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.

Winning the West

Nice recap by Tracy Ringolsby on how the NL West rosters have changed (or not changed with re-signings) as a result of the activity during or before the Winter Meetings. Clearly, the Dodgers are in the driver's seat at this point with the addition of two starting pitchers and re-signing Takashi Saito. Of course, they'll have to contend with lots of outs in the first inning (Grady Little said on MLB.com that Pierre would hit in the first inning batting either first or second) with the addition of Juan Pierre. Nomar Garciapara will continue to be an injury risk as well. The loss of Jason Schmidt and Moises Alou loom large in San Francisco but the addition of Greg Maddux should be an excellent one for the Padres.