THE HIDDEN CHANGE FOR MLB IN '23: INTERLEAGUE PLAY EXPLODES

Last year (in Marienbad?) there were 300 instances of what at one point might have been considered baseball's form of "miscegenation"--that curious phenomenon known as "interleague play." As we know, the two "leagues" in baseball were arbitrary constructions based on ancient entrepreneurial largesse, long since codified (calcified?) into "tradition" and rarely messed with (except when it suited the purposes of the nefariously enshrined Budzilla).

'Twas truly a Roman spring that year in Marienbad, what with its abject
pastoral nonsense, and the same can be said for baseball in 2023...

For all that, interleague play remained mostly a "curiosity," as those 300 games per year amounted to only about 6% of the overall schedule. With the leagues having now been homogenized (Midasized?) and the Commissioner's office now occupied by an ersatz interventionist, that arrangement has been expanded (exploded?) into something utterly different. There will now be approximately 1350 "interleague games" in each season, beginning this year, which more than quadruples their number (now comprising just under 28% of all games played).

All of this has flown completely under the radar of the media acolytes too busy with the cosmetic rule changes that have been instituted to veer the game away from the catastrophic trends that have been cascading as a result of the 1-2 punch of "quants" and Statcast. Brashly insisting that batting average is a pointless statistic yet secretly relieved that it is showing a modest uptick from its invidious Maginot Line (.240), those "embedded" folk who live to make the game "safe for modeling" have studiously avoided any and all mention of this change, which might prove more significant than any of the other interventions (pitch clock, shift ban, bigger bases, restrictions on pickoff throws). 

Fortunately, however, the folk at Forman et fils (baseball-reference.com) have managed to retain their original (primordial?) interest in interleague play, and are continuing to provide (in a low-key and relatively inaccessible way) the results of such games. Since it had devolved into a kind of afterthought, the results of interleague play have most likely become so obscure as to have escaped your attention: for example, what was the overall record between the leagues in 2022 (the last "6% solution" year)? Does anyone know which teams did exceptionally well in interleague play last year? Or had a catastrophic 4-16 record in such games during '22? Or what the overall result between the leagues turned out to be? (Remember that some folks--names omitted, of course, to protect the guilty--used to claim, when the AL was winning a marked number of these games, that it was "proof" of which league was the strongest.)

No? Don't know and don't care? Well, then, we won't bother to give you those answers...

...but we will begin another one of those inchoate services (though not as inchoate as the "action" in Last Year in Marienbad...) that will periodically display the ongoing results of 2023's massively expanded (yet curiously overlooked) interleague play. Given the dynamic nature of interleague play as a result of this change, these numbers (as of 4/21) are already out of date, but never mind that--we'll update every couple of weeks or so just to stay in practice.

(Note the antiquated display of the Angels here as "ANA"--just one of those transient glitches that show up even in the most tightly run web sites.)

What's interesting in the early going is just how expanded interleague play might reflect (and possibly exacerbate) the game's declining competitive balance: the results as broken out by opponent quality (what we sometimes have referred to here as "GvB") show a marked tendency toward something akin to "replacement level" play, with good teams absolutely thumping bad teams.

Note also that it's an absolute dead heat (on a merry-go-round?) at this point (or, should we say, yesterday...), with the leagues tied at 37-37. (After yesterday's games, the NL is now actually ahead 41-39, with those 80 interleague games played over the first three weeks of '23 representing almost a fourth of the number of interleague games played in '22.)

Another strange feature in the early going is that there are still three teams (all in the NL) who have yet to play an interleague game at all. (We've highlighted them in green: they're all NL West teams.)

Some folk (including Bill James) have downplayed any potential impact of expanded interleague play on the standings as they will eventually manifest by season's end, but the early going suggests that there are some impacts to be had. The early success of the Cubs and the Pirates can be at least partially attributed to their performance in interleague games (the Cubs have benefitted from going 5-1 against sub-.500 interleague opponents during April. When we get further along with all this, we'll display interleague hitting and pitching stats for you--data that will contain close to 200 PAs and up to 50 IP for hitters and pitchers this year. What we can tell you right now is that Jarred Kelenic, the heavily-hyped Mariners' prospect who has struggled mightily over the past couple seasons, is currently the interleague leader in HRs with five, and has a SLG of .838 in such games. Might that have something to with the fact that a vast majority of interleague games aren't scouted as robustly as intraleague games have been, and that some players have been able to take advantage of that (at least in the early going)??

There will be a lot more to unpack here, and, as you already know by now, we at BBB are the "kings of baggage"...so you've landed in the right place: somewhere in that vast ethereal plane between Marienbad and the Hotel California). Your motto for '23 might just be: "Bombs away, it's interleague play!"

Stay tuned...perhaps the revolution will, in fact, actually be televised.