Does it seem ridiculous to anyone else how absurd the scheduling format is to allow for this sort of variance?

Jeremy,

Interesting stuff. Quick note: the pitcher list has the same potential flaw as the hitter list: Jon Lester is more likely to throw to batters who also face the Boston bullpen, and other Boston starters, other pitchers in the AL east, and other pitchers in the AL. So each pitcher's score will in part reflect the quality of his peers weighted by a measure of proximity. It becomes a nasty chicken and egg problem.

I'm not so sure that the Angels have been "lucky" in scoring and preventing runs this year. As I've counseled before, maybe the sabermetric community needs to dig a bit deeper into the whys and wherefores of the Angels outperforming their Pythag record rather consistently for a number of years now before ascribing it to luck. Agree or disagree with the principle but Mike Scioscia tends to favor one-run strategies, which perhaps results in more victories with small margins and more losses with large margins than the average team.

As for the Angels starting pitching, I believe the Halos lead the league, if not the majors, in ERA since Scott Kazmir joined the team last month -- and this stretch of games includes series with the Yankees and Red Sox as well as a makeup game in New York. If there is a better fivesome (Lackey, Kazmir, Weaver, Saunders, and Santana) as we head into postseason, I either haven't seen it or the advantage would be minor. I realize that you usually don't need five starting pitchers in the postseason but that only gives me hope that the team's shaky bullpen is likely to be strengthened by the addition of one of the starters come October.

Daniel, I think that creating divisions is necessary, but I would agree that the difference between the leagues creates an unfair balance.

Chris, good point. I would think that hitter quality of opposition would be a more biased list, but they may well be equally skewed.

Rich, the two facts I brought up were the Angels extraordinarily high BABIP as a team and success with runners on as compared to no men on. Your argument seems to be that the Angels have the skill to out play their Pythag, which may well be true, but I'm not so sure that they have the skill to outscore their batting line. Even if they've been playing for one run, they've been getting two. Something's going on.

I admire your confidence in the Angels staff, but again, I believe some of them have deflated ERAs for reasons outside of their control. Either that or Joe Saunders is the anti Javy Vazquez.

"Does it seem ridiculous to anyone else how absurd the scheduling format is to allow for this sort of variance?"

Not really. For most of major league history, you've had different leagues, with one league older than the other, and teams in the different leagues would meet only for one end of season series. For the past fifteen years there have been a few more interleague series.

I don't see why you would want to get rid of this history just to make it easier to compare players on the Yankees and the Padres. Why don't you have all teams play in ballparks with the same dimensions, on the same latitude, while you are at it?

There is a stronger argument with putting more games in the divisions, which in current form only date back fifteen years, and its not clear how much you should treat them as mini-leagues. But again you have the history. The Yankees-Red Sox-Orioles (Browns); Indians-Tigers; White Sox-Twins (Senators)-As; Cubs-Cardinals-Reds; and Dodgers-Giants combinations have been playing each other for 109 years. Fans of these teams simply want to see more games against their rivals than against expansion teams on the opposite side of the country, and analysts just have to adjust. That's part of the fun.

Ed, I think daniel was referring to the "unbalanced schedule", not the difference in leagues. I think as long as people understand that you can't compare AL and NL records like apples to apples, we're all fine with the different leagues.

However, the problem is with the unbalanced schedules. AL teams compete with each other over the wild card as if their records should be comparable, but because schedules are unbalanced in favor of far more games within divisions (and interleague play cut out even more out of division games) teams in better divisions are very much handicapped. Of course, the better divisions tend to be the ones with more money, so this in a way balances things out (except for teams like the Rays), so maybe it isn't unfair.

By the way, this is just another reason why Adam Wainwright is highly overrated this year (along with his home/away splits). And Jon Lester is a beast.

OK, I just checked Wikipedia's list of American League Wild Card winners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AL_Wildcard_winners). Ten out of the fourteen AL wildcards came from the American League East, with the Red Sox "earning" the distinction six times and the Yankees three times. This year will be the seventh time for the Red Sox.

The other four teams were the 2000 Mariners, the 2001 As, the 2002 Angels, and the 2006 Tigers. These teams finished 6, 20, 6, and 8 games ahead of the second place AL East winner those years (in the first three cases, the Red Sox, as it happens).

What could be happening is that the dominance of the AL East in the Wild Card era is really a story of just two teams, the Red Sox and the Yankees. Most years these teams have been good enough to have the best and second best record in the league. Or AL East teams are good enough to overcome the disadvantage of being in the AL East. But for practical purposes, the AL wild cards have come two thirds of the time from the toughest AL division.

In the National League, four Wild Card winners have come from the East, five from the Central, and five from the West. A 4-5-5 breakdown instead of the 10-1-3 breakdown the American League, which is quite a contrast.

I always get ticked at these kind of comps. Yes, I'm a Cards fan so you know where I'm coming from. The Cards can't help that the rest of the division is poor. Fact is, they've done exactly what they should do, beat the tar out of the rest of the division.

As for how the Cards, or the other NL leaders would do against the vaunted AL East? Heck if I know, but I doubt they'd struggle to see a .500 record as suggested. I'd venture to say that the Cards would do quite well, the Phillies too.

Smoltz? Are we seeing the 1996 version? No, but fact is, Boston gave up on him too soon. Boston failed to realize that Smoltz was tipping pitches, something it took the Cards all of one bullpen session to notice. Smoltz has since settled into what I think most of us expected, a guy who at this stage of his career, will go out there and pitch 5-6 decent innings, giving your team a chance to win.

Wainwright? Wait for the playoffs and see if you call him overrated. Ok, I'm done venting now, let's just get to the playoffs already so we can find out who will have bragging rights.

Seems to me the Angels can present 4 solidly above-average starters for the playoffs, whereas the other AL teams have more top-heavy rotations:

Beckett/Lester/Buccholtz/DiceK
Sabathia/Pettitte/Burnett/Chamberlain or Gaudin (eek)
Verlander/Jackson/Porcello/Robertson

I'd argue that the best pitchers on the other teams (Verlander, Beckett or Lester, Sabathia) > Lackey. But the Angels make it up later. Thus, the Angels biggest worry should probably be the 1st round, no?

Lackey-Beckett
Kazmir-Lester
Weaver-Buccholtz (or maybe Matsuzaka?)

I've give Beckett a slight edge over Lackey, Lester an edge over Kazmir and Weaver an edge over Red Sox 3rd starter. Then it's back to Lackey-Beckett.

Of course, all this is subject to the basic truth that the playoffs are a crap shoot. Great pitchers can have bad games, lousy ones can pitch well (Jeff Weaver a few years back. Man that pissed me off, as a Yankees fan), etc.