Which AL teams will escape the basement?

There aren’t many silver linings to disappointment. Sure, people will tell you that with failure comes growth, but particularly when you’re in the throes of defeat, platitudes don’t offer much comfort. The only consolation, as far as I can tell, would be redemption.

I have two recurring nightmares. In the first, I’m in college (even though I graduated years ago). The semester is almost finished; in fact, it’s the last day. I realize that I’ve enrolled in a course that I’ve never attended, and unless I ace the final, I’ll have to forfeit the $50,000 I spent on tuition for the year. I always wake up before the test. In the second nightmare, an intruder is in my apartment, but instead of wanting to harm me physically, he’s come to steal my dog and my electronics, including my toaster. I can hear his footsteps coming closer, but thankfully, I’m always startled awake before he gets to the bedroom door.

You can clean a lot about a person’s every day life (and eating habits) by what penetrates their subconscious. I imagine for many baseball players there are three recurring nightmares: Forgetting there’s a game; if you’re a pitcher, giving up back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs; and finally, losing 100 games in a season.

Most teams snap out of it before that last one happens, and players are spared the pain since even bad organizations tend to find a way to scrounge up enough wins to stay away from the century mark in the loss column. An unlucky few players pinch themselves and find that they are in fact in the midst of a season of humiliation. While the state of finishing last breeds private frustration and depression, publicly it tends to promote a paradoxical optimism: We can’t really be this bad. It has to get better.

In some cases, that sentiment is accurate. The three worst teams in the American League last season -- the Blue Jays, White Sox, and Astros -- had mind-bogglingly bad seasons for different reasons. The Blue Jays were supposed to be one of the best team’s in baseball given the energy and money committed to overhauling the roster, yet they added just one win over a disappointing 2012 finish. In Chicago, the White Sox lost their offense, their defense, and in the process exposed some of their touted young talent as counterfeit. For those two teams there’s a chance that bad luck and poor performance created a perfect storm for failure and that 2014 will get better. But for a team like the Astros, who lost 111 games last year and are still experiencing the growing pains of waiting for the farm to develop, there will undoubtedly be more days of pinching and praying to wake up.

Yet, none of these teams have given up, and now there are 162 games to bring hope to the hopeless. There’s always optimism this time of year, not because that’s what players have to tell themselves to lace up their cleats, but because the only way to combat struggle, defeat, and embarrassment is to hope that this season will be better than the last. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always next year.

Last season’s record: 74-88
Cee’s prediction: 82-80, fourth place
Baseball Prospectus Prediction: 80-82, fourth place

There hasn’t been much chatter about the Blue Jays this offseason, likely because everyone is so embarrassed about last year’s displays of unbridled enthusiasm. Last season was an absolute train wreck for the Jays. If you made a Bingo card of all of the bad things that could happen to a team in a season, you’d have most of them covered except for scandal and a meteor crashing into the ballpark. There were injuries and disappointments. There were broken ankles, knuckleballs that wouldn’t dance, sluggers who couldn’t make contact, and blisters on pitching hands. The offense wasn’t great -- they ranked eighth in the AL in runs scored -- but it was the pitching, 14th in the AL in ERA, that did the Jays in, repeatedly.

The Blue Jays didn’t do much this offseason, mostly because they did so much last year, but it’s hard to get excited about their biggest addition, Dioner Navarro. The Jays were rumored to be interested in several free-agent pitchers, but as of now, they are content to let Drew Hutchison, J.A. Happ, and Brandon Morrow fight for the ball every fifth day, which could be a disastrous safety net if R.A. Dickey or Mark Buehrle start showing their age.

It’s probably not possible for the Jays to win the AL East this year, and they’ll have a tough time climbing out of the basement of one the toughest divisions in baseball.

Last season’s record: 63-99
Cee’s prediction: 80-82
Baseball Prospectus’ Prediction: 76-91, fourth place

Just how bad were the White Sox in 2013? General manager Rick Hahn referred to last season’s spiral of perpetual defeat a “full on dumpster fire” which, while honest, still doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of how disappointing the 99-loss season truly was. Instead of pouting, however, Hahn and the Sox started at last season’s trade deadline and stayed busy through the winter trying to revamp the roster to replenish the team’s power at the plate. It seems that they got halfway there.

The Sox are hoping that Jose Abreu and Avisail Garcia will provide missing power, but two supposed sluggers a roster does not make, and the other moves that they made this offseason -- Adam Eaton and his speed and high-OBP upside notwithstanding -- just serve as a little more noise on an already disjointed roster. The Sox have three first basemen/designated hitters: Abreu, Paul Konerko, who is back for a victory lap, and Adam Dunn, who would be playing for someone else if he were owed something less than $13 million this season. They also have Gordon Beckham fighting off Marcus Semien for his job, and what was supposed to be a compelling battle for third base between Connor Gillaspie and the newly-acquired Matt Davidson resolved in the journeyman Gillaspie’s favor (Davidson looked good this spring, but the Sox don’t want to risk rushing him). And please, don’t ask me what they are going to do at catcher, unless you have an hour and a Xanax to spare.

The Sox may bounce back offensively -- considering their OPS+ was 82 last year, that might happen by accident -- and it’s going to come down to good pitching to win games. The top of the rotation (Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, and John Danks) should be good, and while the back of the rotation is full of unproven arms, the Sox certainly have a track record of developing good pitching, so there’s some hope there. The bullpen, however, could be cringe-worthy, especially if they can’t quickly sort out the setup and closer roles, both of which are up for grabs.

Accuse me of blatant homerism in this prediction if you’d like; it would be at least partially correct: The Sox are going to win 80 games this year. They won’t be a .500 squad and they’ll give Hawk Harrelson a dozen reasons a week to be incredulously ashamed of “the good guys.” They won’t catch the Tigers, and hell, they might not even catch the Royals, but the Sox are better than the played last season and, at the very least, should be better than the Minnesota Twins.

Last season’s record: 51-111
Cee’s prediction: 62-100, fifth place
Baseball Prospectus’ Prediction: 66-96, fifth place

If you like to be in on the ground floor of things, this is your season to hop on the Astros bandwagon (or is a train with a cart full of oranges attached?). The Astros will likely be in last place again next season, it’s just the order of magnitude of their failure that will change, or perhaps it’s failure itself that needs to be redefined given that this was to some degree a planned implosion. Regardless, getting closer to the 100-loss mark would be a welcome sign of steady improvement.

The Astros have made some changes since last season. They are no longer just a promising core of young talent, they are now a promising core of young talent sprinkled with veterans and players that will cost them real money. Their biggest additions were starting pitcher Scott Feldman and center fielder Dexter Fowler, who will earn roughly 40 percent of the team’s payroll this season, as well as relievers Chad Qualls, Matt Albers, and Jesse Crain, who will likely assume the closer role now that Jose Veras is gone.

The thing to remember about the Astros is this year isn’t the movie and it’s not even the trailer for the movie. It’s not even the casting announcement; it’s just the rumor that a movie might get made in 2018 or beyond. But don’t equate the lack of refinement and low win percentage with boredom -- the Astros have some players to watch, and by the middle of the year, they could have a flood of really intriguing prospects to watch, including outfielder George Springer, and pitcher Mark Appel. My best guess is 100 losses for the Astros this year and the only AL division loser not to climb out of the basement. Anything better than that is icing.