The Hardball Time uncovers a joke from 1947:
“There’s an American League joke which has a gag line: ‘Switch to the National League and add five years to your career.’”
Interestingly enough, the joke was out of date in 1947. The following graph shows runs per game by season, separating AL and NL. I’ve brought out the five-year trend lines to make it easier to compare the two (click for a larger version):
The AL dominates from the late teens through the last 30s, pretty much through the career of Babe Ruth. The AL adopted the power game because of Ruth, while the NL stuck with the small ball game of the dead ball era longer. From the late 30s on, however, the NL caught up to the AL, and it was only the introduction of the designated hitter that put the AL on top to stay.
Posted by David Pinto at 9:54 am | Offense | Permalink | 5 Comments
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November 6th, 2009 @ 10:08 am
Wouldn’t that joke be appropriate for pitchers today? How many AL pitchers moved to the NL to extend their career?
November 6th, 2009 @ 10:11 am
@rbj: Yes. I was reading a Curt Schilling transcript yesterday from a WEEI interview, and he said he was very wary of moving to the AL.
November 6th, 2009 @ 11:22 am
Any extra years for going to the NL West?
November 7th, 2009 @ 4:55 am
It became even more out of date after Mr. Robinson arrived in Brooklyn that year, and other NL teams scrambled to keep up while the AL (with a few exceptions) decided to be “the white league” for another ten years. Casey Stengel deserves credit for parleying far less talent than Joe McCarthy had to five straight World Series wins from 1949-1953 (and more to come later in the decade)–but the league his Yankees dominated was more inferior to the NL of the time than the NL is to the AL these days.
November 9th, 2009 @ 11:49 am
I’ve pointed this out on a more recent post, but Stengel’s teams could get into the World Series by posting a better regular season record than seven other AL teams. Then they just had to beat the NL pennant winner, usually the Dodgers, in a seven game series. These were talented teams, but being in the weaker league definitely helped them. The NY Times made a similar point in a recent comparision of Yankees championship teams.