Schedules are interesting. The Red Sox are also about to enter a difficult stretch of schedule: 19 games against the Yankees, Blue Jays, Tigers, Twins, Phillies and Rays. These six Red Sox opponents are presently a combined 37 games above .500. In contrast, the Rays have a relatively easy stretch ahead of them: 26 games against the Mariners, A’s, Angels, Indians, Yankees, Astros, Red Sox and White Sox – teams that are presently a combined 18 games under .500.
It will be interesting to see where the three teams stand on Memorial Day weekend, when this stretch of games comes to an end. One guess is that the Rays increase their lead on both the Yanks and Red Sox, and that the Yanks cool off a bit from their torrid start of the season.
This is their 9th series of the year. Of those nine, five have been against playoff contenders–Boston, Tampa, Texas, and Los Angeles (twice). The remaining four series were against the White Sox (projected to be ~.500), Oakland (.500 now, projected to be slightly worse), and the lowly Orioles.
Sure, they haven't played the Tigers or Twins yet, but they've played every other good team. It's not like it's been a cake walk thus far.
Teixeira and A-Rod didnt hit the ball last month either…
What Dan said. I'd also add that Oakland has a positive run differential at the moment, and the Yankees played them out west. And took 2 out of 3 on the road from the Rays. I'm just not sure where you get "weak" from this early schedule. Maybe it's not extremely difficult, but it seems much closer to a tough schedule than an exceptionally weak one. If you want to see a weak schedule, look at Tampa Bay.
The Yanks have had a much tougher schedule than the Rays and Sox to start the season especially when you throw in the fact the majority of their games have been on the road. Not a strong post at all this morning. Their schedule gets tougher this weekend but it has already been on the toughest in the league.
agree with what the other posters said. And don't forget, Tampa's next 9 games may be against the west minus Texas, but they are all on the road. They will be lucky to get through this nine game road trip with a 4-5 record. It's not just "who" you play, but "where" you play them, especially out west.
That's a good point, Tim. TB hasn't always travelled well.
Whew! Not much love in these comments!
OK, instead of wins and losses, let's look at run differential and home-away split. The current Yankees 21-game stretch (12 games at home, 9 on the road) has been against teams with a current combined run differential of minus 92. The following 20-game stretch (7 games at home, 13 on the road) is against teams with a current combined run differential of +118. You guys really don't think that the stretch upcoming might be more difficult than the stretch concluding?
Tampa's upcoming stretch of 26 games (12 games at home, 14 on the road) is against teams with a curent combined run differential of minus 112. No argument, Tampa's schedule BEFORE this 26-game run also looks easy to me … but would you people really rather play the Yanks' upcoming schedule than the Rays'?
In my comparison of current versus future Yanks' schedule, I did not include the first week of the season, which was both brutal (from a schedule standpoint) and highly successful (from a won-loss standpoint). I was comparing the 21-game stretch concluding with the end of the current series against Baltimore, with the 20-game stretch about to begin. That seems fair to me — a roughly equal number of games in each stretch – but for the record, let's add the first week of the season to the analysis.
The Yanks' first 27 games (12 games at home, 15 on the road) were against teams with a combined run differential of minus 36. No argument — if you're looking at the entirety of the Yanks' season so far (which I was NOT trying to do in my initial post), the Yanks' season has been moderately difficult. But the upcoming stretch of 20 games looks a lot more difficult to me.
My analysis is far from scientific. Both the Yanks and Rays have the advantage of not having to play themselves! This makes it somewhat misleading to compare run differentials between teams at the top of the standings, and teams currently in the middle (like the Red Sox). I did not try to add a difficulty factor for the Yanks' concluded west coast road trip, or for the Rays' upcoming west coast road trip (arguably, west coast swings are more difficult than road trips to Baltimore and Cleveland).
All this being said, I think I'll leave the future statistical analyses to guys like Will and Jason! I'll stick to the easy stuff I usually write about … PEDs … salary caps …
The Yanks opened up AT boston and AT Tampa Bay and took 2 of 3 in each series…How are the Rays at the top of the power rankings and not the Yankees??? After that, they proceded to play the Angels and the Rangers who are both solid teams, ever think their records aren't that great because it's early in the season and they also played the Yankees and Rays?…The Tigers will be lucky to make the playoffs this year and the Twins pitching will be their downfall…One of them will make the playoffs by division default, doesnt mean they are that good so whoever said that the Tigers and Twins are so good, your crazy…It's the 4th of May!!! Yankee haters are everywhere and you can tell who they are just by their posts…its sad…oh, and the Yankees after playing those 4 series proceeded to play on a west coast trip for 10 days! We all know the Yankees will win the division because they just are the best team in baseball and half of their big hitters haven't even hit yet
"No argument, Tampa’s schedule BEFORE this 26-game run also looks easy to me … but would you people really rather play the Yanks’ upcoming schedule than the Rays’?"
Well, no. But I'm not really sure that's the point. Yes, the Yankees have a pretty difficult stretch coming up, but I think the contention was more with the idea that the Yankees played a weak schedule thus far. And anyway, this all seems like a pretty silly discussion anyway; Tampa Bay has to play Minnesota and Detroit at some point, and the Yankees will get to start playing Toronto and Kansas City. I'd rather have a stretch like this in May than in August, when Tampa has to play 14 games against the Yankees, Red Sox, Twins, Tigers, and Rangers, plus a 7 game West Coast trip to Oakland and Anaheim.
exactly…so the Yankees have played the toughest schedule so far of the "contenders"…If the Yankees played a tougher schedule than the Rays and have basically identical records and the Yankees took 2 of 3 from the Rays in Tampa, doesn't that mean the Yankees are the better team at this time? yeah it does
Gerald, we're not resp0nsible here for the Yanks' position in the ESPN power rankings. We get to add a comment to the ranking, but we don't set the ranking.
Brien, agreed that I'd rather get the most difficult portion of the schedule out of the way first. I'd also rather play teams on the schedule while they're going through a bad streak, like the O's at the moment (Baltimore has to get better, they're going to win more than 44 games). Also, to clarify, I did not say that the Yanks' schedule to date has been weak, I said that they had won a lot of games against weak teams.
I was not trying to argue that the Rays have an easier 162-game schedule than the Yanks. It's possible that they do, given inter-league play, but I have not tried to figure out who has the stronger inter-league schedule.
Gerald, just to reiterate: WE do not have ANY input into ESPN's rankings. I provide them with a fact or comment each week. They, ESPN, then does the rankings and uses our comment next to the team.
And I completely agree about the team thriving without Teix and ARod making meaningful contributions (and Javy making negative contributions).
If your going to use the run differential of the teams we've played, wouldn't it make more sense to take out what the Yankees did against them there? since that would really mess up the context, espeically early in the season.
I would just like to point out that if we're basing simply on pre-season projection, then this part of the season so far have actually been pretty damn tough, as we played 2 series (on the road) against top contenders (Tampa and Boston) , 5 series against middling clubs (the Angels / A's / Rangers / White Sox , 2 of the series were on the road) and 2 against a terrible club (the O's split at home / road). of course, it's hard to really split the difference between middling and bad clubs anymore these days, as the pre-season projections mostly simply point to the O's and Royals being terrible, while everyone else except the yanks / RS / Rays finishing somewhere in the 70-80 s win area.
Texas , for example, is 14-14, they are 14-11 with a +17 run differential if we take out the games they played with the Yankees.
Just a quick look, simply looking at the middling teams here (since the O's screw the context way too much) they are currently 5 games under .500 combined, but if you take out the games they played against the Yankees, they are 1 game over .500 . and they end up like… well the middling team everyone projects them to be.
RollingWave, before diving into your suggestion, in my defense I was not counting the first week of the season in my original post. I was simply looking at the stretch of games that followed the first week, and comparing it to the stretch of games that followed. The first week of the season was tough. No question.
I'm confident that there's a better way to estimate the difficulty of any particular stretch of schedule than the one I used. For example, one obvious improvement would be to factor in the number of games played against each team. For example, if over a 21 game stretch the Yanks were scheduled to play the Rays 7 times and the O's twice, then you'd want to calculate strength of schedule giving the Rays more weight than the O's. I did not try to do that. Also, if you want to figure out whether a team like the White Sox is going to give the Yanks a tough series, you'd probably want to give greater weight to the White Sox's most recent results.
It's an interesting question whether to exclude a team's results against the Yankees when computing strength of schedule. In a sense, a team's results against the Yankees are highly relevant — after all, we're trying to figure out how well that team is going to play against the Yankees. Some teams, like the Angels, seem to play better against the Yankees than other teams. Some like the Rangers seem to underperform against the Yankees. Admittedly, there's not much science in these two observations.
But in another sense, your point is well-taken: the Yanks are playing much better than average baseball so far this year. So if a team has played a bunch of games against the Yankees, we can expect that team's run differential to be affected negatively as a result. However, there are other tough teams out there: a team's run differential is also going to suffer if they've played a bunch of games against the Rays or the Twins. The reverse problem also exists: a team that's been lucky enough to play the O's is going to have a higher run differential as a result. So … what we really need is a way to adjust a team's run differential by the relative difficulty of the team's schedule.
However, we can't adjust run differential by difficulty of schedule if we're judging difficulty of schedule by run differential! I am not a sabermatrician, but I'm reasonably sure that this would be circular reasoning.
We're clearly in need of a better way to measure the difficulty of small stretches of schedule! I will try to raise this question with Will, Jason and the other IIATMS stat-heads. In the meantime, I think your system is better than mine: there are good teams, middling teams and terrible teams, 3 categories. Rank the teams and judge strength of schedule by number of games played against each team in each rank.
Thanks for posting! Yours was a good comment, really got me thinking.