When the NL was outscoring the AL early in the season, that should have been an air-raid warning that the senior circuit's pitching has really gotten bad. The influence of the DH is so strong that something had to be very smelly about those NL staffs. I missed the clue like most everybody else.

Now that those less than stellar NL hurlers are exposed to American League hitters, surprise, surprise, they're not faring so well. Yesterday was a painful case in point, as the National Leaguers coughed up about five runs per game.

When you're spitting up that many runs, it's hard to win consistently in a year when overall MLB offense has fallen to its lowest level since 1992.

It would be nice if the NL could rally in the final weekend of interleague play to make the numbers a little less embarrassing. But today in particular, the scheduled NL hurlers don't exactly look monstrously intimidating, except Jurrjens and (maybe) Park.

Volquez has pitched 4 IL games and has an ERA 4+ in those games and around 1.5 in NL games. KC and MN putting the beatdown on NL teams. If you assess the level of talent across the leagues there are only a small handful of NL teams that could compete in the corresponding divisions in the AL. You can't compare the stats from the NL to the AL without assuming a huge exchange rate. You can say it's an abberation but the level of competition is just way higher in the AL.

How is is that Maddux fits the mold? He's been in the NL his entire career.

David,
I feel that the topic by necessity forces the argument to be anecdotal. We can't accurately compare the quality of AL pitching vs. NL pitching any other way - other than to compare the overwhelming Interleague stats and records we now have available to us.

Would anyway really have expected Haren and Santana to help swing the numbers in the NL's favor? We're talking about two pitchers! I'm talking about a league-wide phenomenon. You could literally find an average of at least one starter per team who wouldn't crack an AL rotation. Unfortunately, that's the best exercise to use.

When you look at pitchers now you evaluate them on moving to leagues. Case in point Derek Lowe. Personal issues aside the evaluation was he would be OK in the NL but not good enough in the AL. DTrain - big ? going to the AL. Harden and Santana dominant in AL. Becket goes to AL and gets smacked around until he adjusts. I'm sure there are counter examples but until the NL can compete in IL and the WS it seems like complete dominance.

Jeans,

I don't think your argument is wrong, I'm just looking for a more concrete way to prove it. Maybe with PITCHf/x we can determine some things.

Do AL pitcher throw harder?

Do they throw pitches that break more?

Do they hit the corners more?

If it is true, is it due to AL GMs doing a better job of acquiring talent, or AL pitchers forced to adapt in a league of tougher hitters.

I guess we'll really find out if Sabathia(5-8, 4.07 ERA) gets traded to the Cubs gets significantly better.

I don't think you can just cherry pick 2 pitchers (or 3 if you want to include that stud that Cinci picked up) and go "those guys went from the AL to the NL" and then because of that cause the effect is better pitching in the NL. Those 2 guys made 2 staffs better and 2 AL's staff worse. Not an insigificant amount, but certainly not enough to draw any conclusions from.

You have to look across the board. Every pitcher on every staff. The quality of the AL's 4th and 5ths starters, as a whole, I would suspect, is much higher then that of the typical pitcher in same slot the NL.

And then look at the quality of the defense the players in the AL provide versus that of the NL, and you would start to get a more comprehensive understanding of why the AL is so much better.

Those are great ideas for research, David. I hope that Mike Fast, John Walsh, or one of the other pitch f/x gurus on the Internet finds our discussion and runs with it.

By necessity, because of the unbalanced number of teams in each leagues, AL teams play 45 more games at home during interleague than NL teams. This by itself explains why the NL's record versus the AL has been so poor. Playing 9 away and 6 home against ANY opponent is disadvantageous.

If you just look at 2007 results, and use the 2007 MLB home-road win percentages (.542-.457), the NL should have won 122 games; in reality, they won 115 (out of 242). So the vaunted "AL talent disparity" got them 7 games more than expected last year; the DH alone likely more than makes up for that, or more. In fact, the AL likely underperformed last year, given the huge inherent scheduling advantage they had.

This year, because of the amphetamine ban or the weird travel schedules or whatever, the home-road split is even more extreme (.556-.434), so it makes sense that the AL will win more games this year as well.

The NL isn't as bad as people like to make it out to be and it's stupid to use "NL +/- games over .500" as a measure of the talent disparity between the leagues.

Oops, that should be "out of 252", not "out of 242".

To rephrase the above more concisely, if the NL had gone 122-130, they would have played the AL even last year. Scheduling issues alone should guarantee that the AL is at least 8 games over .500 every year. That should be the baseline for comparison between the leagues, not .500.

Is there a disparity in payroll?