Courtesy of baseball-reference, a quick assessment of OPS+ (on base plus slugging, normalized), by examining the trends of the top hitters in the league each year.
Of the players in the top 5 per league, the average OPS+ is 163, the median 159. The leagues are quite comparable in this measure - best hitter in the league gets distorted wildly, when a god is about, but the 4th and 5th positions hold fairly steady.
5th is generally around 148, with a std. dev of about 8.
National League #5 has been better than his AL counterpart since time began. The exception is the period between 1909 and 1926. b-r's OPS+ calculation is supposed to weed out the pitchers, and it's a league normalized thing, so I don't have an explanation.
January 25, 2004 8:27 PM
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