Sam Donnellon: American League dominates interleague play, but not in October
AFTER LAST NIGHT'S victory over the Rays, the world champion Phillies are 4-9 in interleague play this season, all against the American League East. Before then, only the San Diego Padres had won less against the AL, although three other teams, in both leagues, had won as few games.
Two of those teams play in the National League, which makes the following all the more remarkable: Before last night and with a week to play in this annual baseball oddity, the American League held only an 89-80 margin over the National League.
Last season the AL finished with a 149-103 record before its representative, Tampa Bay, lost the World Series to the Phillies in five games. The margin was tighter the season before, 137-115, but the Red Sox swept the NL's Rockies in four games. In 2006, the AL dominated 154-98, but the Cardinals knocked off the Tigers in five games. The season before, when the margin tighter (136-116), the AL team, the Chicago White Sox, won in five games over the Astros.
This should work in reverse, right?
Unless the AL's annual dominance is really more about timing than superiority.
American League teams spend more and are deeper. It's a long-held staple that was, for years, backed by fiduciary evidence. In the past, the designated-hitter rule bloated many AL budgets by forcing them to spend more to obtain both that extra big bat and the bullpen pieces used to offset that hitting.
For years, the good AL teams have been built to combat the designated hitters more than take advantage of them. Three starters from the Braves' near-dynasty will reach the Hall of Fame. But the Yankees won all those World Series in the '90s because they spent big on their bullpen and the Braves did not.
The Yankees drove the AL's free-spending dynamic back then, and teams followed. The Red Sox, White Sox, Angels, Orioles, Toronto at times - the list of top-spenders was always American League-heavy. It's one reason Bud Selig's Brewers so readily and happily moved to the more frugal National League and its even tighter Central Division.
But look now. According to the Associated Press, four of the six highest payrolls are still in the American League, but the top 10 is split evenly between National League and American League teams. Go deeper and you will find 12 of the top 20 salaried teams now play in the National League.
The lack of horses among today's starters has dictated that, and has inched the National League game toward the AL version as well, pushing payrolls upwards.
Rarely does even a winning pitcher bat more than two times in a game. What the Phillies don't spend on a DH, they may spend on those valuable bats off the bench. Greg Dobbs and Matt Stairs came from American League teams. Combined, the two earn $3 million in salary.
The Phillies are in many ways a model of this. Given their struggles with starting pitching, Brad Lidge's injury, J.C. Romero's suspension, it may also explain the 4-9 record. Sure, they have never fared well against the AL - the record is now 94-118 since interleague began in 1997 - but this seemed to be the year they matched up well with the teams from the AL East, just as they had last October.
Lest we forget, they were two outs away from a sweep of the Yankees and blew games late to Toronto and Baltimore as well. This is no excuse, of course. Red Sox fans believe they would have repeated as champions last season if Manny Ramirez had behaved. You play the games with the players you have at the time, and in the end, you are what your record says you are.
The record says the Phillies are still in first place. The record also says they should improve once people like Lidge and Raul Ibanez return from the DL, once they stop trying so hard to please a fandom they used to feel a certain, um, ambivalence to.
The record also says that success and failure in these games are hardly a barometer for handicapping late October. The Phillies won it all last season playing like a healthy, high-priced American League team. They are losing this June, as they did last June, because they are simply not that team right now. *
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