Division comparisons

I decided to compare each of the six divisions to see which of them was the strongest. I expected the AL East to be the strongest, since it has the Rays, the Red Sox, and the Yankees, and I wasn't disappointed. The rest of the standings were a little surprising, however. Here's the graph I came up with:


As you can see, the AL East leads by a comfortable margin, but a couple of surprises come out. First, what is the NL East doing so far down? The Phillies and the Mets have been in the top ten for the last couple of months. Of course, the Nationals do a lot to bring the average down, but aren't the other teams enough to hold things up? Turns out they aren't - the Braves are currently in 21st while the Marlins are in 17th.

The other surprise, I thought, was that the NL West is only barely in last place. We've known for a long time that the NL West is a weak division (Arizona leads it with an anemic record of 68-65), but shouldn't the AL West be better than it is? Aren't the Angels one of the league's best teams? They have 81 wins! While that's all true, they're only ranked 12th in the SPI standings. (Not good for your division if your first place team is only in 12th.) The other three teams, Oakland, Texas, and Seattle, are ranked 20th, 23rd, and 27th respectively. That does a lot to drag down one really good team. Meanwhile, the recent success of the Colorado Rockies (woo!) has brought the NL West up, though it has come at the expense of some of the other teams in the division.

Long story short, sometimes looking at the numbers in a slightly different way changes the picture.