Current State Of The AL East

So we've been seeing some interesting developments in the East, the first of which is the surging Rays. In this case the Rays have rocketed from mediocrity to being a potential contender for the playoffs, though that will still depend on whether or not they can stay on the winning side until they are closer to first place otherwise they have a better chance and just falling short and then they will likely regret no trading Price. On the opposite side of this the Red Sox seemed like they were going to carry towards a similar surge after they beat the Blue Jays 14-1, however after that game, they lost the 3 following games against the Jays and are falling to the Rays in their current series and as we know the games against rival division teams are the most important especially when your behind them in the standings. Then we can look at one of the teams I more regularly talk about, the Orioles. Now honestly I was in with the majority in thinking that the Orioles would be crushed under the difficulty of the remainder of their schedule since they had series against the Athletics, Angels and other higher ability teams and after the series against the A's it looked to be that way as they only managed to win 1 of the 3 game series and we're beating by several runs in the games they lost. However they came back from at and won 2/3 against the Angels in rather convincing fashion and hell the game they lost was only by 1 run. Then add to that the fact that they have already played 2/4 of their games against the Mariners and again have won both in very quality performances, basically this all means that myself and many other writers and analysts have underestimated the Orioles. So it is very much possible given what we've seen over just a short stint of the most difficult part of their season that the Orioles could run away with the AL East. From there we go to the remaining 2 teams in the division, the Jays and the Yankees. The Yankees recently traded for 3 players to improve their team (Headley, McCarthy and Capuano) however all of them are rather lacklustre players, they are having luck currently but that is likely to change when the league begins to adjust to them as they have not faced these players either ever (Headley) or in a VERY long time (McCarthy and Capuano). Now the most entertaining part about the Yankees and listening to others talk about them is that people seem to assume that this is helping their team, however all they are doing is making sure thir team stays old ( all of these players they have traded for are on the wrong side of 30 and are looking for a hope to turn around their current standing as all have played rather badly in their previous teams. As well add in the fact that in order to make these trades the Yankees are destroying their already barren farm system and according to their GM they plan to trade for another starting pitcher. Another bit of entertainment is listening to commentators, I can't count the number of times I've heard a baseball writer or analyst say that they expect David Price, Cliff Lee or Cole Hamels to end up with the Yankees because they have the money to cover to contracts because the Yankees DO NOT have the prospects to land ANY high end trade chip because of how deserted their farm system is that's why they have had to settle for McCarthy and Capuano. Then finally we have the Blue Jays who are in a bit of an odd place, they won 3/4 games against the Red Sox in a very convincing manner but then they blew it on today's game against the Yankees. Honestly it seems like the Jays have a bit of a stigma when playing the Yankees at their home stadium especially in this game because you can see they jumped on Kuroda early in the game driving in 3 runs in the first inning due to Kuroda pitching rather badly as he lacked control and was throwing a lot of balls. However after the first 3 innings all the Jays couldn't take advantage of those bad pitches as there were several items when some of the higher ups in the batting order got on base or in scoring position  and then the guys lower in the order couldn't drive em in. Now the Jays are in a perilous spot as they are just behind the Yankees in the standings and given that the potential for the Orioles to fall back in the standings and have a chance to throw the guys they are directly in competition with makes this an ideal scenario but they have to get their shit together and win. They do have some improvement to look forward to however as Lind, Encarnacion and Reimold won't need a rehab assignment and could be back as early as this coming week, which would really improve their offence. All in all there are some interesting developments that are to come in this division for these 5 teams.