Rangers Or Tigers: Who Scares You More?

Justin Verlander is apparently dead set on making the rest of the 2011 season not that interesting. First, he decided to end any speculation about who might win the 2011 Cy Young Award by leading the league in nearly every pitching category you can think of, and then, he decided to help his team win enough games to make the AL Central race something less than a heated contest down the stretch.

Sure, there’s still more than a month of baseball left to play, but the Tigers have now opened up a 5 1/2 game lead over the Indians and White Sox, and recent injuries to the Tribe (most notably Travis Hafner’s potentially season ending foot problem) leave them looking like a bit of a long shot at this point. The Tigers haven’t won the division just yet, but assuming that they’ll join Texas, New York, and Boston in the playoffs is a decently safe bet at this point.

If we work off the assumption that those are the four likely playoff teams in the AL, then the interesting question becomes whether winning the AL East is a good idea or not. New York and Boston are currently slugging it out for the division title, but the loser is basically guaranteed the wild card spot, and so all they’re really playing for is home field advantage and the right to play the division winner with the lesser record in the first round.

That team will probably be the Tigers. To date, they’ve won 54.3% of their games, while the Rangers have won 57.4% of their contests. This lines up with most of the evidence that suggests that Texas is just a better team than Detroit – they’ve outscored their opponents by 118 runs, the Tigers by just four. The Rangers have hit better, fielded better, and pitched better than Detroit this year, and by significantly improving their bullpen at the deadline, it’s pretty easy to argue that the Rangers playoff roster will be even better than their season-to-date statistics would show.

So, if Texas is the better team, then winning the AL East is a pretty good idea, because it gets you a first round match-up with an inferior opponent, right? Well, maybe not. Thanks to the way the division series works, that first round plays out as a best-of-five, and Mr. Verlander would start two of those five games. He’s not unbeatable (the Tigers are 20-8 when he takes the mound this year), but he’s probably the best pitcher in the American League right now, and having to face him in 40% of the series’ contests is not really an appealing thought.

On one hand, winning the division allows you to face a weaker team. On the other hand, winning the wild card means you get to skip the league’s best pitcher in a five game series. Gaining home field advantage for both rounds probably tilts things back in favor of winning the division (after all, C.J. Wilson doesn’t exactly suck either, and the rest of Texas’ roster is pretty clearly superior to Detroit’s), but it’s not clear cut which team is an easier match-up in a short series.

If I’m Boston and New York, I only know one thing for sure – I’m rooting like crazy for the Indians to pull off a minor miracle, and then I’m trying like crazy to win the division. If the Tigers do end up in the playoffs, then the two American League Division Series should be very, very interesting.