Good morning and welcome to episode 445 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast.

From Baseball Prospectus, presented by the baseball reference.com Playindex.

I'm Ben Lindbergh, joined as always by Sam Miller.

Today, we are going to be talking about one of the tight divisions in baseball.

So far, there are two really, both of the Eastern divisions so far this year are extremely close.

Right now, the Yankees are still playing as we are recording this and are trouncing the angels soundly early in that game.

So it looks like if that score holds up, the Yankees and the Orioles will be tied for first in the AL East.

All the other games are finished for the night and there's only a three and a half game spread right now between first and last place in the AL East.

So we wanted to bring on the creator of Team Entropy, a man who likes to see close races and ties Jay Jaffy.

Hey, Jay, how are you?

Hey, I'm pretty good. Good to be back.

We are obviously a long way before we can start imagining five way ties scenarios that we always enjoy doing when the season gets a little later.

But is this our best chance for this year?

Is the AL East the best chance to give us one of those crazy tie break scenarios?

I don't know if it is.

I mean, I'd be coming into the season.

I had three teams coming out of this division for the playoffs with the Red Sox winning it and the Razen Yankees.

As the wild card, with Matt Moore going down and Alex Cobb hitting the sidelines for a while, the Raze really having a fair amount of trouble on both sides of the ball.

I'm kind of convinced that they're not going to stick around in this race.

They're 15 and 19 right now.

There are only 10 runs in the Red, but I'm just not seeing the type of team that I usually see from them.

I'm really not the pitching depth there.

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