Yesterday, the Roster looked at the Jay offence, and this morning, it was the pitching and defence. It is time for some Friday afternoon fun. We asked the Roster to supply their win predictions, and keys to the season in a sentence or two.

Yesterday, the Roster dissected the Jays offence. Less fun, but just as necessary is today's look at the pitching staff and defence.  We welcome #2JBrumfield to the Roster. #2JB will be joining the minor league crew in 2007 and makes his debut here.

The Batters Box Roster convened for its biannual meeting in mid-March to talk about the Jays. The virtual sandwiches were stale, the beer was flat, but the conversation was, as usual, lively. In Part 1, we mooted about some questions about the Jay offence.

Over the past three years, the pre-season New York Yankees previews have all forecast, incorrectly in each case as it turned out, a Bronx Bomber World Series trip.

Let's step back a little and ask a regular-season-level question of this ever-changing pinstriped ballclub. How do they stack up against the rest of the A.L. East? Getting into the playoffs is really the whole point of the regular season, and as the Red Sox, and more recently the seemingly overmatched Cardinals, have shown, once there, anything can happen.

So, do the Yankees "get there" in 2007 to see what happens?

Better, a little bit better.

The 2007 Tampa Devil Rays stand on the verge of accomplishing something unprecedented....

Today, Bob Klapisch pens (okay, probably "keyboards") a story for ESPN.com entitled Injuries make AL East a three-team race. It's a typically good read from the solid-if-unspectacular Klapisch, sort of the Michael Young of ESPN's roster of Web writers.

As the title might suggest, his major point of discussion is captured in the final sentence of the second graf: "Considering Josh Towers is 1-8, it's a semi-miracle that Toronto has stayed close to the Red Sox and Yankees, maybe because everyone else in the East has lost important chess pieces, as well."

Now, this isn't about Towers, of course. But it does raise an interesting question ...

If you missed the earlier Cincinnati Reds preview a while back, in it we used the greatness of Baseball-Reference.com and their "most comparable players" list for each individual projected at the time (so long, Wily Mo) to be headed for the MLB roster in 2006.

We'll do the same thing here, with a few minor revisions, for the Jays' vaunted neighbor in Gotham, the 26-time World Champion New York Yankees, to see what we can learn about pinstriped prospects in the forthcoming campaign.

But first, a quick look back at how we did in projecting the last two seasons for the New Yorkers ...

Changes galore. Front office shenanigans. An unhappy Manny Ramirez. In other words, a typical Bosox off-season. The Batters Box roster met over a virtual beer or two in early March to talk about the Beantowners.

Yes, they're going to finish fourth again.

And now, at last, we have arrived at the AL East. We shall begin by looking at the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The D'Rays have never had a good season, and don't expect that to change in 2006.

Now that I think of it, the Devil Rays have rarely had a good month.

How did the Blue Jays compare to their division rivals in scoring and preventing runs? Click on “more” and find out.

Reports indicate the Yankees have traded A-Ball Staten Island hurler Justin "I'm Not Dave" Berg to the Cubs for former two-time All-Star OF Matt Lawton.

A few questions ...

But the years went by and the rock just died
Suzie went and left us for some foreign guy
Long nights crying by the record machine
dreaming of my Chevy and my old blue jeans

And you may ask yourself
Am I right? ...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?