May 07, 2008
Shift in Dominance
My latest column at SportingNews.com examines why the National League is outscoring the American League so far this season. I really believe this is the first indication of a seismic shift in the quality of the leagues. It happened twice before. The NL was way ahead of the AL in signing black ballplayers after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and that led to the NL dominating the All-Star game from the 1950s through the early 1980s. Then, the AL was quicker to harvest the talent coming out of Latin America, and AL became the dominant league, taking over the All Star game from the late 1980s through last season. It now appears that the NL discovered that young talent is better talent, and I suspect they will once again return to being the dominant league.
Posted by David Pinto at
11:55 AM
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Out of curiosity, are the mean/median ages of the 25-man rosters of the two leagues significantly different?
Ha, whoops, probably should have clicked the link before I asked...
You didn't mention the quality of the pitching, which of course, would be hard to compare. It might be worth revisiting after some interleague play. It's also worth noting the enormous difference between the NL and AL in both OPS and Plate Appearances by 28 year olds. A large part of it seems to be that the NL has way more players in their primes, and that the players in their primes are performing better.
I'm curious if there have been more extra-inning games in the NL than in the AL.
With more innings, there are more opportunities to score runs (and thus would increase the "Runs per Game" without being detected).
Granted, there'd probably have to be a bunch of games where the visiting team put up crooked numbers in the later innings, but it seems like it's not impossible.
BTW- If you refute this (which seems like someone with access to the data could do quickly), could you tell me what resource you used that had the total number of inning s played in each league?
This is such a difficult subject to tackle. So much is missing from the research; some of the obvious things being the park factors, weather, and comparative pitching faced by the hitters. The research is interesting, but is so limited it tells us nothing real about the scoring of runs in the leagues.
Nick,
Do you think Johan Santana and Dan Haren going to the NL would lower or raise scoring in the AL?
It seems like lasy year (and 2006) there was a stink being made about how the AL was becoming much better than the NL. Has all of that changed in just one month or are we looking at sample size issues?
Wouldn't you know, as soon as David puts up this post, the AL goes out and scores ten runs a game for the day, while the NL scores eight.
My guess is just small sample size. The DH is such a powerful force that the AL has fallen behind the NL in per-game scoring in only one season since the rule was enacted. That was 1974, the second year of the rule, and the difference was one-tenth of one run. It's really, really tough to outscore nine hitters with eight hitters (or seven-and-a-half, as Michael Kay likes to say).
As for relative superiority between the leagues, we don't have to speculate any more. Interleague play will decide the issue pretty conclusively...or at least much more conclusively than the one-shot All-Star game.
Since '04 the NL is 4-13 in WS games - since 2000 they are 15-26 - the last 2 NL WS champs were the '06 Cards - possibly the weakest team to win the WS in memory and the dismantled Marlins - even in the 50's,'60's and 70's when the NL was stronger the AL still won the majority of WS - no NL team won more than 90 games last year and the Rox got swept - I don't see any dominant NL team - Dbacks have a lot of holes and Brandon Lyon as closer. We'll see how it plays out but the NL has yet to prove anything yet.