AL Division Strength 1994-Present

Sunday, May 11 2008 @ 11:00 AM EDT

Contributed by: Pepper Moffatt

In a follow-up to yesterday's post I decided to look at the strength of each AL division from 1994 (the first year of the 3-division setup) to present. Below the cut is the data.

I did the most basic thing I could think of - just looked at the Win/Loss% of the teams in each division. Since the W/L records of inter-division games will be .500 (by definition), this will act to move all the division records closer to each other - bad divisions will not look as bad as they were and strong divisions will be stronger than their winning% would indicate. But this at least gives us a guide to which divisions were stronger than which. The data is as follows:

Year AL East AL Central AL West

1994 .518 .533 .438

1995 .489 .498 .516

1996 .484 .516 .500

1997 .527 .470 .488

1998 .538 .465 .499

1999 .522 .457 .511

2000 .493 .506 .518

2001 .474 .481 .565

2002 .490 .453 .566

2003 .513 .457 .520

2004 .512 .475 .517

2005 .507 .496 .511

2006 .495 .520 .525

2007 .504 .499 .514

AVG02-07 .504 .483 .526

A few points:

In the 6-years of the Ricciardi regime, the AL East has played .504 baseball. That hardly seems like a "tough" division (particularly when compared to the AL West), but it is better than the Central's .483 clip.
The 1998 AL East was particularly rough, yet the Blue Jays managed to pull off 88 wins. Had they been in the Central, they almost certainly would have won it. So if Dave Till meant that the Jays would have won two division titles if they weren't in the East, he may in fact be correct if he meant the 1994-2007 period (and not just the Ricciardi regime). Since he didn't specify, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. :)

If we take the 42 divisions in this analysis and rank-order them based on winning percentage, we see that the Jays under Ricciardi have not had a single year where they have played in a particularly tough division:

Year	Division	Percentage	Rank
2002	AL West	.566	1
2001	AL West	.565	2
1998	AL East	.538	3
1994	AL Central	.533	4
1997	AL East	.527	5
2006	AL West	.525	6
1999	AL East	.522	7
2006	AL Central	.520	8
2003	AL West	.520	9
1994	AL East	.518	10
2000	AL West	.518	11
2004	AL West	.517	12
1996	AL Central	.516	13
1995	AL West	.516	14
2007	AL West	.514	15
2003	AL East	.513	16
2004	AL East	.512	17
1999	AL West	.511	18
2005	AL West	.511	19
2005	AL East	.507	20
2000	AL Central	.506	21
2007	AL East	.504	22
1996	AL West	.500	23
2007	AL Central	.499	24
1998	AL West	.499	25
1995	AL Central	.498	26
2005	AL Central	.496	27
2006	AL East	.495	28
2000	AL East	.493	29
2002	AL East	.490	30
1995	AL East	.489	31
1997	AL West	.488	32
1996	AL East	.484	33
2001	AL Central	.481	34
2004	AL Central	.475	35
2001	AL East	.474	36
1997	AL Central	.470	37
1998	AL Central	.465	38
1999	AL Central	.457	39
2003	AL Central	.457	40
2002	AL Central	.453	41
1994	AL West	.438	42

In 1994 all four AL West teams finished under .500 during a strike-shortened year. If we take out strike-years, then the 2003 AL Central was the 2nd worst division in American League 3-divisional history. The argument that the Jays should have been a playoff team in 2003 is basically saying that, had the Jays played in one of the worst divisions in history, they would have won 90-92 games.

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