The GVG Report

Does the American League have an unfair advantage playing the National League at Home?

That’s what my first impression was when I saw the Phillies beat the American League pretty well at home earlier in the year and then get completely managed on the road.

My idea was that the AL has had many years worth of drafting and conditioning to perfect the DH position and when the NL rolls in, it can only put another position player in the lineup to fill the DH spot.

When a NL team looks for players, it is looking for a player who can play offense and defense. AL teams have a position for offense only. It makes sense that there would be a trade off in batting ability to get a player that can field too.

Plus, the wear on a position player is greater then an offense only player. They are diving to catch batted balls, they are thinking of what happened last inning and what will happen next inning and they have additional stress due to performance in the field by not letting their teammates down.

The DH has only to think of batting and only researches the pitcher's tendencies and not the other batter's tendencies.

Anyway... that’s my idea. Now let’s look at the data.

I took a look at all of the scores from 2007 and compiled them into an Excel database. There were 252 interleague games last year. ** In non-interleague games:** The AL averages 4.9 runs at home and 4.8 runs on the road against other AL teams. The Home field advantage is 0.1 runs. The NL averages 4.8 runs at home and 4.6 runs on the road against other NL teams. The Home field advantage is 0.2 runs. Fairly similar and not much of a home field advantage. ** But when the AL plays the NL....** The AL averages 5.67 runs at home and 5.06 runs on the road. The NL averages 4.53 runs at home and 4.76 runs on the road.

Even the NL's run output went up on the road in an AL park. Why?

The 5.06 vs the 4.53 in NL parks shows that the AL is just better than the NL by 0.53 runs. So there should be a corresponding 0.53 run advantage when the NL plays at AL parks. Right? But there isn't. The advantage is 0.91 runs (5.67 - 4.76 runs). The 0.38 run addition on top of the Al being better must be attributed to something else that only AL parks have. The DH.

Now there are probably a number of reasons that go into scoring differences in general but most of them drop out like park familiarity, travel distance, pitching rotations, crowd noise, etc. The only thing it could be is the DH and possibly the adjustments NL players must make for AL umpire’s strike zone.

Summary: The AL is better than the NL by 0.53 runs but there is an additional unfair advantage of 0.38 runs per game via the DH. In my opinion the DH position should be discontinued.

The original purpose of the DH was to keep the older stars in the game.

That’s not baseball... that’s marketing.

-GVG