The AL East Needs to Find Its Edge Again
Remember a few years ago when the American League East was known as the best, most unpredictable, most exciting, and most competitive division in all of baseball? There was the exciting Yankees-Red Sox rivalry.
There was Game 162 in 2011. There was never a way to confidently say who would win the division. The second place team in the AL East was always guaranteed a wild card spot to the playoffs. And rarely did a team finish well below .500 for the year.
But the AL East has become a laughing stock. Last year, three of the five teams finished at or below .500 for the year, leaving little to be excited about. The two real storylines out of the AL East last year were simply that the Blue Jays got hot out of nowhere after the trade deadline and Alex Rodriguez was exceeding expectations.
The AL East has lost all of its luster recently and is almost unexciting to pay attention to unless your team is in the division. Simply put, the AL East has become a boring division full of mediocre teams that make the postseason simply because somebody from the AL East has to.
For much of the 2015 campaign, it was not even a competition as the Yankees had large leads over the rest of the division. Additionally, most of the year was spent with four of five teams being under .500 and the Yankees, at one point, had the lead in the division at .500 too.
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The AL East needs excitement. It needs good teams to compete again. It needs drama and benches clearing and true rivalries like it used. Remember how big the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry used to be? It was a beat ’em up rivalry where the players purely and wholeheartedly hated those on the rival team.
Benches clearing became common, like in the 2003 ALCS. The only way to achieve this level of animosity again is to bring in a “jerk” player like they had back in the ’70s and ’80s. Or, they even need to bring back someone with a more recent attitude like Roger Clemens had with the Yankees.
Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez practically started fights between the Yankees and the Red Sox years ago. When you look at these two clubs now, all the players are friendly with each other and hanging out after the games and working with each other in the offseason. There is barely even a rivalry between these clubs anymore.
In fact, the last time these two teams even had a conflict was in 2013, when Alex Rodriguez was appealing his suspension and just returned off the DL from his hip injuries. Then-pitcher Ryan Dempster plunked Rodriguez intentionally, leading to a very small heated exchange between the clubs, if you want to be generous enough to call it that. The only really heated person there was Yankee manager Joe Girardi, and that was more of an act to protect his player more than anything.
Nobody wants to see a dangerous brawl or people get hurt. It definitely is not part of the game. But, let’s be honest for a minute. Baseball needs attitude. It needs style and sass and individualism. Do you think that the Yankees became so famous because they just followed the norm and did what everyone else did?
George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973 and was known as ‘the Boss’ because he went about baseball the way he wanted to, which was much different than how everyone else did it. He built the ‘Evil Empire’ because he fired anyone that did not produce and he was willing to go to any lengths to get the Yankees to be successful.
In fact, he even got players to come to his team just to start fights and produce drama and something that people would pay to watch outside of the game of baseball. In short, Steinbrenner kept the game exciting to watch and brought tons of attention to the Yankees and the AL East.
But look at the Yankees and the AL East as a whole now. There is no more AL East dominating the playoffs. There is no more guarantee that an AL East team takes the wildcard. The AL East has no emotion behind it. Something needs to be done to both better the AL East and make it more exciting.
If nothing is done, the game will stand still and fail to keep evolving the way it has over the years. The major reason the game is where it is today is because teams, players, and divisions would change throughout the years to get an edge. Now, for basically the first time in its history, it is the AL East’s time to become the best again.