King Kaufman's Sports Daily
American League preview. Sorry Blue Jays: Yankees and Red Sox again. Plus: Indians to win it all.
Editor's note: Read the National League preview.
Read more: Sports, Baseball, Major League Baseball, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB
April 2, 2008 | We looked at the National League Tuesday so, as New York Mets fans close in on me with torches and pitchforks, we turn to the junior circuit.
For the first time, this column is changing its west-to-east format so as not to bury the lead, which is that the Toronto Blue Jays will finish third again.
Actually, I'm picking them to finish fourth, but that's not really the lead. The lead is that the Blue Jays and, especially, their fans should shut up about the glass ceiling of the American League East, the idea that it's just about impossible for the Jays to finish higher than third because the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are 800-pound gorillas.
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East Division
2007 finish: Boston, New York (wild card), Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa Bay
The fans complain about it more than the team does. If I had a dollar for every Blue Jays fan who's written me to complain about the Jays being consigned to third, well, maybe they should be Canadian dollars, but there'd be a lot of them.
But here's general manager J.P. Ricciardi in Canada's National Post a year ago, talking in a fairly typical way about payroll disparities:
"It's the reality of the division. I think the one thing when I came here [five seasons ago], I knew how good they were, but I didn't know how hard it would be playing them all the time, and going against them from a financial standpoint."
The Blue Jays and their fans have said this kind of thing so much that it's become accepted as fact. Poor Blue Jays, they can't win the East because the Yankees and Red Sox are so rich and always so good.
What I'd like to know is when, exactly, have the Blue Jays been good enough to win the East if only the Axis of Evil weren't in it?
The American League went to the current unbalanced schedule, with division rivals playing each other more often than they play teams in the other division, in 2001. So every year since then the Blue Jays have had to play the Yankees and Red Sox 18 or 19 times each.
And they've struggled against them. The Blue Jays have lost all seven of those season series against New York, piling up a 55-75 record against the Yankees over that time. The Jays have done better lately against Boston, splitting in 2007 and winning the season series the two years before that. But from 2001-04, the Red Sox won the series every year. Over the seven years, Toronto is 59-72 against the Sox.
And you know what all that losing to the Yankees and Red Sox has prevented the Blue Jays from doing? Nothing. They never would have made the playoffs anyway.