By Bill
The Common Man introduced our Three Questions series yesterday, and I'll pick that up tomorrow or on Thursday. Today, though, I wanted to address something else.
Keith Law wrote a breakdown of the top 50 free agents over the weekend. It's worth reading on its own (though Insider-only), but several commenters took issue with his rather frequent reminders that the American League is a much better league than the National. The general idea among these objectors, apparently, is that this myth of AL superiority emanates from a kind of anti-National-League bias, and that any perceived difference in the leagues in interleague play comes from the huge advantage the American League gets in getting to use a designated hitter, like the guy on the right, in its home games.
I assume that to most of us, that sounds silly. It sure did to me. That the AL has outclassed the NL for many years now is pretty much common knowledge, and there's just no way at all that the AL's interleague dominance can be explained away by the DH, a player who only plays half the game (which they only get to use at all in half of those games). Still, though, at least a few of the pro-NL-equality commenters wondered aloud (well, on-screen, anyway) what the interleague numbers would look like if you took only the records from National League parks, getting rid of that DH effect.
It seemed easy enough to do, but I couldn't find that information collected anywhere. So I collected it. Took half an hour or so. Here are my results, if you're interested. Let's talk it out:
