newper wrote:
The reason that the AL will be superior to the NL is that the AL can build the team with a pure hitter, zero fielder guy. The NL teams do not have this luxury... they are much more likely to carry a utility guy than a power hitter. If Thome played on a NL team, for example, you would expect him to get maybe 150 PAs a year, but the price tag on him would be the same as it would be on an AL team. You can argue that he can play first base, and that is a fine argument, but an AL team can do that as well and add another pure power, zero field guy. That's really the reason why the AL would continue to beat the NL for the foreseeable future IMHO.
Imagine two teams with payrolls of $100,000,000 each. That averages out to $4,000,000 a year for each person on a 25 person roster, but of course most will make less and a few will make more, including a couple making much, much more. Even the average DH is going to make more than that 4m figure. From there on out, the teams are exactly the same. The only difference is the 25th man on the NL team, which will make much, much less than the $4,000,000 amount.
Now, that difference in resources should be spread to other areas on the NL team, so that the $3 million per year (let's say) they save on DHs gets put towards better... something. Anyway, if the positions are properly valued, the difference should be completely minimal.
The one thing that makes me thing this might not be completely true is that AL teams don't compete against MLB teams at large, but instead other AL teams (in general; interleague play is still a very small percentage of the games played). It could be that, if you were to construct the best possible $100,000,000 roster, and you could choose to either have a DH or not have a DH, the most efficient use of resources would be to have a DH. If that were true, the NL would be locked into a natural inefficiency; the extra $3,000,000 (or whatever) simply cannot purchase the same value, per game, that the DH would. In same-league games, you wouldn't notice because all teams would work within the same inefficient paradigm.
In other words, the AL teams would be the better teams because they are allowed to assemble better teams. They literally play better baseball, and, given the price constraints present since both leagues compete for the same pool of players, the AL has a natural efficiency which can be exploited.
Now, I should also say that arguing that the DH is more efficient, and that the DH makes a better baseball team, does not mean that the DH is right for baseball (I'm not arguing it's not either). Imagine if next year the NL adopted a rule that said you could have the same batter bat over and over and over, and someone else would run. For example, the Cardinals would have Albert Pujols make 27 outs a game, and the rest of the team would be runners and fielders. The Cardinals would be much much better at hitting, much much better at defense (because that's pretty much all those players are good for now) and probably better at pitching (both because of the defense and because more resources could be moved towards pitching.) But that would be an awful game, and hardly the same as what we expect baseball to be.
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