If you’re like me and Tim, you’ve probably noticed recently that a fair amount of high profile players have moved from the American League to the National League and immediately gotten a whole lot frickin’ better.
Cliff Lee was untouchable until he got knocked around a little bit last week. Manny Ramirez hit somewhere near .400 after he got traded to the Dodgers last year. Matt Holliday sucked in Oakland but is now hitting the hell out of the ball in St. Louis. The same goes for John Smoltz, who had 6 SO’s in 6 innings and only gave up one run for the Cardinals after getting unceremoniously dumped by the Red Sox. Tonight I see that, according to ESPN, Brad Penny - who was released by a team in the middle of a pennant race - “dominated” the Phillies as the newest member of the Giants.
In the midst of my eyes telling me that something wasn’t quite right, I was fortunate enough to discover an article on ESPN Insider, written by Jay Jaffe, that has enabled me to completely believe what I thought I’d been seeing.
The basic evidence is that the AL has won 13 straight All-Star Games and beat the NL 52.2% of the time in interleague play since it began in 1997.
The deeper evidence is that over the past 5 years both good and bad AL teams see their winning percentage go up against every kind of NL team - bad, mediocre, great - while those same NL teams’ winning percentages decrease. And not just by a little, we’re talking between 39 and 85 points.
No grouping of NL teams, even those who performed in the top 20% against teams in their league, has a winning percentage above .500. The best overall showing by one of these groups is .461.
The reason I bring this up isn’t to say that it’s illogial for MLB to have two separate leagues that operate under different rules (that would be entirely true, however). Rather it’s to say that we’ve talked a lot about how mediocre the AL Central is, but we’ve never talked about how strong the AL is in general.
Jaffe and his colleague Eric Seidman ran a more complicated mathematical analysis of these numbers in order to predict how a team that performs at certain winning percentages in intraleague and interleague play would perform if they swapped leagues.
For example, using linear regression analysis the Dodgers at .608 would be a .458 team in the AL. The Blue Jays, on the other hand, would be contending for the wild card in the NL.
The sample sizes are small and a little disjointed because teams aren’t competing against the same teams in interleague play, but the implication is pretty clear - the Indians are, and have been, outperforming a slew of NL teams.
Unfortunately, they’re stuck in the AL.
So while Indians can feel fortunate their team isn’t in the AL East with the Red Sox and the Yankees, they should probably feel a lot worse about the fact that the Tribe is still in the American League.
This discrepancy between the quality of teams in the NL and the AL is a huge flaw in the MLB system, especially if we’re to assume that a big part of the gap stems from one league having a DH while the other does not. Add to this the fact that there’s no salary cap, there is revenue sharing - which incentivizes teams to not bother with trying to win - and we begin to see how MLB is creating widespread imbalances in the sport. The wealthy teams are playing with more resources, the NL teams and players are battling against poorer competition…yet, at the same time everyone from the players to the coaches to the front office is being judged by the same criteria.
Would we be talking about Eric Wedge being fired, the Dolans fudging the facts about revenue, and whether or not Shapiro got enough for Cliff Lee if the Indians were playing in the NL?
Hard to say for sure, but we at least have reason to believe we might not. And this kind of imbalance isn’t good for the competitive spirit that’s at the root of baseball and every other sport.
