During one of the Subway Series games last weekend, one of the announcers (possibly David Cone) theorized that the reason the AL has been so dominant in interleague games is the DH. For the last couple years, a lot of baseball "experts" have spend a lot of time trying to explain why the AL has been winning such a large percentage of the interleague games. For some reason, they rarely discuss the obvious explanation: AL teams have higher payrolls.
Last season, the average payroll for a National League team was $73.6 million; the average for an AL team was $92.8 million. So, AL teams are spending 25% more on payroll and writers are struggling to explain why the AL is better? Here's a rough calculation - it's generally estimated that free agent players should cost about $2 million per win they add to your team. I think salary inflation may have pushed that to something more like $2.5 million. So, depending on how you want to calculate it, the average AL team last year should have been about 7.5-9.5 wins better than the average NL team. Using the 7.5 number, you'd expect AL teams to have a .546 winning percentage in interleague games. They're actual winning percentage last year was .544. Bingo!
OK, this year, the AL winning percentage was .594 and it was a little higher in 2006. So, the difference in payroll doesn't explain everything. But, it gets us a long way to explaining the difference. The rest of the explanation may be random fluctuation, better personnel decisions made by AL teams, some structural advantage (which I'm skeptical of), or some combination of all 3. But, the payroll difference is large and I think anyone who's honestly trying to figure out why the AL has the advantage needs to start there.
3 comments:
Those points are good, but how did the Royals and Twins dominate the NL? And don't the Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers and Angels greatly inflate the payroll average? Then again, I guess the escalation of spending from the upper AL teams forces the lesser ones to draft that much better while NL teams get away with the parity and mediocrity throughout their league.
There are always going to be random fluctuations when dealing with small sample sizes, so I don't think there's any real explanation as to why a particular team like the Royals did well over 15 games. But, over the last three seasons, there have been over 750 interleague games and it's clear the AL has an edge. I think payroll explains it to a large extent - we know some low-payroll teams do well and some high-payroll teams do poorly, but overall, payroll correlates pretty strongly with winning %.
In regards to your second question, you named over a quarter of the AL teams, which is a lot to just dismiss as anomalous. Also, 6 of the 7 lowest payrolls last year belonged to NL teams.
I just noticed this article today, so I haven't had a chance to comment on it yet, but it could be argued the reason AL payrolls are higher is because DHs are usually highly-paid players.
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