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March 31, 2016Where Does This ‘Dor Go?
March 31, 2016What is the toughest division in MLB? The AL East made that claim for years with many big-budget teams including the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox winning multiple World Series titles. The NL Central has a strong case with three top tier teams in the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, and Pittsburgh Pirates (despite the lackluster Cincinnati Reds and Milwaukee Brewers). However, the best division in MLB might well end up being the AL Central. Within the division lies the defending World Series champions and four other ballclubs who look capable of knocking the Kansas City Royals off their perch as noted in the WFNY AL Central preview.
SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score described the parity in the division while setting expectations for 2016. The entire article is worth a read as they dig into the details, but here is the quick synopsis on each team as they see it.
The Kansas City Royals are still the divisions top until proven otherwise, and it is due to a strategy that few other teams in baseball partake in:
Their entire strategy revolves around their home ballpark; its spacious confines place a premium on defense as well as gap power and contact.
The Minnesota Twins are a team relying on their young pipeline of potential stars to keep moving forward:
It’s hard to see the Twins making a deep run into the playoffs without real contributions from their pair of 22-year-old wünderkinds, Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano…
In 2015, the Twins had five players in the Baseball America Top 100 Prospects list and ranked eighth in WARP from those players, all of which came from Buxton and Sano.
No surprises about the Cleveland Indians we all know and love.
The starting pitching will almost undoubtedly be there for Cleveland, but whether the rotation is a historically good fun fact or the engine of a playoff team will depend on the position players being consistently effective in a way that didn’t happen last year.
The Chicago White Sox desperately attempted to rebuild their entire lineup (six new regular players) to complement their good rotation.
That’s almost a completely new lineup; if that configuration clicks, the White Sox could be fearsome with Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, and Carlos Rodon leading the rotation.
A potshot at the Detroit Tigers will always be appreciated on these pages (even if they then go on to explain why it might not be true this year).
The Tigers having a bad bullpen is like the Giants winning the World Series in even years and the Orioles having injured pitching prospects. It just happens and that’s a fact that the universe has designated as law.
So, the question remains about which of these teams will be healthy, have players fufill their potential and knock the Royals off the mountain. Or, if the Royals can continue to threaten payback pitches and boast about their mental superiority to SI’s Tom Verducci without retribution in the standings. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
BODE! Couple more days. KC always starts fast. We need to make sure we don’t get owned by anyone in division like we have in the past.
The 2016 AL Central defies handicapping. The only thing I can say is that any team except Minnesota can win the thing and any team except KC can finish in last place. And I’m not even sure about the latter, given their lackluster starting pitching.