Dear Casey Casem,

I don’t understand something and I was hoping you could dedicate a song to help me out.  I don’t understand the ‘AL is better than the NL’ argument.  It is very reminiscent, and is just as popular as, the famous “NFC-style football” argument of my childhood.  Which I never understood.  I’m technically on the clock at work so I’m not going to go rummaging around in football schedules from the 80’s and 90’s, but if I remember correctly, the format has always been that a given NFL team would play one entire division from the opposite league.  At the time that was typically five games, or approximately a third of your schedule.  In addition, there wasn’t any discernible (discernAble?...my Microsoft Word spellchecker recognizes both spellings…curious) differences between conferences—no rule differences or room for collective referee bias (like strike zone judgment).  Maybe some NFL superfan out there will tell me that referees from each conference judge, say, pass-interference or intentional grounding differently, but with a third of teams’ games being mixed between leagues you’d have to think referee ‘style’ was homogenized. 

Furthermore, both conferences have always drafted from the same pool of players (we’re getting to baseball in a second, bear with me).  Okay, so, you have the same players, the same rules, not much room for referee bias, and at least 30% of team schedules mixing conferences.  But that didn’t stop NFL commentators and my University of Iowa college roommate—who was from the Chicago area—from constantly squawking about ‘NFC-style-football.’  That spiel just wouldn’t die.  It was something about aggressive (blitzing?) defense and smash-mouth running offenses.  Correct me if I’m wrong, Gen-Xers, but the ‘NFC style’ was all about line-play and ball control.  Best I can tell this myth was built on the Bears and the Giants and Emmitt Smith.  And maybe the Redskins?  Never mind that Walter Payton was quintessentially not a ball-control back, that the NFC featured the 49ers who were the least smash-mouth team of all time, that Troy Aikman’s down-field passing shared at least half the credit for the awesomeness of the Cowboys’ offense, and that Marty Schottenheimer was an AFC coach.  Seriously, the ‘NFC-style’ was basically describing the Chiefs. 

Today’s version of the ‘NFC-style’ spiel is ‘the AL is so much better than the NL, they might as well just separate the leagues and make the NL a farm system for the AL.’  Every time a player, particularly a pitcher (CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee) switches leagues and goes from being a very good AL pitcher to a dominant NL pitcher, everyone crows about AL dominance.  KC Star reporters write absurd articles about how, if the Royals were in the NL, they would be competing for a playoff spot. 

I’m not rejecting the ‘AL is way better than the NL’ argument out of hand, I’m just saying I haven’t yet seen an acceptable explanation for it.  ‘AL pitchers are way better, as a group, than NL pitchers’, for example, isn’t much of an explanation.  Because, if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense.  What you’re saying with that particular non-argument is, essentially “We are witnessing an incredible coincidence.  It just so happens that sixteen teams, which all happen to be in the National League, have simultaneously fallen victim to the same deficiencies: none of them know how to scout pitching, and their minor league pitching development techniques happen to all be terrible.  Conversely, fourteen teams in the AL all happen to scout and develop pitching very well.”

Now, maybe you could say league-wide rules or umpiring differences somehow have had an effect on how pitching talent develops.  This argument would posit something like “smaller strike zones condition pitchers to throw more hittable pitches.”  Now, that could be an interesting argument, but does it really speak to talent levels?  I mean, couldn’t Jake Peavy just go through a transition period as he gets used to the new strike zone?  In fact, wouldn’t that make Peavy a better pitcher in the AL, since he’s gotten used to working in such tight spaces?

Whatever rules or bias-based argument you might make to explain why pitching is worse in the NL…wouldn’t those same arguments necessarily imply that hitting is better?  For example, the ‘pitchers in the NL are more hittable because they have a smaller strike zone argument’ would have to also say ‘hitters are better in the NL because they get more hittable pitches.’  Or maybe they’re worse because they get more hittable pitches and therefore never develop the ability to deal with pitches that are higher or lower in the strike zone?  Is that what this is all about?  I guess then they’d be worse when transitioning to the AL because suddenly they wouldn’t be seeing so many hittable pitches, maybe this was Holliday’s problem in Oakland.

But even if you made arguments like those, you couldn’t make the leap that baseball is somehow inferior in the NL, you’d simply be saying it’s played differently and there are awkward adjustments for players switching leagues.  I’m starting to go in circles here, but you get my drift.  Arguments for league-wide superiority talent-wise just make no sense to me. 

So could you play “Lost In Emotion” by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam?

Sincerely,

Lost and Confused