Whether a .300 hitter in the AL is better than a .300 hitter in the NL will depend instead on the relative strength of the league/division pitching. (There’s no such thing as a “Designated Pitcher”, though a LOOGY might come close…) By your own comments, you speculated that the NL got better pitching due to natural migration away from the “hitter-friendly league” of the AL. Shouldn’t that mean that a .300 NL hitter is better than a .300 AL hitter, not vice-versa?

Also, when you say that the offense in both leagues is fairly close, how are you measuring that? If runs/game is the standard, then doesn’t that mean that the offense in the NL is actually better than in the AL, because runs produced in NL games is (typically) generated among 8 players while runs produced in AL games is generated among 9 players?

I find this thread fascinating, and I’d like to explore how other SOS measurements rank the teams. I also agree with Cubbies, that using only the last 5 years (I’d even argue for only 3 to 4 years) is more relevant for evaluating the current franchises’ prospects.

This is an oversimplification because offense alone does not make a league better. But I would argue that with offense between the two leagues now fairly close, it means that the hitters and pitchers are both better in the AL. Whereas I am arguing above that the better pitchers flocked to the NL, it seems that overall their talent level has fallen off over the last 15 years. A starter with a 3.00 ERA in the AL is a better pitcher than one with a 3.00 ERA in the NL because the offensive talent is superior in the AL. A .300 hitter in the AL is a better hitter than a .300 hitter in the NL because the pitching talent in the AL is superior.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/games/head2head.cgi?teams=TBD&from=2000&to=2009&submit=Submit

They still went 565-694 (the equivalent of 73-89 in a 162-G season) against everybody else.

As far as the AL West being weak goes, I certainly don't believe it, but I've gotten the impression over the years that people felt it was easy to win, that Anaheim was winning it "by default" in recent seasons... But maybe it's just me, being a Red Sox fan (and naturally looking down on the Angels' accomplishments -- until last year, that is), because Googling "weak al west" returns fewer hits than "weak nl east", "weak nl central", "weak nl west", and "weak al central". So by the "Google test" I made up just now, the AL West is actually the 2nd-best (least-weak?) division in baseball behind the AL East. For whatever that's worth.

Really? For most of the last 10 years I, and a lot of people I talked to, considered the AL West to be the most competitive from top to bottom. You could make a good argument though that they wasted the most talent. All 4 teams end the aughts above 0 in MLE, and they only have 1 pennant to show for it.

Now the AL Central, there's a weak division, and the numbers don't tell the story. The Twins were consistently good throughout the 00's, with 2000 being the only year they had less than 79 wins. The Royals were consistently bad, with 2003 being the only year they were above .500 at 83-79. But the other 3 teams were all over the place. Year in and year out, the crown was a battle between the Twins and whichever other team happened to catch fire. In 6 of the last 10 years, only two teams in the AL Central finished at .500 or above. In 3 of the remaining years the third team was 83-79 (kind of a weird statistical aberration). In '06 they had three teams above 90 wins, and I'm going to have to declare that year a fluke.
So while the AL Central may have averaged out to be more powerful than the NL East, if you look at it on a year-by-year basis, the NL East probably had a better decade.