Am I supposed to impressed by our new Div?? Outside the texass rangerettes you've no teams that our above 500. I think we are going to competitive in our new division.
Angels are a sleeping dragon...but they need to wake up soon. 9 games out already. geez. This has, historically, been the weakest division in baseball. How many times have any of these franchises won a WS in the last 20 years? once in 2002 (angels?)???
The cardinals got off to a horrible start last season. They ended up winning the WS. Maybe the bad start has something to do with Pujols.
Has the AL Central won the WS more than the AL West? How about the NL West? That's usually a pretty bad division even though they pulled off a couple of WS. The AL West has of course had the Angels, but the Mariners were also really good for 4-5 years, the A's were good from like 99 to 06, the Rangers are obviously beasting right now... It's a tough division, but it's not a world beater division obviously. Until the last few years where the A's and Mariners have both fallen apart, I wouldn't have considered it a worse division than the NL West or the AL Central. The NL Central has also been pretty bad the last decade or so. You've had the Astros and Cardinals but the Pirates, Brewers and Reds were all pretty bad until recently.
Since 1992 (last 19 championships because of the strike): AL East - 9 (Yankees 5 ; Red Sux 2 ; Blue Jays 2) NL East - 4 (Marlins 2; Phils 1; Bravos 1) NL Central - 2 (Cardinals 2) NL West - 2 (D'Backs 1; Giants 1) AL Central - 1 (ChiSox 1) AL West - 1 (Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of California of the United States of Earth of the Solar system of the Milky Way Galaxy 1)
I don't think that's the best way to judge the divisions. What about records of those divisions? Where would we look that up?
Outside of the AL East, I think all of the other divisions are similar in difficulty. They all ebb and flow, but there's no other team (outside of Atlanta in the 90's and 00's) that you consistently are pretty sure going to make the playoffs year in and year out.
I think that the AL West now has 2 big spenders is the key to making the top of the division tough. Although small market teams can compete if they do everything right (i.e. Tampa Bay), in general, the big budget teams are better-positioned to win over the long haul (Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies). Texas and Anaheim have joined that stratosphere this year, and it looks like it'll be awhile before we're there.
