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Updated May 20
Because most of the message board public tend to not see things coming, we are going to go ahead and make a bold statement that flies in the face of public perception and even (some) numbers:
The NL has surpassed the AL as the superior league.
Lock it up.
Go ahead and stew on the boards. Write scathing comments about your most-hated baseball power ranker in Internet history. Tell him and anyone who will listen how you are never reading this rag again.
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| Acquisitions like Dan Haren prove the NL was much more aggressive this past offseason. (AP) |
The NL might be known as the Senior Circuit, but is has been the inferior league. Until now.
We couldn't say it before. The AL has dominated the All-Star Game for 10 years and has won three of the past four World Series. It has also dominated interleague play, going 427-329 from 2005-07. In fact, in the 11 years of interleague before this season, the AL had the better mark in seven of them.
The AL even went 22-19 this weekend, but we are still pretty certain the balance of power has shifted.
But this debate and the Power Rankings are not about current winning percentages. We could reprint the standings for you every Tuesday and call it Power Rankings, but that is telling you what you already know.
Like Chris Farley once said, or tried to say, "You can look up a bull's, uh ... but wouldn't you want to take the butcher's word for it?"
We strive to tell you what you might not know yet, and what might very well be.
Sure, the charmed Red Sox are the defending champs and a solid No. 1 in our Power Rankings, but seven of the top 10 spots belong to NL clubs. Deservedly so.
The NL started taking the elite players from the AL sellers who stopped trying to compete with the big-budget franchises of the Red Sox, Yankees and Angels. Those three clubs make the playoffs every year, no matter how much money you try to spend to compete with them.
The NL is more wide open, so more conducive to aggressive moves like the addition of Big Tex.
The shift began last July when Mark Teixeira was dealt to the Braves (No. 10 below) to kick things off. They went from elite pitching to the AL-like "let's mash" model -- as did the Astros (No. 9), who brought in Miguel Tejada from the O's.
Then the NL took two of the elite arms from the AL. The Mets (No. 7) won the Johan Santana sweepstakes and Arizona (No. 3) paid the lofty price tag for Dan Haren.
Pitching might win championships, but you win games by scoring more runs than your opponents. Of the top 10 teams in runs scored, eight of them reside in the NL: Cubs, D-Backs, Astros, Phillies, Pirates, Cardinals, Dodgers and Marlins. Only the Red Sox and Rangers crack that elite group from the AL.
The NL was more aggressive with the imports this year, too. Again, hope breeds aggression. The Cubs (No. 2) added Kosuke Fukudome and the Dodgers brought in Hiroki Kuroda.
The NL has also been better with the rookie breakthroughs. The aforementioned Cubs have Fukudome and monster-mashing catcher Geovany Soto leading the NL ROY race. The Reds have burgeoning star Joey Votto and Johnny Cueto, who has been compared to a young Pedro Martinez.
The aforementioned Braves stole rookie arm Jair Jurrjens from the pitching-poor Tigers -- heck, the everything-poor Tigers.
The AL gained ... Edgar Renteria, Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. How have they worked out for the Tigers? They are merely the second-worst team in baseball and have the second-worst ERA in baseball at 4.93.
Josh Hamilton (.319, 11 HR, 50 RBI) was a great AL addition, but it came at the expense of the best pitcher in baseball to date, Edinson Volquez. The fellow Dominican Dandy leads everyone with a 1.33 ERA.
We could go further into how the transformation occurred, but you should get the point by now.
If case you are stubborn and still not convinced, match up the current All-Star teams. Yours truly did here. Tell us which side looks stronger.
Hopefully, this power ranker has earned a shred of your respect for being able to look ahead instead of back. Yeah, right.
The complete Power Rankings:
| Power Rankings | ||||||||||
| Current | Team | Previous | ||||||||
 | 1 | Angels · Trends | 1 | |||||||
| Once more, with feeling: The Angels outscored their opponents by 68 runs and finished 100-62; the Yankees outscored their opponents by 62 runs and finished 89-73. This can mean one of several things: that the Angels were incredibly lucky; that the Angels were amazingly fortunate; or that the Angels were astonishingly blessed. I'm leaning towards a combo of explanations one and three ... Three months into his Angels tenure, Mark Teixeira finally gets to play in games that matter. Bully for him. | ||||||||||
 | 2 | Rays · Trends | 3 | |||||||
| I'll just come out and say it right up front: I think they win it all. They've got speed, defense, depth and pitchers who miss bats (that's the cool way to say "strikeouts" nowadays, dontcha know). I'd feel even more confident if I thought Joe Maddon would leave Troy Percival off the playoff roster and give his innings to certified L.D. crush Grant Balfour ... Don't discount Carl Crawford's value as a pinch-runner/late-inning defensive replacement ... After thinking about it for days and crunching the numbers, I've come up with two viable candidates to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Rays' first playoff game: Hall of Famer Wade Boggs and Tampa mainstay Hulk Hogan. | ||||||||||
 | 3 | Cubs · Trends | 2 | |||||||
| It figures that they'd have the bad fortune to face the one playoff team without much lefty pitching. Jim Edmonds becomes a crucial player against the Dodgers' glut of righties ... I accept that the networks dictate the hour at which every non-WNBA sporting event will be played, but an 8:30 p.m. local start for Game 2 of Dodgers-Cubs still seems willfully stupid ... Of course Cubs fans should be worried about Carlos Zambrano. The team would be better off right now if somebody had singled off Big Z during the early innings of his no-hitter, which would've allowed Lou to remove him from the game (and preserve his arm) without enraging the masses. | ||||||||||
 | 4 | Red Sox · Trends | 4 | |||||||
| At full strength, the Red Sox are baseball's best team. With Mike Lowell down and the status of J.D. Drew and Josh Beckett up in the air, they ain't at full strength... All the time off -- the Red Sox-Angels series has one of those NBA-ish day-on/day-off rotations -- plays to Boston's advantage ... I can't imagine how this doesn't go five games. | ||||||||||
 | 5 | Phillies · Trends | 5 | |||||||
| They catch a break in that the Brewers can only use CC Sabathia once in the first four games of the series. The Phillies should tee off on the Brewers' righty starters; their lefty-leaning lineup will have more trouble with big CC ... Brett Myers was awful until mid-summer, devastating between then and Sept. 14, then awful again in his final two starts. Go ahead, you figure him out ... Yes, Brad Lidge gave up two monstrous dingers during the Astros' postseason run in 2005. Big deal. He has mostly been a wonderful pitcher since then. I don't buy into the whole psychological-wounds thing. | ||||||||||
 | 6 | Twins · Trends | 8 | |||||||
| I'm writing this before Tuesday night's for-all-the-marbles clash ... The Twins get ranked ahead of the White Sox owing to last week's unlikely sweep ... Not to be the rain-on-parade guy here, but if the Twins still had Johan Santana we'd be talking about them as a World Series contender ... I underestimated the Twins all season long, to be honest. I figured the young pitchers would take much longer to develop and that the limp-noodle bats at third base and in the outfield would prove too much to overcome. My bad ... Of course, I'm still predicting that Tampa pastes whoever wins the play-in game. | ||||||||||
 | 7 | White Sox · Trends | 6 | |||||||
| Hello, symmetry, part I: Through 162 games, the White Sox and Twins have the same record (88-74), the same home (53-28) and road (35-46) records, and almost the same number of runs scored (829 for Minny, 810 for Chicago) and allowed (744 for Minny, 729 for Chicago) ... So the White Sox drop five straight final-week games to the Twins and Indians, but they're still "clutch" because they rebounded to win one against the Indians and another against the indifferent Tigers? Whatever. | ||||||||||
 | 8 | Yankees · Trends | 10 | |||||||
| Hello, symmetry, part II: The Yankees and Mets finished 2008 with the same record (89-73), the same home (48-33) and road (41-40) records, and within 15 runs of one another in runs scored and allowed. The Yankees, of course, put up those numbers against the AL's big-boy competition ... I'm about to sound like a massive Yankee apologist, but if you had said in April that they would lose Chien-Ming Wang, Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui for most of the season, get nothing out of Phil Hughes or Ian Kennedy, and see Robinson Cano regress into a poor man's Mariano Duncan ... well, 89 wins would've sounded pretty good, right? | ||||||||||
 | 9 | Brewers · Trends | 12 | |||||||
| They came up big when they had to, or at least CC Sabathia and Ryan Braun did. Were Corey Hart, J.J. Hardy or Bill Hall even on the active roster last week? ... Chances are the Brewers have as little idea what to expect from Yovani Gallardo against the Phillies in Game 1 as you or I ... It's a great story, this once-proud franchise finally getting its act together and making the playoffs after a 92-year drought, but the Brewers chip away at the happy narrative with all the crap-talking, chest-pounding and shirt-untucking they do. | ||||||||||
 | 10 | Blue Jays · Trends | 9 | |||||||
| I can't decide whether the Jays' 86-76 campaign was a success or a disappointment. They surrendered the fewest runs of any team in baseball, but the hitters didn't do much until it was too late ... J.P. Ricciardi lives to see another season, ostensibly under the condition that he doesn't return phone calls from David Eckstein's agent ... I'm trying to think of scenarios that are less probable than A.J. Burnett opting out of his contract and testing the free-agent waters. A surprise visit by Halley's Comet? A Stephen Hawking victory on Dancing with the Stars? | ||||||||||
 | 11 | Mets · Trends | 7 | |||||||
| Five runs in the final three games are as much a reason the Mets are packing up their shower shoes and toiletries as the travails of the super-maligned bullpen ... Late Sunday night, I watched a local sportscaster rail about 'THE CULTURE OF LOSING!!!' that has supposedly engulfed the poor, sweet Metsies. Here's the thing: If one or two balls had bounced differently in any of the close games they lost during the past two seasons, you're looking at a team with a three-season playoff streak, not one that has been tattooed with the "loserhead" tag. This is unfair and shortsighted ... Despite all the screams for franchise-revolutionizing change, there aren't a lot of moves to be made. Omar Minaya has his new four-year deal (lovely PR work, letting news of it slip as Rome burned last week), the players and media have embraced Jerry Manuel, and the team would be foolish to disturb the Reyes/Wright/Beltran/Santana/Pelfrey core ... The obvious solution? Take a deep breath, then set about finding guys like Matt Lindstrom and Heath Bell -- who the Mets gave away in recent years -- to plug the middle-relief leaks. | ||||||||||
 | 12 | Dodgers · Trends | 11 | |||||||
| I won't pretend to speak for all Yankee fans, but yeah, many of us are sincerely happy for Joe Torre ... The Dodgers have played nothing competition for the past five weeks, which has as much to do with their surge as Manny Ramirez. Their last series against a legit team concluded on Aug. 25 ... Rafael Furcal treated the season-ending series against San Francisco as "spring training." There's probably still some rust to be shaken off. | ||||||||||
 | 13 | Marlins · Trends | 14 | |||||||
| There's a lot to like here moving forward: the cache of young starters, frisky kids like Cameron Maybin, Matt Lindstrom in the 'pen -- but the usual financial issues will force them to deal off Kevin Gregg and others ... Maybe you take some of the slow-footed sluggers due for hefty raises, like Mike Jacobs or Dan Uggla, and trade them for pitching depth and guys who can field their position. The Marlins have plenty of offense; they can get by with a defense-minded player at second base. | ||||||||||
 | 14 | Astros · Trends | 15 | |||||||
| Fine, they finished strong. Now comes the hangover, when the Astros wake up to an organization that's creaky and devoid of prospects ... We all expected more from Hunter Pence this year, but he's still only 25 on Opening Day 2009 ... I don't care how scrappily they stepped up in 2008. If Mark Loretta, Geoff Blum, Brad Ausmus or Darin Erstad are on the Houston roster next season, the government ought to intervene. | ||||||||||
 | 15 | Cardinals · Trends | 17 | |||||||
| As per usual for a La Russa-helmed team, they were better than the sum of their parts ... Nice move signing Kyle Lohse for a slightly-below-market deal before the start of free agency ... You know who's pretty good? Albert Pujols, that's who ... It might not be a bad idea to re-up wise geniusy pitching guru Dave Duncan before a big-dollar team that wants to placate its fan base realizes he's on the market. | ||||||||||
 | 16 | Indians · Trends | 13 | |||||||
| It mostly came down to health -- winning without your middle-of-the-order cogs is not easy, clearly -- but the Indians shouldn't get a full pass. For all the things they do right, they haven't had a big-time corner-outfield bat since Manny Ramirez and nothing they've tried in the bullpen has worked ... It's time to cut bait on Andy Marte (perhaps it's no coincidence that few of the hot prospects traded away by John Schuerholz have blossomed). Move Peralta to third and Cabrera to short (where he should be playing in the first place), then go find a second baseman to complete what should prove a productive offensive and defensive infield. | ||||||||||
 | 17 | Diamondbacks · Trends | 16 | |||||||
| Baseball's most disappointing team in 2008, hands down. At least the Indians can blame their fate on a wave of injuries. The Diamondbacks have no excuse except underperformance ... Somebody's going to overpay Orlando Hudson by $15 million, owing to his defensive rep and his good-guy clubhouse demeanor ... "Hope that the kids improve" isn't much of an organizational game plan, but it's the only rational one for the D-Backs heading into 2009. They're too smart to deal guys like Chris Young when their value is at its lowest. | ||||||||||
 | 18 | Athletics · Trends | 18 | |||||||
| The last-weekend sweep at Seattle's hands was unseemly, but the Dan Haren, Nick Swisher, Rich Harden and Joe Blanton deals have stocked the organization with all kinds of useful parts ... I wonder what it's like to be an A's fan. Your team runs its business smartly and efficiently, yet there aren't any post-Bash-Brothers championship banners flying high over the stadium. There's always hope, at least, and you can sleep at night knowing that smart people are in charge. I'm rooting for your patience to pay off. | ||||||||||
 | 19 | Rangers · Trends | 20 | |||||||
| Today's duh-really assessment: they need pitching. Rangers fans are as bored reading it as I am writing it, but that doesn't make it any less true. Maybe it has finally sunk in that they should go after guys who keep the ball down -- which, of course, would require an overhaul of their middle-infield defense ... They've quietly built one hell of a farm system, plus they have what no other MLB organization does: a glut of catching. | ||||||||||
 | 20 | Royals · Trends | 21 | |||||||
| The effort is there; the talent is not. And talent trumps effort ... They finished strong, with an 18-8 September ... If they decided to deal Gil Meche (three years, $30-plus million left on his contract) for a handful of prospects, no fewer than eight teams would participate in the bidding. As tough as it is to deal a starter who has succeeded in the batty AL, maybe that's the best way to go about replenishing the system. | ||||||||||
 | 21 | Tigers · Trends | 22 | |||||||
| What a bunch of quitters. The way the Tigers rushed through Monday's game against the White Sox, you have to wonder if they had a cab with a running meter waiting outside the park ... Let's not let everybody's super-pal Jim Leyland off the hook here. When the Tigers stumbled, he stopped pinch-hitting and started to leave his pitchers (especially Justin Verlander) in the game several batters too long ... This is an aging team with an inability to catch the ball, no inclination to spend on needed upgrades and few prospects in the wake of the Miguel Cabrera/Dontrelle Willis deal. Good luck righting this ship in a single offseason. | ||||||||||
 | 22 | Reds · Trends | 19 | |||||||
| With a few savvy moves, they could contend in 2009. The wish list starts with a corner-outfield bat and a replacement for low-energy 3B Edwin Encarnacion (Adrian Beltre via trade?). They could use a shortstop, too, as Jeff Keppinger is most useful in a super-utility role ... Dusty Baker didn't run any pitchers into the ground this season, nor did he smother any of his young players with a pillow. This constitutes progress. Now, if he could only quit Corey Patterson ... | ||||||||||
 | 23 | Rockies · Trends | 24 | |||||||
| At this time last season, they were baseball's fresh-faced darlings. No, really, they were. You can look it up ... Some regression to the mean had to be expected, but nearly every player not named Matt, Brad or Ubaldo disappointed ... They have four legit starters and a nice morsel of trade bait in Garrett Atkins (to the Yankees for some pitching?), but Brian Fuentes will flee via free agency and Holliday's expiring contract will fuel 720,000 rumors. Difficult decisions lie ahead. | ||||||||||
 | 24 | Giants · Trends | 23 | |||||||
| If you'd told me before the season the Giants would not end 2008 as one of baseball's five worst teams, I'd have called you a crazy person, then backed away slowly while maintaining eye contact and dialing 911 on my cell ... The positional players remain a mess -- enjoy those next four years of a decaying Aaron Rowand, Giants fans -- but the young arms are abundant ... I keep hearing that Matt Cain will be dangled in a deal for the soon-to-get-very-very-very-expensive Ryan Howard or Prince Fielder. Bare positional-prospect cupboard or not, that strikes me as a big risk for the Giants to take. | ||||||||||
 | 25 | Braves · Trends | 25 | |||||||
| The 2008 Braves, in nine words: injuries bad luck injuries injuries injuries bad luck injuries ... Remember when the Braves used to trot out a functional outfield? Boy, that sure takes me back ... Tim Hudson won't be back until August at the very earliest, so the Braves are at least two starting pitchers short of a marginal rotation. Veterans like Derek Lowe or Brad Penny could be a nice fit. | ||||||||||
 | 26 | Pirates · Trends | 26 | |||||||
| The two New York teams win 89 games and get labeled by slow-blinking fans as weak-willed losers. Pirates devotees must see that and think, "Unappreciative a--holes" ... The first postseason move was to fire the first base coach -- that'll sure fix what ails 'em ... Neither the Pirates nor their players took anything resembling a step forward in 2008. The season's biggest success? Nate McLouth, I guess, or maybe that Matt Capps' arm remains attached to his torso ... Most people reading this aren't old enough to remember a time when the Pirates were a competitive franchise. That's tragic, in a circle-of-life/one-generation-giving-way-to-the-next sense. | ||||||||||
 | 27 | Orioles · Trends | ||||||||