AL Still Dominating NL In Interleague Play

By my count, there will be 252 interleague baseball games during the 2012 regular season. We first checked in after the first third, observing that the American League was leading the National League 46-38, and that the AL was outscoring the NL 410-335.

We’re now through another third. In the second third, the AL beat the NL 50-34, and the AL outscored the NL 366-324. Put them together and you have a 96-72 record and a 776-659 run separation.

You know who should care about whether or not one league is superior to the other? Baseball analysts. Analysts on the Internet or analysts who work for baseball teams, who have to worry about things like league adjustments when evaluating a player’s performance. Outside of that, it doesn’t matter. The All-Star Game pits one league against the other, but it pits only the best players against the best players, and it’s one game. The World Series is supposed to match the best team in the American League against the best team in the National League, but it doesn’t always feature the best teams, one team is only one representative, and the series is limited to four-to-seven games. If you aren’t an analyst, you shouldn’t be too concerned with league superiority or inferiority.

Yet people still are, because people are sports fans, and sports fans are irrational. In recent years, the AL has dominated the NL in interleague play, and this has caused fans of AL teams to become obnoxiously smug. In response, this has caused NL fans to be obnoxious back, with no one pausing to consider that they’re getting all emotional over a league. Nobody roots for leagues. I did one time see a guy wearing a blank All-Star Game jersey who wasn’t at the All-Star Game, but he was homeless. The most likely possibility is that the jersey was a donation. An alternate possibility is that this is something that happens to people who get emotionally invested in leagues.