Cloverland Leagues: AL Northeast Division

So, I'm going to keep the Cloverland Leagues moniker, at least for now. As noted, I'm going to go through the teams and say a bit about each of them, starting with the AL's Northeast Division:

1998 New York Yankees:  Won 114 games during the regular season, which was an American League record to that point (the current record holder is in the AL West in this game), and went on to win the World Series. As a Yankees fan I'm rooting for them and will be managing them. At the time it was claimed that even though they were among the all-time greats they didn't have any Hall of Famers, but of course Jeter and Rivera proved that wrong.





2015 Toronto Blue Jays: Winners of only 93 games during the regular season, they scored and prevented runs at a clip that "should" have won them 101 games (i.e. their "Pythagorean record"). That's the best in Blue Jays history, and that's the metric we're using, so here they are. They also were involved in perhaps the single craziest inning I have ever seen in my 40+ years of baseball fandom. Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion, and Jose Bautista lead the hitters, and David Price makes his first appearance among the pitchers.  We'll see if they can keep out of 4th in this division.



2017 Cleveland Blues: I noted the name change in the last post. This team won 102 games in the regular season, but had an even better Pythagorean record (predicting 107.5 wins). This is another Edwin Encarnacion team--even given the sort-of compressed timeframe of this league I'm surprised at how many people show up on multiple "best-of" teams. Perhaps I'm used to the long tenures of the best recent Yankees? Or not acclimated to the late summer shuffle of good players from contending teams to non-contending ones?



2018 Boston Red Sox: Another recent team. This one is considered by a lot of folks to be not only the best Red Sox team of the last ~50 years, but the best of all time. In the old APBA game I used the 1912 Red Sox, it would be interesting to play them against one another (though perhaps hard to have a single group of game settings that could fairly apply to them both).  David Price makes his main appearance here, though I think he shows up on yet one other team. Mookie Betts was the superstar, of course...

Next up, we'll go to the AL Central.