Burning River Predicts the Future: American League Edition

A few days ago, the BurningRiverBaseball staff brought you our picks for the best of the best in Cleveland Baseball for 2015. This time around, we are expanding to predict the future of the American League in 2015 including major award winners, play-off teams, World Series teams and the full standings of the AL Central. As with last time, the cast of writers picking these points will be myself, Joe Coblitz along with Mike Melaragno, Kevin Gall, John Hutchison, Jennifer Coblitz and ESPN 970’s Cody Slaybaugh.

The first quick pick is for the AL MVP and Cy Young winners which were won by Mike Trout and Corey Kluber, respectively, in 2014. There isn’t much hope for a repeat among this staff, however, as only I picked Trout and no one picked Kluber. The favorites for AL MVP is the 2014 Rookie of the Year award winner, Jose Abreu and third place MVP finisher in 2014, Michael Brantley. Jen, as always, is sticking with Jose Bautista until the first half wonder can complete an entire season in MVP fashion.

For the Cy Young, the second place finisher in 2014, Felix Hernandez, is the favorite. He already has one win, two second place finishes and two other top ten finishes in his career, so he definitely isn’t a long shot. Two other picks, Chris Sale and David Price are also favorites who finished in the top six in voting last season. Cody’s pick of Verlander is a bit of an outliar however as he considerably fallen off over the past two seasons. Of course, he also has six finishes in the top eleven of the Cy Young voting over his career including one win when he won the Triple Crown and MVP as well.

The second group of predictions is the division that the Burning River staff is most familiar with, the American League Central. Last season there were two play-off teams from the group, the Tigers and Royals, followed by the Indians, White Sox and Twins. Each team has made significant changes going into the 2015 season and a complete change in the order is possible. For this group of prognosticators, however, the Indians and Tigers are a solid one and two. This appears to be a national consensus as well as the Indians have improved at least slightly this off-season while the Tigers have maintained at best.

For third, there is the question whether the White Sox improved enough to surpass the 2014 American League Champion Kansas City Royals. There is no real agreement here with three picking each for third, although the White Sox were the only non Minnesota based team to receive a fifth place prediction. That is another national consensus as little to nothing is expected of the Twins while the White Sox at least have MVP and Cy Young contenders as mentioned above.

This final group of picks is the most cocky and fan-sided, but stick with us. The most blatant homerism is located in the Central picks where all but John have chose the Tribe. The other divisions seem to be more fairly distributed with the Angels, Mariners and Athletics all being chosen to win the West and the Orioles, Red Sox and Blue Jays to win the East. As far as strength in divisions go, the Central and West appear to have taken over as the dominant divisions. This can be seen in the Wild Card picks where only Mike picked a team out of the AL East to take one of the two. Including the Wild Cards, everyone picked both the Indians and Mariners to make the post season one way or another with only two people excluding the Angels and one the Tigers. Here, the one risky pick belonged to John, who has three play-off teams coming from the AL Central for the first time ever.

Since no one picked the Royals to even make the play-offs, it is obvious that everyone also picked a new AL Champion. Here, the home town favorites were the most popular choice with the Mariners, Red Sox and Orioles also getting single votes. In the National League it is the Nationals who are the favorites, although I was the only one to place them against the Indians in the World Series. Mike has them against the Mariners and Cody the Orioles. For the others, Jen and John chose the Dodgers to face off against the Indians and Red Sox respectively while Kevin went the trendy route by choosing the Pirates and Indians to face off for the first time in the post-season in the battle of the rust belt.

Picking the World Series champion at the end of the regular season is difficult enough, so picking one in 30 before the season even starts is entirely irresponsible. Maybe that is why we do it. Here, Jen, Kevin and myself have the Indians winning (Kevin couldn’t bare to pick a Cleveland team to lose to a Pittsburgh team) while Mike has Seattle, John Los Angeles and Cody Baltimore. If any one of these teams were to actually win the ultimate prize, it should be a pretty good time as the Dodgers were the most recent winner of the picks and they won last in 1988. For the others, Baltimore hasn’t won since 1983 while Seattle has never won a World Series and the Indians, as everyone knows, haven’t won since 1948. For baseball’s sake, let’s hope that these predictions are at least somewhat correct and we get to see some new blood in the World Series this year instead of more of the same.