Rox Talk

Lots of Hot Stove fodder last week. First off the much anticipated Mitchell Report was released last Thursday. At this point, I think it is a bit anticlimactic. Although now we have a yin to Bond's Yang which would be Clemens. Although public opinion will always be against Bonds more so then Clemens, I think it will give an out to Baseball Writer's when it comes to Hall of Fame election time. Basically they will probably leave Bonds and Clemens off at the same time and then no one will think it is racially related. Of course we could always take Bob Feller's suggestion of having a Hall for those who deserve it and then a cheater's Hall for those who took performance enhancing substance. Okay so that is a bit strong but in a 100 years we will simply look back and the late 80s, through the 90s, and early 00s will simply be known as the Steroid Era much like we have the Deadball Era. All stats will be qualified and the big numbers will simply be adjusted away.

The Denver Post had an article on baseball salaries, competitive balance between leagues, and why the AL is so much better than the NL. Anyway they had a graphic showing the salaries of the starting All-Star players for each league. The graphic basically showed the AL starting line up to be worth $115.16 million and the NL line up worth $52 million. Anyway I don't think that is a good representative sample because the All-Star line up is not always a good example of the overall worth. So I went and found the highest paid player for each position and results are:

Well if you include the exorbitant Yankee salaries for Giambi, A-Rod, and Jeter then the AL blows out the NL but if you take these 3 players out and fill in with the next highest player than basically the salaries are awash. Basically this says that both the NL and AL are equal opportunity money wasters...just look at some of those names...yikes! If you look at total payouts for each league than the AL spent $1,306,601,780 or about $93 million a team while the NL spent $1,184,961,212 or about $74 million. The AL does have another position to pay out paying about $7-8 million for a designated hitter and of course there are 16 NL teams and 14 AL teams. Obviously life at the top is better in the AL with 7 out of the 10 highest paying teams being from the AL. Interesting debate, I do think lineups from top to bottom in the AL are better and there seems to be a bit more talent but I don't think salaries are the ultimate reason for making the AL better.