The AL East is once again a beast

The American League East is back, and in a big way. The Rays are a half-game better in the standings than the Red Sox right now. The Red Sox are a half-game better than the Yankees. As good and interesting as the division has been so far, it can only get better from here.

Even with the way Rays just swept the Blue Jays, Toronto is still at .500, with a 23-23 record. If they Blue Jays played in the NL East, they’d only be a half-game out of first place. This all isn’t just a good thing for baseball. It’s a great thing.

It’s not as if we lost the AL East completely in the short season of 2020. We did end up with that five-game division series between the Yankees and their new nemesis from the division, the Rays. The Rays finally beat them in Game 5, when Mike Brosseau, who had been buzzed by a 100 mph fastball from Aroldis Chapman earlier in the season, took Chapman out of the Trop in the bottom of the eighth with the run that ended the Yankees’ season.

Now the Rays somehow look better than they did a year ago. The Yankees look a lot better. And the Red Sox, largely irrelevant last season, just spent more than 40 days alone in first place in the AL East. And you know how the Red Sox began to turn their season around in April after an 0-3 start? By sweeping the Rays at Fenway and rocking their world a little bit at the time.

But now the Rays have taken first place away from the Sox by winning their 11th in a row, after finally ringing up the Blue Jays for seven runs in the top of the 11th inning on Monday.

While all this has been going on, here come the Yankees, hard on the outside. The Yankees have gone 23-9 since a 5-10 start. Oh, man, things have changed plenty for them since their general manager, Brian Cashman, talked about “15 games I’d like to forget.” The team that never seems to have enough starting pitching has just seen its starters throw 35 consecutive scoreless innings -- the best streak of that kind for the New York Yankees in 90 years.

Cashman made a big bet on three starters -- Corey Kluber, Jameson Taillon, Domingo Germán -- who pitched a combined total of one inning last season, and so far that bet is paying off big. Kluber, of course, pitched a masterful no-hitter last week against the Rangers, the team for whom he pitched that one inning in 2020.

The Yankees and Rays have already played each other nine times this season. The Yankees and Red Sox don’t play their first game against each other until June 4, the beginning of a three-game series at Yankee Stadium. And guess what? The Yanks and the Sox aren’t even the best rivalry in the East, not right now, because that distinction currently belongs to Yankees vs Rays, who like each other even less than the Dodgers and Padres do on the other side of the country.

Since September 2019, the Rays are 16-5 against the Yankees. Yup. 16-5. Nobody is supposed to do that to the Yankees. The Rays do it all the time. When the New York took two of three from Tampa Bay a couple of weeks ago, it was a very big deal. But this has happened over a period when the Rays have become a low-payroll powerhouse. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, which knows everything, here are the best records in Major League Baseball since 2018:

Dodgers, 270-162, .625 winning percentage
Astros, 265-166, .615.
Yankees, 264-167, .613.
A’s, 258-174, .597.
Rays, 255-177, .590.

The Rays went to the World Series last fall and gave the Dodgers all they wanted, all the way through that memorable Game 6. The World Series of 2018 also included an AL East team, the Red Sox, who won 108 regular season game and then were 11-3 in the postseason.

No one expected the Red Sox to be as good as they’ve been so far. They remain the biggest surprise of the 2021 season, followed by the Giants, currently right there behind the Dodgers and Padres in the NL West. But the Red Sox can hit, Xander Bogaerts has been as valuable as any player in the league, and their starting pitching has been better than expected. We’ll know a lot more of them in a few weeks after a schedule that has them playing two series against the Braves, two against the Astros, one each against the Yankees, Marlins and Blue Jays. As things get real for them, we’ll find out just how real the 2021 Red Sox really are.

This is the way things are supposed to be in the East, the way we want them to be. Some expected the Rays to take a step back after they lost both Blake Snell and Charlie Morton. Only the Rays never go away. And they are back in first place, at least for the moment. But as we’ve seen so far, things can change in the East, and fast.

“This is a good team, man,” manager Kevin Cash said after the Rays’ 14-8 victory over the Jays on Monday.

The AL East looks like a beast again. In a season when everybody keeps talking so much about strikeouts, it feels like a home run.