The Rays Tank: Introducing Tampa Bay Baseball Market

It's impossible to follow the Rays without getting into "attendance talk" from time to time. Well now, when we do, we'll all have access to the facts. Mike Lortz, a longtime participant in the Rays blogosphere has started up a new website called Tampa Bay Baseball Market that's dedicated to collecting and analyzing attendance stats from the Tampa Bay area. This subject isn't going away, so it's better that we know what we're talking about.

Jeff Sullivan's been hard at work graphing how difficult the American League East is. As you might have guessed, it's projected to be the most difficult league. As for individual strengths of schedule, the Baltimore Orioles have the toughest one in baseball, according to the projections. The Rays catch a break in that they don't have to play themselves, so their schedule is only the seventh most difficult. Yippee.

MGL has been busy. He looked at which teams have bested their projections over the past five years. The Rays rank fifth in terms of over-performing.

He then spent two posts looking for the pitchers who allow more and fewer runs than they should, based on their components. Is this interesting? I'm not sure. I came down with a rather high fever last night, and my brain's not working right. I can't make heads nor tails of it, but I usually like MGL.

A grab-bag from Laurila.