The American League Championship Series begins on Saturday, and it will be as notable for the teams that are not participating in it as those that are.

For the second straight year, the Rangers have reached the ALCS by knocking off the Tampa Bay Rays in the Division Series. This season, instead of facing the Yankees, Texas will oppose the Tigers, who knocked off the Yankees in five games in the ALDS.

And so, the vaunted American League East did not field a single team that made it past the first round. That being the case, it seems fair to wonder: Has a shift occurred in the majors? Has the strength of the major leagues left the East Coast and been redistributed in a sign of greater parity?

While such conclusions are tempting, they are unsupported, and reinforce how difficult it can be to judge trends across the game based on the postseason. In some ways, the ALDS series were a reminder that the postseason follows different rules than the regular season, and that anything can happen in a short series, a notion that will forever have validation thanks to the fact that a 2006 Cardinals team that embodied mediocrity in the regular season managed to win the World Series.

Need any evidence that short series take on lives of their own? In a five-game set that featured CC Sabathia and Justin Verlander, the best pitchers in the Yankees-Tigers series were Max Scherzer (15-9 but with a 4.43 ERA that was worse than league-average in 2011) and … A.J. Burnett, whose numbers over the last two years (377 innings, 21-26, 5.20 ERA with opponents hitting .272 with a .352 OBP, .461 slugging mark and .813 OPS against) look awfully similar to those put up by John Lackey in the same span (375 innings, 26-23, 5.26, .291/.355/.449/.804).

In short, a pair of five-game series involving AL East teams is too small to draw any real conclusions about the relative strength of baseball’s divisions. On the other hand, the regular season points to the ongoing claim of the American League East to the title of the most punishing division in baseball.

The AL East featured three of the junior circuit’s five teams with 90 or more wins. It was the only division in the majors with three or more 90-win teams (the NL Central, which featured the Brewers and Cardinals, was the only other division with two such teams).

The Blue Jays, who finished at 81-81, gave the East four teams that finished the season with records of .500 or better, another distinction claimed only by the AL East (the NL West was the only other division with three such teams: the 94-68 Diamondbacks, the 86-76 Giants and 82-79 Dodgers).

More to the point, as a whole, the AL East mercilessly rampaged over other divisions. From top to bottom, the division (including a 69-93 Orioles team) steamrolled the AL Central (.559 winning percentage, with each of the five AL East teams claiming winning records against Central foes), AL West (.540) and National League foes (.556). The combined .551 winning percentage of AL East teams when playing out-of-division foes was easily the best in baseball, suggesting that the gap between the level of competition in that division and the rest of the American League, in particular, was sizable.

Indeed, while the Tigers won the AL Central with a 95-67 record, it is startling to realize that they had a dominant 50-22 mark against foes within their division (good for a .694 winning percentage that was easily the best of any team in the majors against its primary rivals) and just a 45-45 mark against everyone else.

In fairness, the Tigers performed well against the AL East, with a 6-1 record against the Rays, a 4-2 mark against the Blue Jays and a 4-3 mark against the Yankees. Even so, it would be difficult to imagine the Tigers having enjoyed such a decisive march to the postseason in another American League division.

For that matter, the Orioles can be forgiven for wondering what the world would look like if Maryland was gerrymandered into the AL Central. For most of the year (what happened in September?), the O’s were an easy mark for AL East teams, going 28-44 against them. However, the Birds had a 22-20 record against the Central.

Both leagues followed roughly similar geographical patterns, with the AL and NL East proving dominant when playing teams outside their divisions, the AL and NL Central serving as punching bags and the AL and NL West playing roughly .500 ball against non-divisional opponents.

The details:

Ultimately, it would appear that the AL East is still baseball’s meat grinder division. The degree-of-difficulty of emerging from it and reaching the postseason is greater than it is in any other division, making it all the more remarkable that the division has yielded two playoff teams in five straight years and eight of the last nine.

Still, that fact will offer little consolation to the Yankees and Rays, who have now joined the Sox as early-October vacationers.