A couple of months back, I’d written about how the NL Central was playing the best baseball of any of the game’s divisions. As we come to the merciful end of interleague play this weekend, the NL Central has collectively slipped under .500, while the cream of the game has risen to the top. Rapidly. Here are the divisions’ interdivisional records through Thursday:
W L Win%
AL East 134 108 .554
NL West 103 95 .520
AL West 102 96 .515
NL Central 111 113 .496
AL Central 108 123 .468
NL East 96 119 .447
It looks more and more like the superiority of the AL, which we’ve come to take as a given, is actually a superiority of the AL East. Remember, the two leagues aren’t distinct entities any longer, but conferences within one league. They operate under the same rules, they acquire talent in the same draft and have the same setups in the minor leagues. There’s no structural reason why one league should be better. For a generation after World War II, the National League ran out ahead of the American League because it integrated more quickly, tapping into the reserves of African-American talent made available in the wake of Jackie Robinson‘s debut. There’s been no change like that in MLB; I might argue that the AL has had more success in bringing over Japanese players-other than Hideo Nomo, the top NPB successes over here have played for AL squads-but that’s nothing like the NL’s better integration practices in the 1950s.
However, the competitive pressures of the divisions, and in particular the competitive pressures of two highly-successful, high-revenue, high-payroll monsters, sets a bar in the AL East that has to be met. That’s why the Rays, who might have wandered into contention in the early 2000s in a different locale, had to be sold and implement an entirely new and different-thinking management team to be successful. It’s why the Orioles, with no hope of contending through marginal improvements, brought in Andy MacPhail and gave him both the authority and the resources to change a decade of failed policies. The Blue Jays have put together so much pitching depth that they’ve been able to survive the complete loss of a rotation. That is a credit to a GM, J.P. Ricciardi, who I’ve frequently criticized. The Jays may, over a three-year period, be one of the top five teams in baseball, and nevertheless end up with absolutely nothing to show for it.
The AL is once again slamming the NL in interleague play, with a 113-96 mark (.541) with 43 games left to play. Barring at least a 29-13 weekend by the NL (there’s a dangling Cubs/White Sox game to be played), the AL is going to win interleague play for the sixth straight season, and there’s a good chance that for the fifth in a row, it won’t be close. In this case, each division is carrying its own weight: every AL group is above .500 in interleague play, as are nine of the 14 teams in total. Over in the NL, the West is .500, the other two divisions below. Just five teams are above .500 against the AL.
The Adjusted Standings, which take into account not just wins and losses, but the underlying quality of play and the overall strength of schedule, are perhaps the best indicator of the quality gap. By third-order record, four of the top seven teams in baseball are AL East teams, with the Rays-fourth in their own division-arguably the best team in baseball, same as a year ago. Bullpen problems and some bad luck have done a good job of hiding how well they’re building on last year’s foundation. The Toronto Blue Jays are the seventh-best team in baseball. The bottom five teams in the National League, the Giants, Reds, Nationals, Astros and Padres, are all worse than the A’s, bringing up the rear in the AL. It actually could have been worse for the NL; the Dodgers are clearly their best team, and had they not signed Manny Ramirez and Orlando Hudson as winter turned to spring-had, say, the Angels picked up one or both players, or the Angels Ramirez while the Twins ink Hudson-the AL could conceivably have the four best teams and maybe seven of the top eight.
Fundamentally, the AL is a .520 league, the NL a .480 league. The AL is six games better over a full season (84-78 vs. 78-84). However, that difference is entirely about the AL East. The average American League East team is a 91-71 team. No other MLB division is even at .500, although the AL Central pretty much rounds to 81-81:
AL East .564 AL Central .498 AL West .494 NL East .488 NL West .485 NL Central .474
That’s complete and utter dominance of the sport, akin to what a great college basketball or football conference might be in any given year. Or perhaps to what the best division in the NBA’s Western Conference might have done at that group’s peak. It’s an imbalance the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, and which we’re certainly not accounting for in evaluating both the AL East teams and the teams around the league. The four best teams in the AL are all in the East, and two will have to stay home so that two of the Tigers, Twins, Rangers, and Angels can populate October. I wouldn’t necessarily call that unfair, which is a loaded word, but I do think it’s a shame that we’ve gotten to a point where the best teams in baseball are so unevenly distributed as to leave so many good ones home. Some fundamentally 90-win team like the Jays is going to miss the playoffs so that we can watch at least one, maybe more, fundamentally .500 teams play on. The Orioles, no one’s idea of a contender, would be in the mix for the National League Wild Card.
So watch the Yankees and Mets this weekend, and the Jays and Phillies, and the Rays and Marlins, and think less about the gap between their actual records and more about the gap between what they really are. The AL East is simply playing a different game than everyone else is.
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I suppose this does mean that we're likely to see a fight to the finish for the AL wild card, unlike 2001 (for example) where Oakland won the wild card by 17 games over Minnesota.
In September, all of the O's games but 6 are in the AL East.
This is the traditional unbalanced schedule.
According to 2009 payrolls posted at baseball.about.com, the average AL team payroll is $93.25M while the average NL team payroll is $84.34M
That's quite a difference and goes a long ways in explaining the differences in interleague play.
I think a good way to verify this is to look at the home/road records in the interleague series. Over time, are the NL teams--who don't reserve a payroll spot for a designated masher--falling behind in games under AL rules?
Even if this theory is correct, the money NL teams aren't spending on a DH should be available to improve other aspects of the team. Just having a DH rule doesn't create a huge spending gap between the teams in each league.
Moreover, if this was because of the DH, the gap should have been evident from the start. It didn't emerge for some time. The DH rule is likely not the reason the AL has dominated interleague play of late, no matter how many times the argument gets made.
Add in the fact that the NL rules allow otherwise mediocre pitchers to survive as 5th starters or relievers, and the regular domination shouldn't come as a complete surprise.
Am I missing something in the logic here?
As for the $$, why would an NL team spend as much as the AL on top pitchers to fill out a rotation when lesser arms will do? Seems like they would reallocate that $$ (plus the $$ otherwise spent on DHs) to the 8 starting spots in the lineup, but perhaps there aren't enough stars available to make this cost effective.
Here's another debunking session:
1997: 97-117
1998: 114-110
1999: 116-135
2000: 136-115
2001: 132-120
2002: 123-129
2003: 115-137
If the AL's advantage in interleague play is systemic, with the proximate cause being the DH, what happened in the first seven seasons?
It's not the DH. It's the higher standard set by the best teams, which forces the AL East, and to a lesser extent everyone else, to work harder. The top tier of the NL doesn't reach that level, allowing everyone to mill about and try to get to 90 wins. First the Yankees, then the Angels and A's, and then finally the Red Sox set a competitive standard starting in the late 1990s that was well above the NL's level.
That's why the AL is better.
I agree with your basic premise that AL East is the best. Nothing is worse than watching the Phillies get smacked around in series after series against the AL East through a combination of their own ineptitude, injuries, and being overmatched.
I wonder what impact the matchups have on the interleague records or do you think it does not really matter in the end.
They did win their most important interleague series, last October, which helps ease the pain some. But as a Phils fan, I've come to dread and loathe this part of the schedule.
Do you have any solutions? Do you think this is a "problem", or just a quirky outcome that's interesting to note but ultimately nothing more? When the Western Conference was so dominant people were calling for a straight 16 team playoff, David Stern's response was "this is just cyclical", and to a degree, he's right.
It could be argued that this is not cyclical in MLB because of the Yankees and Red Sox. But that's not the point.
Regardless of whether it's cyclical or not, do you think there should be a change? And a "realistic" change at that (as in, not going back to the days of 2 divisions with only one team from each advancing; I know you've long advocated for that but there's just no chance the owners would EVER agree to that)?
That the Blue Jays, Rays and Orioles get screwed probably doesn't trump all the teams not on the West Coast not wanting to travel out to the West Coast more than they already do.
Maybe it does though.
The DH makes a huge difference.
But you've hardly made the case that those are the 4 best teams.
How do you explain that Tampa Bay's record against the AL Central is inferior to 3 AL Central teams' record against the AL Central?
The point is that this needs to be accompanied with schedule analysis to make the conclusions that you made.Toronto was hot early in the season and happened to be playing the AL Central teams at the time. Let's see how it all shakes out.
Good to see you're still not chirping about those horrendous Indians. Can you imagine how bad they would be had they not made the Colon trade?
The big guns on the hoops staff did a great job with all of the draft coverage this week. Check out the live in-draft chat over at http://www.basketballprospectus.com for some really good material.
It makes the difference when a team can hire an extra $5-15 million dollar middle-of-the-order bat.
But I digress....the AL is clearly superior. They've won the last three World Series...oh...wait.
I'm guessing the aforementioned travel costs would be a factor. Also, it is probably a lot easier to sell tickets with a second-place team two games out in a four-team division than a 10th place team with the same record in a 16-team league.
Subsequent expansions of the postseason have been more about the postseason than the regular season, adding tiers of high-value (or perceived high-value--remember ALDS games on The Family Channel?) games at the expense of pennant races. You'll never convince me this has been a net positive for the industry, but because the costs are not visible--you can't lament what you haven't seen, the Septembers lost--and the benefits apparent, it's a hard argument to make.
A one-league structure as you propose wouldn't really be much different. You'd never have the races between great teams, and you'd simply have NBA and NHL races among mediocre teams.
I think we'll eventually have expansion to 32 teams and eight four-team divisions. That looked like something for the late 2000s or early 2010s, but between the economy and what seems like a lack of viable markets, maybe it'll take longer.
MLB *does not* care about its structural integrity. Maybe it shouldn't, I don't know. But it's never going to make a change out of a desire to make the regular-season a more fair contest. That ship hasn't just sailed, it's reached port and is taking on cargo.
The Jays front office isn't perfect--for one thing, they doled out a back-loaded $121M contract to Wells that is looking more and more like an albatross for the organization. And they failed abysmally to find competent players in LF and DH last year (consider the players used at those positions in 2008: Thomas, Stairs, Stewart, Wilkerson, Mench, Barajas, Inglett), probably the two easiest positions at which to find replacement-level talent, thereby torpedoing the team's playoff chances by midsummer.
But they've made a lot of good drafting and other under-the-radar moves in recent years--for example, they're currently getting all-star caliber performances at SS and 3B, despite their complete and utter failure to develop minor-league talent at those positions. In short, they've pieced together a good team on a budget using unconventional tactics. Once again, however, they're likely to end up with nothing to show for it, in part because of the wealthy behemoths of the AL East (take a look at the first- and second-place teams in the division over the last 15 years to get a sense of the long-term power imbalance).
Also, these imbalances do bring into question the nature of the imbalanced schedule. Why not just switch to an NFL-type format where there are 6 divisions of 5 teams each, (pick some crappy NL team and move them to the AL) ditch the "interleague play week!" and just fit your interleague games into the schedule like the NFL does -- whenever it makes sense. You play 1 division in the other league, leave open a 3-game set with a natural rival if you feel like it, and play maybe 4 or 5 more games against your divisional teams (weighted toward september to make things interesting.)
That would cause some 2-game series, which the union hates, but I think most of those would happen within the division, and thus probably not involve long travel.
At least that way you wouldn't have a 4-team division, a 6-team division, and 4 5-team divisions. what a damn mess.
Oh, and while you're at it, make interleague games play by the VISITING team's rules. I'd love to see a pitcher hit at Fenway, or a DH in St. Louis.
The NL absolutely cannot pay some dude 10 mil to sit on their bench. No player would go for that and it is a complete waste of resources. What the NL teams HAVE to do is compensate by having decent pinch hitters and glove guys to hit for the pitcher or be able to come in for a double switch. In addition, NL teams have to focus on a different subset of relief pitchers to compensate for having to bat for a pitcher if his spot comes up in a key situation.
These are sizable advantages that the AL team has. They may not be able to have 2 1st basemen playing like the Red Sox, but they certainly can have a stud minor leaguer come up and be abl to put his bat in the lineup even if his position is blocked whereas he would just sit on the NL team's bench. The DH affords the AL plenty of advanatges in terms of how they spend their money on their bench and bullpen and gives them a spot to test some young players if they aren't in the WC race.
Given 90 mil, if a non-Yankee AL club dedicates 10 mil to a DH, they must fill the other 13 (8 fielders + 5 pitchers) regulars and 11 bullpen/bench slots with only 80 mil left. NL clubs have 89.6 mil left for their 13 regulars and remaining 11 bullpen/bench slots. If we assume the clubs have equal talent recognition, the NL team's 13 regulars, bullpen, and bench should end up being 12% "better" than the AL team's. However, what IL records for several years have shown is that, as a whole, the NL clubs are *not* recognizing talent as efficiently as AL clubs.
Orioles, 11-6
Indians, 5-11
A's, 5-11
Nationals, 6-11
Pirates, 8-6
Diamondbacks, 5-9
I say, "null hypothesis."