BPro: Burke and Sheehan: Chillin’ in the American League

A look at why the NL is outscoring the AL and even more chasmous...the massivo disparity between truth and Buster Olney!

Speculation inside the game, as Buster Olney referenced in his blog Saturday, centers on the theoretical eradication of performance-enhancing drugs from the game in the wake of the Mitchell Report. Personally, I dismiss this out of hand. Since 2003, when survey testing kicked off a series of regimes and punishment mechanisms, offensive levels, and specifically power, have jumped around from year to year independent of what rules were in place. There has been no correlation between increated testing and greater penalties, and offensive levels and power, over the five-year period.

This makes sense when you think about it. Both from the players who have been suspended for failing tests and the ones named in the Mitchell Report, we learned that PED use was not something confined to power hitters, nor even hitters. Even if PED use has been affected by the rules changes, there’s little reason to think that it would show itself in lowered offense.

The biggest reason to dismiss this claim, though, is the league split. Runs per game, slugging, and XBH/FB are all up in the National League, whose players are subject to the same testing program as the ones in the AL. To assert that the overall falloff is due to the Mitchell Report and the impact of PED testing is to imply that all the juicers were American League hitters. That doesn’t strain credulity; it causes credulity to laugh at you, smack you upside the head, and go find your best friend to smack him, too. The one explanation that I can safely rule out is some kind of Mitchell Report/testing effect.