The figures are in, which means this must be another baseball column.
Do the math. Obviously the American League is better than the National League.
This is an opinion that might not cause the kind of objections it once would have, for when baseball was the world, the world was divided clearly by leagues. You were born an American Leaguer like you were born a Texan or you lived as a National Leaguer the way you lived as a vegetarian. Nothing to be done. That is just the way it was.
This arrangement gave harmony to lives, structure to reality and meaning to existence.
This is the way it worked: team first, league second, country third. A Cubs fan could tolerate a dentist before a White Sox fan and a Frenchman before an American Leaguer.
This was all the thought the matter needed and all that it deserved.
Today, in a world that flies to where it is going, arguments about baseball are like disagreements over steam versus sail.
Whatever else interleague play has done, other than dilute the natural order of things, it has accumulated evidence of league superiority.
The essential platelets in the lifeblood of baseball have always been statistics and this past week has been a veritable nosebleed.
After the first installment of interleague play, the Americans lead the Nationals 48-36, including the Sox’s disposal of the Cubs 2-1.
The AL hit more home runs, as was expected, 87-79. Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. is chasing Roger Maris’ home run record, after all. And Frank Thomas missed the whole thing.
Also, the AL hit for a higher average, which might not have been expected. It is San Diego’s Tony Gwynn who is chasing .400.
The AL scored more runs, slugged better, walked more often and stole just as many bases.
Even the non-hitting pitchers from the American League collected nearly as many hits as the hitting pitchers of the National. And the designated hitters in the NL matched almost exactly the DH’s in the American.
What does this all mean? Baseball is baseball and probably immune to dickering.
The NL did have the edge in sacrifice bunts, living up to its image as the thinking-man’s league.
Even the AL pitching was better, and not all of it was from the Cubs.
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Roberto Hernandez of the Sox offered the notion that if the Sox were to bat all the time against the kind of NL stuff they saw from the Cubs’ staff, mostly fastballs and mostly hitable, they would be one happy bunch.
Maybe the cure for Albert Belle is Turk Wendell. Belle wouldn’t be the first.
These performance numbers are much more significant than attendance figures, which is where most of the focus has been. Attendance is up 40 percent or something over the season average, which only means the season average is pretty crummy.
Baseball ought not to be too tickled with interim gimmicks.
It can’t just keep building new stadiums or accepting more wild cards or, coming next, realigning from one league to the other.
Sooner or later, baseball will again have to get back to whatever it was that made it the national game in the first place.
The week’s numbers do reinforce the sentiment that has been around for some time, that most of the interesting players to watch are in the American League–the aforementioned Griffey, Belle and Thomas, the ever-redundant Cal Ripken and young Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, even the next great curiosity, Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu, almost anybody you might want to see, including the best manager in baseball, Phil Garner.
The National League has the Atlanta pitching staff and Barry Bonds.
But here’s what sealed my opinion over which is the better league. One of the stars of the NL, Larry Walker of Colorado, simply refused to bat against Johnson of Seattle. Something about worrying whether Johnson’s fastball would take off the end of his nose.
I said the National League was inferior, not dumber.