The AL East has lost some of its shine over the past couple years, but it’s still a competitive division – just one that happens to have a lot of question marks. Here’s five of them.
Can the Red Sox pitch well enough to win the East?
The Red Sox had one of the most adored offseasons of any major league club following a disastrous 2014. But while the signings of Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, and international free agent Rusney Castillo are net positives for the ballclub at the plate, the Sox’ approach to fixing the rotation woes caused by the departures of Jon Lester and John Lackey, and the organization’s clear lack of faith in prospects like Anthony Ranuado and Rubby de la Rosa, was to trade for or sign every moderately-experienced, technically-qualified fourth or fifth starter. That’s an approach that may not pay off as well as Sox fans would like in the overly-friendly confines of Fenway Park.
The projected rotation – Clay Buchholz, Rick Porcello, Wade Miley, Justin Masterson, and Joe Kelly – is a who’s who of recent underachievers, with Porcello the lone exception. His impressive 2014 (204.2 IP, 3.43 ERA) was an outlier following four seasons of below league average work (698 IP, 4.64 ERA). Masterson bounced around between the Indians and the Cardinals last year; Kelly came to Boston in the Lackey deal and offers far worse results as a starter than his upper-90s fastball would imply. Meanwhile, Miley – the return for the traded Ranuado and De la Rosa – has seen his BB/9 jump from 1.7 to 2.9 to 3.4 over the past three seasons. And Buchholz, the staff ace, has some of the most impressive year-to-year variance in his performance in the modern game. Here are his season ERAs, from 2008 to present: 6.75, 4.21, 2.33, 3.48, 4.56, 1.74, 5.34. Will he be an All-Star or a replacement player? Will he pitch 190 innings or barely 80? Anyone who claims to be able to tell you with any degree of certainty is trying to sell you something.
And while Ramirez and Sandoval are excellent hitters, these pitchers are going to need help on defense – help the Red Sox are woefully unsuited to give them. Sandoval has a great glove but his range at third base leaves something to be desired, to put it politely, and Xander Boegaerts is a below-average defender at shortstop who probably should be playing third instead. Pedroia remains one of the better defenders in the league at second base, but he’s entering his early 30 – when players at his position usually start falling apart – and Mike Napoli at first has the expected quality glove of a former catcher but moves like a tank.
That infield doesn’t include Hanley Ramirez. That’s because Hanley is moving to left field, playing outfield in the majors for the first time in his career in front of the Green Monster. Mookie Betts will be playing center-field because the team has to play him somewhere – he’s being billed as nothing less than a franchise savior – and though he should be in right, manager John Farrell wants veteran clubhouse guy Shane Victorino there instead. Victorino might be the best defender in that outfield, and Victorino is responsible for some of the most impressively poor routes I’ve ever seen. Usually he’s still fast enough to make up for that.
Ryan Hanigan is a bright spot at catcher, but catchers don’t have too much impact on what happens to a baseball once it’s put into play – and for the Red Sox rotation, especially noted groundballer Porcello, what happens to their pitches off the bat could make or break the Red Sox rotation in 2015.
Will the Yankees stay healthy?
The Yankees broke .500 last year with a feast-or-famine kind of team: you had players like Masahiro Tanaka and Dellin Betances having All-Star seasons and putting themselves in the conversation for individual awards (both were top-five finishers for Rookie of the Year), and then you had the team giving nearly a combined 300 innings to Vidal Nuno, David Phelps, and Shane Greene in the rotation. You had Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury with productive seasons in the field and at the plate, and then you had the corpses of Derek Jeter, Brian Roberts, and Ichiro Suzuki shambling about the diamond, echoes of their former selves.
The notable thing about this year’s Yankee squad is that everyone mentioned in a positive light above has returned, and everyone mentioned in a negative light has departed either for retirement or another team. The most important piece the Yankees lost this offseason was David Robertson, who is a great pitcher, but also a closer – otherwise, they retained everything they need to be a good team in 2015. Assuming they get to keep those people on the field, instead of sending them to the disabled list.
Much has been said about Masahiro Tanaka’s elbow, but it bears repeating: there’s a small tear in his elbow ligament, and small tears in elbow ligaments will, for the vast majority of the pitching population, turn into full tears given repeated stress. The one high-profile exception to this was Adam Wainwright, who managed to pitch through such a small tear for six years before requiring Tommy John surgery. So the question is not “if,” but “when”. Tanaka will in all likelihood miss part or all of at least one of the years remaining on his deal with the Yankees. It might be this one. It might not.
CC Sabathia and Michael Pineda have ongoing concerns about their knee and shoulder, respectively, though both are healthy now; 1B Mark Teixiera is also a walking injury concern, though everyone is pretty much mentally conditioned to accept him missing at least 50 games a year at this point. Ivan Nova had his Tommy John adventure last year and should be back at some point this season, which could be a blessing depending on how injuries shake out.
The Yankees have an opportunity, here: the AL East is weaker than it’s been in some time, and with their recent investments this and last offseason – Ellsbury, McCann, Headley, Miller, and of course Tanaka – New York are in a fairly good position to capitalize in 2015. But to do that, they need to stay healthy.
Shouldn’t Baltimore do things in the winter?
The Baltimore Orioles under Dan Duquette have shown a reticence towards making changes to their ballclub in the winter months almost bordering on pathological – the exception to this being the 2013-14 offseason, when the team swooped in and signed Nelson Cruz to a make-good contract (turned out to be a steal) and Ubaldo Jimenez to a major deal (something they’re already regretting). They did that solely because both players were trapped in draft pick compensation limbo, meaning they were willing to sign undervalue deals because the market for them bottomed out. And yes, the free agent starting pitching market is so nuts right now that four years, $50m was an undervalue deal for a guy with Jimenez’s track record up through the 2013 season.
This offseason, no such targets presented themselves, so the Orioles were content to make three acquisitions of note: Everth Cabrera, the disgraced San Diego Padres shortstop; Travis Snider, the former Toronto first-round rightfielder, and Wesley Wright, a journeyman lefty reliever. That’s it. Neither Cabrera nor Snider were guaranteed anything but utility play until JJ Hardy hurt himself last week, forcing Cabrera into at least temporary starting duty at short.
What could Baltimore have done? Well, their major point of weakness is a rotation that shares many of the same problems as the Red Sox’ starting five – the main difference being that Baltimore have a stellar defense while Boston do not. Just as the Red Sox have been in conversations with the Phillies over the services of Cole Hamels this offseason, so too could have been the Orioles – but they weren’t, mainly for organizational philosophy reasons surrounding big contracts. Acquiring Hamels would have taken one of the few Orioles prospects still worth dreaming on, someone like Dylan Bundy or Hunter Harvey, but considering the lingering injury concerns around both guys (Bundy’s already had Tommy John once; Harvey was shutdown for elbow inflammation last year and just broke his fibula) and Baltimore’s hideous inability to draft and develop starting pitching, trading for a finished product doesn’t sound like a terrible idea.
Alejandro de Aza, Travis Snider, and Delmon Young are a flatly uninspiring corner outfield rotation; Melky Cabrera and Alex Rios were available on the market but went elsewhere while the Orioles focused their attention on Colby Rasmus, who ended up signing in Houston. Baltimore also showed no apparent interest in any of the Cuban signings like Rusney Castillo or Yoan Moncada, which was unsurprising given the amounts of money that were eventually involved.
The Orioles are still in a good position to win the East, but they’re a weaker team than they were last year, at least on paper. The only saving grace is that no one else in the division seems to have taken a major step forward (rabid Red Sox optimism aside). Baltimore will have to hope that’s enough.
How will the post-Friedman era begin in Tampa?
The Tampa Bay Rays had the biggest shakeup this offseason in the East, with the team’s general manager Andrew Friedman leaving for the Dodgers, manager Joe Maddon departing for the Cubs, and Ben Zobrist, Matt Joyce, Yunel Escobar, and Wil Myers all sent packing to other clubs in return for mainly minor-league prospects. Combined with the David Price trade at last year’s deadline, it was the culmination of a massive fire-sale. If this was a 77-win team last year with most of those guys, the floor’s the limit for what they can accomplish in 2015.
Which is, generally speaking, how the Wall Street-brand front offices in MLB work these days: they preach a culture of austerity to fans, a tightening of the belt and an acceptance of a losing season or two (or three, or four) before the good times return again. Tampa Bay did this once under Friedman, culminating in the 2008 turnaround of franchise fortunes, and the legacy of that season – and notably, how little Tampa Bay had to pay its players to achieve it – has left an undeniable impact on how some front offices do their business. So the Rays once again enter a rebuilding phase, and in all likelihood will be terrible this year. They can’t help it; it’s how they’ve been designed.
The best thing that can be said about the Tampa Bay squad is that there’s a whole lot of youth: outfielders Steven Souza and Kevin Kiermaier, 2B Nick Franklin, and SP Nate Karns still have varying degrees of prospect sheen on them, Souza being the standout here, and even players that have been up and around for awhile -- Chris Archer, Jake Odorizzi, Matt Moore, Drew Smyly, and so on -- are for the most part under 27 years old, and therefore still at the age where fans can reasonably assume that some of them will unlock their potential and take major steps forward.
But a team whose projected middle of the order is Asdrubal Cabrera, Evan Longoria, and James Loney is far from impressive at the plate, and Tampa Bay just made a late camp trade for Seattle’s Erasmo Ramirez (career 4.62 ERA in the best pitcher’s park in the AL) to shore up their rotation, which has already been waylaid by injury to starters Alex Cobb and Drew Smyly. First-year manager Kevin Cash looks, to all appearances, to have been put in a position to fail – or, generously speaking, he’s been brought in to help a young team develop at the major league level.
That’s all it looks like the Rays intend to do this year, however: develop. They certainly don’t look like they’re going to win.
Will Toronto’s own youth movement save them?
There’s a stark difference between the young players the Rays have on their team and the young players that are going to make the Toronto Blue Jays. Most of the Rays youngsters already have major league service time, either with Tampa Bay or with another team, and are in the majors because it’s either not possible to send them back to the minors to start the season in order to squeeze more team control out of them or because it’s frankly not worth the gaming involved to do so.
Toronto, on the other hand, are taking six of their Baseball America Top 10 prospects north with them: SP Aaron Sanchez, SP Daniel Norris, RP Miguel Castro, and RP Roberto Osuna will be on the Opening Day pitching staff, while CF Dalton Pompey and 2B Devon Travis will make the lineup. Devon Travis mainly made the club due to Maicer Izturis’s groin injury, but the Jays easily could have given the job to Ryan Goins or Steve Tolleson. Instead Travis won the job outright.
The Jays aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts: they’re doing it out of desperation. Following the loss of Marcus Stroman for the year to a torn ACL, the Toronto rotation without Sanchez or Norris is hideous: the next men up are either past-prime veterans like Jeff Francis, Randy Wolf, or the ghost of Johan Santana, or waiver-claim guys like Juan Oramas or Bo Schultz. Osuna and Castro on the team means that Steve Delabar, Rob Rasmussen, and assorted company can be safely optioned down to the minors. And following the trade of Anthony Gose and the departure of Colby Rasmus, Dalton Pompey is the only logical choice to start in centerfield.
The current Toronto roster is a mishmash of team-developed youth and veterans either signed in free agency or for whom general manager Alex Anthopoulos dealt significant minor-league assets: every pitcher in the rotation is either under 24 or over 36, and Josh Donaldson is the only member of the starting lineup under 30 except Pompey, Travis, and Toronto-developed Kevin Pillar (Travis it, should be noted, is the exception here to “team developed:” he came over in the Gose trade with Detroit).
The good news for Toronto? The veterans, when they’re healthy, are very good veterans: Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Reyes, and Russell Martin are all conservatively top-15 players at their positions league-wide, when they’re on the field. All the prospects making the team have had good springs and look like they’ll belong at the major league level. But the most reliable pitchers in the rotation are 40-year-old Mark Buehrle and Opening Day starter Drew Hutchison -- and if anyone gets hurt, or anyone stumbles, it could be (for instance) Jeff Francis time in Toronto real quick. And once Jeff Francis time starts, Toronto fans likely aren’t going to enjoy how it ends.
Predicted finishing positions
Baltimore Orioles
New York Yankees (Wild Card)
Toronto Blue Jays
Boston Red Sox
Tampa Bay Rays
