I was curious what he said about the Mariners.

July will be the tough one I guess, with two four game series against NYY and Boston, though they’re at home. Overall the schedule doesn’t look very difficult. Plus it looks like we got the NL central for interleague which I think is good news.

Deathspiral potential in mid August with a 12 game trip to Cleveland, Baltimore, NY and Boston.

Having an easy schedule at the start of the year has its positives and negatives, depending on how hard the latter half turns out to be. A strong start has all sorts of psychological benefits for the team (and the fanbase) though it’s impossible to know what that really means in terms of on-field impact. It also gives the team a little margin to recover from early minor injuries or any experiments that might fail (Lopez, the bullpen, the back of the rotation, Wak going bunt-happy again), and it’s obviously the weighting you’d choose knowing that Bedard isn’t breaking camp with the team but is coming back at some point.

On the other hand, if the team starts off hot but ultimately gets mauled by the schedule in August and September, that totally blows their chance of turning Cliff Lee into value at the trade deadline. As a fan, I’ll take meaningful baseball in late summer (even with dwindling postseason hopes), but from a long-term perspective it sure would be nice to know by July if the team’s record is real or a schedule-induced mirage.

We know all the teams in the AL West are significantly different from last year, and the consensus is that division has tightened up quite a bit. How Oakland performs is anyone’s guess (they may as well wear caps adorned with a question mark) but the M’s get to face them repeatedly in the first weeks of the season when Ben Sheets is likely to be pitching for them, rather than sitting on the DL (or pitching elsewhere), and you could say the same of Harden in Texas. And neither of those guys were on their teams last year.

Assuming the opponents are going to be the same strength as last year is indeed a lazy way to do it, but for a writer it does have the virtue of being simple to understand and requiring little space to explain; just about any attempt to project the “true” strength of the teams in ‘10 is going to generate controversy and tangential discussion… not to mention being a lot more work. Nevertheless, I think it would be interesting to do this same schedule comparison but plugging in the winning percentages suggested by one of better projection systems. Would anybody like to give that a try? (I’m too busy / lazy / incompetent).