Rays no long favorites for 2010 AL East title

Posted Jan 30, 2010 by Roger Mooney

Updated Jan 30, 2010 at 07:58 PM

Hey, that’s the computer at Baseball Prospectus talking, not me.

BP’s first PECOTA projections of the season, which came out Thursday, had the Rays winning the American League East with 96 wins, followed by the Red Sox with 95 and the Yankees with 93.

What a race that would have been, huh? The defending World Series champs win 93 games and miss the playoffs. Can’t wait for September to see that play out.

Anyway, according to BP editor-in-chief John Perrotto, the numbers were re-crunched Friday and the Rays are now projected to win 92 games. The Red Sox and Yankees are expected to win 93.

Now BP has the Rays as the odd-team out come playoff time. If these projections hold true, and they most surely won’t, it would still make for a heck of a race.

Perrotto said the projections will likely change before spring training as teams sign free agents.

For those interested, BP has the Twins and A’s as the other AL division winners. In the NL, it’s the Braves, Cardinals and Dodgers with the Phillies and Diamondbacks fighting it out for the Wild Card since both are projected to finish with 85 wins.

For those who want to know what PECOTA means, according to Perrotto, it stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. PECOTA is BP proprietary system that projects player performance based on comparison with thousands of historical player-seasons. PECOTA analyzes similarities with past player-seasons based not only on rate statistics, but also height, weight, age, and many other factors.

Here is the link to the site ...

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/