One publication ranks Orioles schedule as toughest in majors

Is strength of schedule important in baseball? Even if it is, how do you quantify it?

For me, yes, there is some importance to it, but the quantifying part is the difficult part.

Strength of schedule can have some significance with an unbalanced schedule as it relates to getting one of the two wild card berths. Since all teams play more than 50 percent of their games within their division, it stands to reason that if you are in a very tough division, you are at a disadvantage against a team from a weak division.

According to this article from FanGraphs, the Orioles and Rays have the toughest 2015 schedules.

Here is what Jeff Sullivan wrote about the method used to come up with his rankings:

"At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don't know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing."

Maybe this is something done better at the All-Star break in looking toward the second half. By then, we have a pretty good handle on which teams improved and which fell back from one year to the next.

While the story ranks the O's and Rays as tied for first in toughest schedule, it lists New York fifth, Toronto ninth and Boston 13th.

But here is a story from ESPN's Buster Olney that actually ranks the Orioles as having the easiest schedule in the entire American League for the first quarter of the season.

Olney used a combination of how many games a team will play against over-.500 teams from last year in the first 40 games or so, with a consideration to how many games are home and away.

Where the AL East teams were ranked in the league:

2 - Boston, which plays 29 of its first 38 against 2014 winning teams.
7 - New York, with 22 of 41 versus winning clubs and 25 of the 41 on the road.
10 - Tampa Bay, with 23 of 41 against winning clubs.
12 - Toronto, with 19 of 39 games versus over .500 clubs.
15 - Orioles, with 20 of their first 40 against winning clubs and 24 of those 40 at home.

So there are two schedule analysis stories that are quite different, with one ranking based on 162 games and the other just the first 40.

I wonder if the readers here like the current makeup of the schedule or perhaps want to see a more balanced schedule, which would mean fewer AL East games and more outside the division.

While I could do without interleague play, I do like the current schedule and playing so many AL East games. It's been that way for a while and maybe I'm just used to it. There is tradition with these rivalries and I don't want to see fewer of them.

By the way, don't count on any reduction of interleague games. Each year Major League Baseball points out how well-attended those games are, and if the fans are responding, we will keep getting these games.

What is your take on analyzing the O's schedule and what about the current schedule makeup? Do you like it this way?