Baseball's Toughest Division

Which division is baseball's toughest?

Well, if you listen to the media you'll no doubt respond that the AL Central is clearly the toughest division in baseball. Having heard that so often in the past couple months in the wake of the Tigers deal for Dontrelle Willi and Miguel Cabrera and the Johan Santana trade last week, I decided to take a look based on the actual performance of the divisions in intradivisional play as well interleague results stretching back to 1997. The end result is discussed this week in my column at Baseball Prospectus.

In the second half of the column I take a look at the simple projection system I created and wrote about several months ago. This time around I have it project into the future and show the top 2008 projections in terms of Normalized and Park Adjusted OPS. From there I take a look at the where the projections differ the most as well as the track record in graphical form of the projections for Magglio Ordonez, Alex Rodriguez, Andruw Jones, Torii Hunter, Gary Sheffield, and Ken Griffey Jr. Enjoy.

The Royals Roundtable

Garth Sears, author of Royal Ingenuity: Where Pine Tar and Powder Blue are Revered, was kind enough to invite me to share a few thoughts on the Royals in a new roundtable he started over at Baseball Think Factory. The topics range from Dayton Moore and free agency, to the futures of Jimmy Gobble and Mark Teahen. Some readers will notice that a few of my comments are now a bit dated with the recent signings of Jamie Walker, Randy Wolf, and the revelation of the $51.1M bid for Matsuzaka. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Also wanted to mention that my column this week takes a second look at the issue of first contacts wherein I reverse myself. Turns out I hadn't considered an excellent study by Dave Smith (you can find an older version online) - the presentation of which I saw at SABR 36 this summer in Seattle. When that's taken into consideration it appears hitters have the relative advantage the first time hitter and pitcher meet at the major league level (using 2000-2004 data). I also take a look at performance over the course of the first 15 confrontations between hitter and pitcher pairs.