Charting the pennant races with BABS

I write this article every few years because it’s the thing baseball writers are supposed to do. But it’s an exercise that has a weak foundation in reality and thus, has little merit other than for us to mock in October. Actually, you’ll forget I wrote this in about a week.

The exercise is pointless because it assumes that everything we know now will remain as a fixed reality for six months. It assumes no injuries, no role changes, and no trades. It assumes that struggling teams won’t do something to address their deficiencies and contending teams won’t run into a streak of bad luck in September. It assumes that all our highly touted rookies will hit the ground running and none of our established veterans will go splat.

It assumes a perfect world, where all our projections achieve 100 percent accuracy. Even sitting here with full knowledge that 70 percent is the best we can possibly expect, we ignore that a 30 percent error bar immediately renders the following predictions moot the moment you read them.

So here they are, carefully constructed by accumulating the total value of each team’s BABS assets, minus the penalty from each team’s total liabilities.

AMERICAN
WEST	CENTRAL	EAST
HOU	CLE	NYY
LAA	MIN	*BOS
OAK	CHW	*TAM
SEA	KC	TOR
TEX	DET	BAL
NATIONAL
WEST	CENTRAL	EAST
LAD	STL	PHI
*COL	*MIL	WAS
SD	CHC	NYM
ARI	CIN	ATL
SF	PIT	MIA

Some observations (that will be wrong):

There is a good amount of parity in the National League. The AL teams will separate themselves into haves and have-nots pretty quickly.

The Indians win the AL Central, but there are five other teams that could have a better record, including the Angels.

The best races? In the AL, a Yankees-Red Sox battle would be no surprise. The Rays and Angels could take it down to the wire for the second wild card spot. In the NL, the Cards and Brewers will battle for the Central crown, the loser taking the first wild card. The other wild card will go one of four closely rated teams: Rockies, Cubs, Nats and Padres.

So yes, BABS thinks this year’s surprise teams will be the Angels and Padres.

When the Mets made all their off-season moves, this fan was encouraged that they were doing something. However, at the time, I did note that BABS was not overly impressed with the incoming players. So, as much as I was hoping for a return to the post-season, BABS thinks the Mets will spend the summer barely holding off the Braves for 3rd place.

If the world perfectly reflected BABS’ ratings, October would look like this:

• Astros over Yankees for the AL title.
• Phillies over Cardinals for the NL title.
• Astros win the World Series.

Actually, any of the Astros, Yankees or Red Sox would win the Series against any team the NL would send.

And you can bet the rent on none of it.