I was talking to 10D and Sababas at work the other day, and they were calling the National League "Quad A". I decided to run the
Bradley-Terry Algorithm on this year's results, to see how much better the AL was. Bradley-Terry tries to account for unbalanced schedules and strength of opponents, so you can compare teams whose schedules are nothing alike -- I'm familiar with it from college hockey, and I pledge to use it for the voting during next year's Hot Dog Week.
The teams' rating numbers are normalized to 1 (A team with a 1 rating should win 50% of its games, if the schedule were balanced). You can compare two teams by dividing their ratings (A team with a rating of 1.5 should win 3 times as many games as a team with a rating of 0.5).
Here are the ratings after game 182:
1.4382 Boston
1.3830 Cleveland
1.3592 New York Yankees
1.3543 California of Los Anaheim
1.1935 Arizona
1.1907 Seattle
1.1804 Detroit
1.1791 San Diego
1.1743 Colorado
1.1430 Philly
1.1287 New York Mets
1.0566 Toronto
1.0404 Atlanta
1.0149 Los Angeles Dodgers
0.9966 Chicago
0.9604 Minnesota
0.9468 Milwaukee
0.8963 Oakland
0.8780 Texas
0.8535 St. Louis
0.8195 Chicago White Sox
0.7970 Washington
0.7931 San Francisco
0.7798 Baltimore
0.7653 Kansas City
0.7637 Houston
0.7527 Cincinnati
0.7516 Florida
0.7256 Tampa
0.6838 Pittsburgh
Neat things:
- Non-qualifiers Detroit and Seattle are "better" than all NL teams except for Arizona
- The playoff-bound Cubs would be below .500 if they had an average schedule.
- Three of the bottom five teams are in the NL Central. The Pirates are significantly worse than even Tampa.