There’s no doubt the Sox recent injuries have done a number on the club’s chances of winning the AL East. So we thought it would be interesting to uncover how bleak -- or rosy -- the those chances have become.
Prior to the slew of injuries that befell Victor Martinez, Dustin Pedroia, and Jason Varitek, Baseball Prospectus had the Sox at about a 99-win team with an 853-702 scoring differential. That team, with the current standings, would have won the division about 38 percent of the time -- a solid second best to the Yankees' expected title rate of 45 percent. The Devil Rays take the cake about 18 percent of the time while the Blue Jays and Orioles are almost nowhere to be seen.
But that was a different team. Injuries have decimated this club and with it, their chances at the division. So, we sought to quantify this question and see just how often the new lineup would win the AL East.
We’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details, but the essentials are this: based on the expected run production of the new lineup, we simulated 10,000 “seasons,” the end result being an AL East championship probability.
Further, we plugged in some of the club’s rumored trade targets and internal options to measure their effect on the team. Playing time estimates are rough estimates and are subject to change. Production estimates are based on Fangraphs.com’s CHONE projections. Below are the results.
July 5, 2010
mike silver
