Man, that looks so fun I kinda wish I had thought to do it first.

Just take a sec and think about the fact that you just got paid to do this.

Lucky bastard.

Peter Gammons and ESPN's Baseball Tonight are quickly putting together an AL East montage reminding us that no other baseball division matters to America as much as the AL East. Vlad who? That Francisco saves guy is okay but doesn't compare to Papplebon. Besides, Los Angeles Angels of Aneheim is too confusing - you can't even find that on a map. Everyone knows where Boston is. Never heard of a Aneheim tea party you know. I must now return to my regular YES network programming.

The first thing I looked at when I read this column (which was way-cool!) was the net-change column. The first thing that I noticed was that the AL had a cumulative +21 change. That struck me as odd, until I looked at the NL, which had a cumulative -15 change. This struck me as even more odd, for two reasons. First, does this indicate that the NL is stronger, and benefited by playing the AL? Second, shouldn't the numbers net out to zero?

I think it doesn't need to zero out because not everyone plays the same number of games within and outside their division. A.L. West teams play about 57 games each within the division and 105 outside of it. NL Central teams play about 81 division games and 81 outside. So the records are adjusting by different amounts.

Also, interleague play ought to conspire against a zero sum in each league.

They kicked some butt when I saw them play against the Phils this year. I was kind of bummed when I first got the tickets, because I thought I was going to see the Dodgers I figured it would have been better to see NL v NL. Boy I was wrong. The Angels played great baseball. They really are the cream of the crop this year.

I think I may have come up with a better method for determining how much the Angels benefited from beating up on the AL West. It's unfair to assume that, if strength of schedule was similar across the league, that the Angels would have performed less well against teams in their own division. Which is what you are doing, essentially. Instead, we should determine how well the angels would do if the teams in their division made up an equal proportion as all other teams.

I tried this method out. First, I removed the 18 interleague games. I just didn't want to deal with them. The Angels played 57 games against their division and 87 against other AL teams. If they played all AL teams equally, they would play 33 games against division teams and 111 against other AL teams for a total of 144 games in the AL. The Angels went .632 against their division, so if they had only played 33 games they would have been about 21-12. The Angels went .621 against other teams in the AL, so if the had played 111 games against them, they would have gone 69-42. So, add the 21 games in the division and the 69 games in the rest of the AL and the 10 games the Angels won in interleague play and you get a projected victory total for the Angels, with a balanced schedule, of... wait for it... 100 games.

I haven't done the same for all teams. I leave that open for other enterprising individuals. If anything, the Angels suffered a bit from having a very difficult interleague schedule against a tough NL East division.

That was really cool. Very interesting stuff.

What do the numbers look like over the last 20 years???

kidding...

King, in your fourth paragraph you've transposed the positions of the .632 and .610 winning percentages, which makes them appear to contradict your argument. Might want to fix it.

King, in your fourth paragraph you've transposed the positions of the .632 and .610 winning percentages, which makes them appear to contradict your argument. Might want to fix it.

I don't think the numbers are transposed. It looks correct to me.

right?

This is the real poop! Thanks, King. (That is what Jim Thorpe supposedly said to the King of Sweden.)

"And they had to play the supposedly great Red Sox, which the Red Sox didn't have to do." (Our King wrote this.)

This is a wise idea, paradoxical, a step into meta-statistics, beyond sports into the cosmos. Those who have eyes to read, read.

Why not?

The Angels were ever-so-slightly better against the A.L. West (.632) than they were against everyone else (.610). That difference would translate to three wins over a whole season. Over the 57 games the Angels played vs. the West, it's about one win. So if they'd played against the West the way they'd played against everyone else, they'd have ended up with 99 wins instead of 100.

My argument was that the Angels didn't get fat by playing the West. By this measure, they got a one-win boost. That's not getting fat. The Diamondbacks getting a 14-game boost from the N.L. West, that's getting fat.

and this is quite refreshing in comparison to sportswriters who refuse to use baseball-reference to look up very basic information.

It's more fun to think that, based on their interleague record, if the Royals just got to play the National League this year they would have won 117 games..