Who’s going to win the AL East this year? On a regular basis I’m going to follow-up with what FiveThirtyEight.com did at the beginning of the year, and show an average of a few statistical models for each of the teams in East. Across all three each show the Yankees and Blue Jays in either first or second, and the Red Sox and Rays in third and fourth respectively, with the Orioles in the last. The model from Baseball Prospectus has the Yankees in first with 98.6 wins, compared to 91 wins for the Jays, and the Red Sox and Rays at 84.8 and 84.3 wins respectively. The models from FiveThiryEight and Fangraphs have the Blue Jays ahead of the Yankees in a tight race, with the former projecting 94 wins for the Blue Jays compared to 92 for the Yankees, and Fangraphs project 92 wins for the Jays and 91 for the Yankees.
Overall, when averaging the models, the Yankees come out to 93.9 wins, compared to 92.3 for the Jays, or about 1.5 wins ahead. The Red Sox average out at 85.3 wins, and the Rays 84.1, with the Orioles at 61.4 wins.
It’s early in the season, it’ll be interesting to see where things are with the next update.
Note: Information taken from each model at 12:30 on April 23, 2022, and each model is continually changed.