MLB’s schedule change makes it easier for the AL East to dominate

Six months after that NFC East was the best division in footballthe American League The East preceded it MLB. Neither team will hit .500 Friday morning/early afternoon, and the top-five clubs are a combined 105-56 against non-division opponents. THE Tampa Bay Rays (37-15) and Baltimore Orioles (33-17) leads the streak, and the Rays have more Ws outside the AL East (24) than 12 teams combined.

At least sports fans outside of the Northeast Corridor were able to poke a hole in the NFC East’s success when Richie from Queens went on an extremely East Coast-biased rant. Brian Daboll at Buffalo Wild Wings because there’s no real argument to get him to keep his own baseball love interests.

Tampa and Baltimore produced differentials of +114 and +45, respectively. THE New York Yankees also has 30 wins and despite the Boston Red Sox and the Toronto Blue Jays are just a combined three games over .500their run differential is in the green and they have the fifth- and 10th-highest scoring offenses in baseball, respectively.

The pitching leaves something to be desired, and that’s probably what you should be leading up to when trying to get Johnny to stop yelling “27 bells!” The Rays and Yankees are the no. 5-6 in staff ERA, the Jays and O’s are Nos. 11-12. (The Sox are 25th, if you’re wondering why they’re not better.)

While this is standard operating procedure for the AL East for the most part, 2023 is especially stuck, and the other AL teams looking to get in via the Wild Card will have to keep up a pretty strenuous pace. The hope, if any, that the Yankees, Sox, Rays, O’s and Jays all kick the crap out of each other and keep the big three bids within reach.

The AL East is tied 47-47, but…

Because MLB changed the schedule between the leagues, the clubs play only 52 games within the division instead of 76. This represents a decrease of 15 percent, from approximately 47 percent to 32 percent. That’s a huge difference, and Tampa, Baltimore, Toronto and New York are taking advantage of it. (They are the no. 1-4 in non-division wins.)

You’d think that widening the opposition would theoretically give teams chasing the Orioles and Yankees more opportunities to gain ground in the head-to-head matchup, but that’s not the case due to the growth of interleague play. There are now 46 crossovers per season, up from 20, for a total of 98 games against the division and the opposing league. After each schedule change, the number of times an AL or NL team played a non-division league opponent dropped from 66 to 64.

I know I’m throwing out a lot of numbers here, but this is a baseball story, so you have to get used to it – or at least prepare for it. That being said, let me try to put this in a less confusing way.

For example, the Yankees will play non-AL East members of the American League 64 times instead of 66. This difference is negligible compared to the idea that fewer people class games mean more chances for wild card teams to control their own destiny.

In fact, the AL East is getting more games against opponents that aren’t in the AL East, which is a net positive gain for them. They are 37-23 against the NL as a group, with the Orioles, Yankees and Jays barely touching the interleague schedule. (Baltimore has 38 games remaining in the NL, New York 37 and Toronto 35.)

Good luck to the clubs in the AL Wild Card race

This was not the year Shohei Ohtani will be in a contract season. The Los Angeles Angels are currently one game behind defending champion Houston, 2.5 ahead of Boston and Seattle. We’ll see how this goes. This is Y1st ear of this new format, but I think the good teams will have an easier time picking up wins and increasing their playoff advantage.

Fans in the Pacific Northwest can take solace in the fact that the Mariners ended last year’s playoff drought because MLB could be even stronger..

It took over 700 words to get my point across, but it’s as simple as swapping eight-nine streaks against the Rays, O’s, Yankees, Sox, or Jays for eight-nine streaks against a league currently under 30 wins holding team. than the AL East alone.