The Reset Button’s Been Hit on the AL East
For most of the first two weeks of the 2026 season, just about everything was coming up Yankees. In what was supposed to be a highly competitive division, the Yankees burst out of the gate with eight wins in their first 10 games. None of those victories came against pushover teams, and they were also convincing wins, with the lineup scoring more than twice the team’s runs allowed. Just as importantly, the teams expected to rival the Yankees all got off to mediocre (or worse) starts. The Bronx Bombers had a 3 1/2 game cushion in the AL East, about as large as one can reasonably hold in a tough division after 10 games. Then, things happened.
After the games of April 7, ZiPS had the Yankees with a projected two-game edge in the East, and a 35% chance of winning the division. While these numbers didn’t suggest dominance or anything remotely resembling a guarantee, that was a four-game swing from the preseason projected standings (New York was initially two games back of Boston) and a solid bump from their 20% odds to win the division.
While none of the games were one-sided affairs, the Yankees proceeded to drop five in a row against the Athletics and Rays, only winning on Monday in the ninth inning against the Angels after a Jordan Romano meltdown. Had they lost, it would have left the Yankees without a share of first place for the first time this season.
As of Tuesday morning, ZiPS projects the divisional race between the top four teams in the East to be close enough to send my colleague Jay Jaffe into full Team Entropy excitement. Or at least, it would if MLB hadn’t ruined bonus baseball with the blasphemy of tiebreakers. Here are the projected standings:
| Team | W | L | GB | Pct | Div% | WC% | Playoff% | WS Win% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore Orioles | 88 | 74 | — | .543 | 25.8% | 38.5% | 64.3% | 5.2% |
| New York Yankees | 88 | 74 | — | .543 | 26.1% | 40.8% | 66.9% | 6.8% |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 88 | 74 | — | .543 | 26.0% | 39.1% | 65.0% | 5.8% |
| Boston Red Sox | 87 | 75 | 1 | .537 | 20.7% | 44.0% | 64.7% | 6.7% |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 75 | 87 | 13 | .463 | 1.5% | 12.2% | 13.7% | 0.3% |
The Yankees may have lost their best chance to put the division away early. The Orioles are missing Jackson Holliday and Jordan Westburg, and will be without Zach Eflin for the rest of the season. They started out 3-6 after getting swept by the Pirates, but they got back to .500 on the backs of the White Sox. The Red Sox have started to occasionally score runs, and their pitching staff is too deep to be this far down the rankings in ERA and FIP. The Jays are scuffling at the moment with a rotation that’s been beset by injuries, but ZiPS still sees them as dangerous competition over the rest of the season.
This looks like it’s back to being a really fun race, especially if the overperforming Rays can continue to defy our preseason expectations. I’d like to think that there’s a chance I could live to see a five-way divisional tie after 162 games. But even if the East doesn’t prove to be that tight, it should be quite the gauntlet the rest of the way.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
ZiPS has much better win projections for the Orioles, Red Sox, and the Blue Jays than the standard FG playoff odds (83, 82, and 81 wins respectively).
Is it possible to unpack what ZiPS sees differently about those teams?
My guess is that it’s because those three teams have a good amount of depth / redundancy that the standard FG playoff odds do a bad job of accounting for since they have generally optimistic playing time assumptions and don’t use simulations to account for injuries (i.e., in every FG playoff odds simulation, the playing time distribution is the same, but ZiPS explicitly models these scenarios and reallocates playing time in those situations).
Situations like the Red Sox pitching and outfield depth provide useful redundancy in the case of injury that is hard to expose in the FG playoff odds model. Conversely, the Yankees are a bit more top-heavy and exposed in situations where, for instance, Judge misses a significant amount of time.
The Red Sox are bit of a mess. Kinda sorta. The lineup has been extremely unproductive beyond Abreu and Contreras. Most of the non-Abreu/non-Contreras members of the squad have also performed worse than expected with the glove. Yesterday, Crochet got lit up like the 4th of July by the Twins, who exploded for 11 runs in less than 2 innings of bat-work.
Not all is lost. Suarez looked amazing in his last start. Gray had been very effective. Bello was pleasantly crisp in his last start. Early has struggled to keep his pitch count down per inning but has shown flashes of being something special. Tolle is waiting in the wings, performing very well for the WooSox. All good things.
Back to that lineup—it’s a weird one. 4 outfielders who need to play every day, and a 5th in Yoshida but with DH-only capability and tortoise-like wheels. An infield with supposedly a high defensive floor but an equally low offensive ceiling.
The pitching depth is impressive. However, I’m not sure what the plan is for the lineup. Despite 4 outfielders better than Yoshida, he’s actually played 15 innings in the outfield so far. That’s 15 too many. The way the team is built, it is practically screaming for a trade to make the roster more manageable. The clearest move would be to trade Yoshida to free up the DH, then rotate the 4 outfielders through that role each week to keep their legs fresh. Barring marked improvement from the entire squad, the lineup as-is doesn’t seem competitive with rest of the AL East. It will be interesting to see if that even matters over 162 games with such a deep pitching staff and focus on run prevention (they won’t give up 13 runs everyday)
The lineup has been the way it is with Anthony and Duran playing at replacement level. Once they start hitting, the lineup will look fine.
You wrote this one day too early. It is only 17 games into the season and I am struggling to find much to be happy about. After one good trip through the rotation the next two games have been disasters. I just don’t see a way to consistently score without a few more HR’s and where the dingers are going to come from is hard to see. Still early but Early is on the spot today.
Can we really call Jordan Romano’s performance Monday night a “meltdown” when he’s pretty much had that kind of outing every other game since 2024?
He also looks exactly like the skeezy boyfriend your babysitter invites over as soon as your parents leave even though she was strictly instructed not to.
You mean the boyfriend who is actually going to get laid; unlike the maths/stats nerds who post on this site?
Ha, I kid…
Right now the East is the bedrock of mediocrity. No one looks good, everyone looks average except the Sox, who just look disorganised.