Contractual Matters: T... (05/13)
2 comments have been left for this article. BP Comment Quick Links
| |
|
|
May 14, 2010 One-HoppersCombined Hit List Rankings: May 14With this week's National and American League Hit Lists posted on their regular schedule and me NOT on heavy painkilers (unlike last week, when I was out on a brief medical leave), here's this week's combined Hit List rankings, with the league adjustments we've discussed before. This marks the first week that the preseason PECOTA projections are not part of the LF computation; this is all based on results to date. Before you gripe about bias against your team, take a look at their run differential, and see here for a primer on the basics.
Rk Team Comments So we're down to four NL teams in the top 10, none of them above the Padres at number four. The not-so-mighty Cardinals, the fourth-ranked team in the last combo rankings, are much closer to falling out of that grouping, though there's just one other Senior Circuit team above .500 after the 21-point deduction. In the AL, the Blue Jays are the big gainer, up from #13 to #8, with the A's swapping spots, perfect game and all.
|
While I agree about the AL East clearly being the best division in baseball, I'm not sure about rating the rest of the AL as clearly superior to the NL.
I took a look at interleague results last year (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9481) and found that even bad AL teams did pretty well against the NL. Key graf:
One revealing aspect about the AL's advantage over the NL is that even the lousier junior circuit teams are beating the senior circuit's weak sisters consistently. Sticking with the last five years of data (including this unfinished season) and splitting each league into upper and lower halves in terms of interleague records -- the 35 best (or worst) team-seasons in each half in the AL, 40 in the NL -- we find that the AL's better half, which won at a .561 clip in those intraleague games, boosted their winning percentage to .610 in interleague games. The lower half, which produced a measly .438 winning percentage in intraleague play, kicked NL tail at a .523 clip. The NL's better half posted a .551 winning percentage in intraleague play but just a .447 mark in interleague play, while the lower half dipped from .450 to .421.