. This is very good news for the Rays. If these projections were to hold then the Rays would make the playoffs by winning the division and the Red Sox would have a good chance at the Wild Card.
It is important to remember that these projections are assuming that each team performs the same for the rest of the season as they have been for the season to date. What the projections really account for is the strength of schedule remaining along with the mix of home and away games.
The main interpretation of the projections I think is that the Red Sox have the most favorable remaining schedule. The Sox are currently 2.5 games back of the Rays, but the projections (assuming both teams perform as they have been) moves the Sox only 1 game back of the Rays at the end of the season.
This means the Rays have even less breathing room than they may think. It would only take a slight improvement for the Red Sox or a slight choke by the Rays for Boston to claim the division crown.
It is also clear that the Yankees and Blue Jays will need to improve their play in order to move up in the rankings. Either that or the teams above them must play worse.
As you can see, the final rankings are very close for all teams. And the Orioles still aren’t too far behind.
This race should be a great one to watch play out. As we near the end of the season, the teams are still separated by the slightest of margins. One significant winning streak could make the difference as to who makes the playoffs and who stays home.
