The Angels really shouldn’t be part of this conversation. They were an aberration last year (pythag record says they should have won about 88 games instead of 100), and they’ve only gotten weaker. They truly have the potential to carry 6 .330 OBP guys in their everyday lineup, which is not a formula for scoring runs. I don’t care if they go first to third more than any team in baseball.

As was the case last year, the 3 of the 4 best teams in baseball will play in the AL East. Truly, I think the Yankees are the only team that can realistically expect improvement over last year’s results. Both the Rays and Red Sox return essentially the same cast of characters (granted, neither team had many glaring weaknesses), and I think both have some cause for concern.

The BoSox have a few concerns. First, who is the real Josh Beckett? In 3 season with the team, he’s posted ERAs of 5.20, 3.30, and 4.00. And, he’s the kind of guy who’s always capable of getting injured and missing long stretches of time. Dice-K is due for a major regression – his low ERA last year was largely due to luck; no pitcher can succeed over the long term when he walks nearly 5 batters per 9 innings. Lester is and should remain a solid pitcher, but at this point Wakefield is little more than a league average innings eater. They should get something out of the Smoltz/Penny combination when they are healthy, but how often will they be healthy? Their lineup projects to be solid if everybody is healthy, but that’s a big “if” with Ortiz, Lowell, and Drew. If a couple of their plays go down for any length of time, they could be forced to put Julio Lugo and Mark Kotsay into the linup, and coupled with Jason Varitek, that’s 3 automatic outs.

The Rays have to worry about their young pitchers slipping. Most, if not all, of them set career highs in innings pitched last year, and regression is not uncommon the year after. Their lineup probably overacheived last year, as Iwamura, Bartlett, Crawford, and Navarro may only project to league average or worse OPS numbers this year. They are a 90 win team, but after the won 97 games last year, there’s really nowhere to go but down.

The Yankees have some lineup issues. For starters, I don’t agree with your assessment of Damon as a CF, and I don’t think the team intends to put him there on a regular basis. That means Melky, Gardner, or somebody else. So potentially, if Posada doesn’t recover from injury and Cano doesn’t bounce back, the team could have some holes in the lineup.

However, I’m very optimistic about the rotation. Very few teams can say that, if injuries stay away, they can realistically hope for 1,000 innings of 4.00 ERA from their starters, but the Yankees are one of them. Coupled with a surprisingly good bullpen, I think the Yankees have to be slight favorites going into 2009.

I’ve said this before – its reasonable to expect 780-820 innings from out top 4 assuming the start 120 games (30 starts each, 7-7.1 innings per start from CC, 6.5-6.6 from AJ and Wang and 6.1-6.3 from Andy). As a group they have never started more than 123 games in one year so 120 is fairly optimistic. The innings pitched per start is in line with their 3-4 year averages.

However, Joba is only good for 130 innings as a starter if they want to have him available for the postseason. Lets assume he does that in 22 starts.

That gives us 930 starts from our 5 main starters – 1000 seems highly unlikely if you are talking about the main 5.

However the remaining 20 starts by Hughes, etc 80 innings only imply 4 innings per start – not unreasonable. IF hughes has a break out year and pitches 20 starts at 6 innings per start, we’d get 1050 innings from our starters. If Mariano pitches his normal 75 innings we’d be at 1125 out of the needed 1450ish. So we’d need 325 from the rest of the bull penn! If that happens they’ll be coasting and complaining about getting rusty inbetween outings…