For years now it has been established wisdom that most of the top-shelf talent in baseball eventually gravitates to the American League, due to the presence of big spending teams such the Yankees, Red Sox, and Tigers. This dominance of the AL over the NL has also been perceived in the AL’s recent maulings of the NL in the All-Star Game, the AL’s manhandling of the NL in Interleague Play, the perceived superiority of the recent AL World Series representatives, and the lists of big-name free agents who defect from the NL to the AL each season.

But even the most cursory of glances at the leaderboards this season yields the surprising impression that most of baseball’s biggest starts currently play in the National League, while most of the big name players in the American League are aging, injured, or both.

For example:

- The top five MLB leaders in batting average are all in the National League, as are 7 of the top 10.

- The top five MLB leaders in home runs are all in the NL, as are 7 of the top 10. Fourteen players in the NL have at least 7 or more homers, compared to a mere 4 players in the AL.

- The top eight leaders in OBP are all in the NL.

- All ten qualified players in the majors with an OPS over 1.000 are in the National League (and that is not even counting non-qualified Micah Owings). In fact, the AL only has 11 players with an OPS that is even over .900, compared to 23 in the National League.

While it is still early in the season and it is still possible that we could be seeing some sort of statistical fluke here, I think we may be seeing the beginning of a trend in which power begins to shift back toward the National League.

The way the American League has sustained its dominance in recent years was by significantly outspending the National League in the offseason free-agent market. But with the new trend which has emerged in the past two or three years of teams locking up all their good young players through their peak years by buying out several arbitration years, the free agent market has become thinner and thinner each offseason, making it harder and harder for the rich AL teams to pilfer all the NL’s hottest young stars by luring them with bigger contracts.

So now the AL teams are stuck with the aging, declining superstars they lured away five years ago, while the NL continues to produce the hot new young stars of tomorrow.

I couldn’t stay quiet. Not after the Phillies swept the Mets AGAIN - this time at Shea. But  Coley’s steadfast endorsement of Jimmy Rollins for MVP absolutely wreaks of homer-ism This is not a reference to the idiocy of Homer Simpson, but rather, the disease that plagues 99.99% (yes, this includes me) of baseball fans - the inability to properly judge the players on the teams for which you root.

I believe that there are 12 hitters in the National League who have had MVP-calibre seasons individually - Chipper Jones, Hanley Ramirez, Jimmy Rollins, Matt Holliday, Albert Pujols, Chase Utley, David Wright, Carlos Lee, Eric Byrnes, Jose Reyes, Prince Fielder, and Carlos Beltran. Rollins does certainly come out looking pretty good even among this bunch:

In the above chart, “Rk” stands for rank, comparing among the dozen players how each of them fare within those categories. Rollins is Top-5 in four categories - Runs, Strikeouts, Total Bases, and Stolen Bases. But look at Matt Holliday. He’s Top-5 in seven. Or David Wright, who is Top-5 in six. So Rollins doesn’t have the most balanced numbers among them.

What Rollins is heads-and-shoulders above his competition in is the number of times he has crossed home plate. His 127 Runs Scored is best in the NL, leading Hanley Ramirez by 12. But how is it that Rollins has this distinction with the lowest OBP among the dozen players (.346)? I’m sure that his number of extra-base hits and stolen bases has a good deal to do with this. But I’m just as sure that having Ryan Howard and Chase Utley behind you doesn’t hurt either. Moreover, look at the column for “ABs”. Despite playing in only three more games than his nearest competitor, Jose Reyes, Rollins has 38 more at-bats which sounds like a lot to me.

In fact, I checked the list of players who had led the NL in Runs Scored over a full season and found something that would make a good trivia question: When is the last time that a player has led the NL in Runs Scored while having a lower OBP than Jimmy Rollins (.346)? The answer is Glenn Beckert of the Chicago Cubs, who accomplished the feat all the way back in 1968, scoring 98 times despite having an OBP of .326. Suffice to say, the general rule of thumb is that in order to score runs, you need to get on base. It’s very unusual for a player like Rollins to lead the league.

Which got me wondering, in what other categories has Rollins benefited from his number of at-bats? I know this isn’t exactly scientific, but for kicks, I projected the numbers for each of the 12 MVP candidates if they too had equaled Rollins’ 656 At-Bats:

Rollins doesn’t look very special in this light. He still keeps up with his peers, but he’s now only Top-5 in two categories.  Now I know this chart assumes that each player performs just as they have throughout the season, but I think the point can still be made. While this certainly does not change how much Rollins has contributed on the field - let’s face it, the guy’s been tremendous - but this does help put things into perspective. He’s performed exceptionally well, but he has also received more opportunities to do so than anyone else.

And if you need more proof, Rollins is ninth in Win Shares with 23 (behind David Wright who has 30) and is also ninth in VORP (behind Hanley Ramirez).

Jimmy Rollins has played at an MVP-level for certain. But when you compare him to his peers, he’s just middle-of-the-pack. To be fair, there’s still two weeks of baseball to be played. With the race for NL MVP so tight, I can be convinced otherwise.

You know what I don’t get? Why is it that when a National League player gets traded to an American League team, or visa versa, he starts from scratch (statistically speaking)?

For example, Julio Lugo was traded at last year’s deadline from the Devil Rays to the Dodgers, and his stats on ESPN.com read like this:

TBD AL  73  289   17  1  12   27  18  4  27  47  .308  .373  .498

LAD NL  49  146    5  1   0   10   6  5  12  29  .219  .278  .267

I understand why, prior to interleague play, we kept a player’s National League and American League stats separate. The two leagues were very different beasts. But why have we kept doing it?

Some of the hits Lugo got as a Devil Ray last year came against National League teams. And some of the (very few) hits he got as a Dodger came against American League teams. So why not just combine his 2006 stats? Does that make too much sense?

Sarah had a post a few weeks ago about how “evil” some teams were because they were pocketing some change instead of spending all kinds of money in free agents (in other words, the NL vs. the AL).

Being a little late to the argument (the entire Umpbump staff except me commented on that post), I can’t say I have the final word, but I did find this website that kind of proves that, not only are some NL teams spending less money, they’re actually winning!

You can drag the date marker to see how each team is doing over time. Check it out here.

Dan Rosenheck has an article in the Times proving what we’ve all long suspected: the NL is much weaker than the AL. (So much weaker, in fact, that without interleague play last year, my Red Sox would’ve been a sub-.500 team. But that’s another story.) Rosenheck marshals a lot of evidence to show not just that the AL is stronger, but why the AL is stronger (hint: it’s not all about the designated hitter):

Some variation in league strength is not uncommon in baseball history, but the magnitude of today’s imbalance is remarkable. The cause is straightforward: A.L. teams have spent more money on players than their N.L. counterparts. In 2005, the average N.L. team had a $71 million payroll, while the average A.L. team’s was $75 million. Since then, N.L. spending has increased only slightly, to $74 million a team, while salaries in the A.L. have soared to $93 million a team.

Surprisingly, the Yankees cannot be directly blamed for this trend. They are one of only two A.L. teams that have reduced their payroll since 2005. The Red Sox, often accused of imitating the Evil Empire, are not the primary culprits, either — their $20 million increase in spending over the past two years is right around the A.L. average.

Instead, it is the small and midmarket A.L. teams that have pumped up their payrolls. The leader, believe it or not, is perennially cellar-dwelling Kansas City, which has more than doubled its $30 million payroll of 2005. The Chicago White Sox and Toronto have also added more than $30 million in salaries over the past two years.

[…]

It may be just as fair to finger the N.L. owners for their parsimony as it is to criticize the A.L.’s titans for their largess. Fans certainly don’t factor in league strength when deciding whether to go to the ballpark or how much to spend. According to Forbes magazine, N.L. teams earn just as much revenue on average as A.L. ones do, despite their smaller payrolls, which makes them more profitable: the average N.L. franchise posted an operating income of $19.9 million in 2006, compared with $12.7 million for the A.L.

And if you’re one of those NL partisans out there who is still clinging to the misguided belief that the NL is still just as good as the AL?

At a team level, an average A.L. squad would probably improve its record by about 10 games if it could face N.L. competition, meaning that last year’s Yankees probably would have been a 107-win juggernaut if they had played the Mets’ schedule. The same is true in reverse: if the 2006 Mets had played in the A.L., they would have won only 87 games and missed the playoffs. This is about the same difference in league strength as the gap between today’s N.L. and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball.

Eek. Ouch.

Why do I like this article? Because it shuts the door on all this moaning from Coley (and, for that matter, Nick—the other NL fan on UmpBump! aha!) about how the Red Sox are evil. We’re not evil. You national leaguers are just darn parsimonious.