Wall Street Journal puts the National League in its place: Toledo

A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that if the leagues were united in one 30-team league, and each team had to play all the others a similar number of games, no more than two National League franchises would have even qualified for the postseason in the past five years.

If this is true, it means the 2008 Pittsburgh Pirates would have finished fourth in the Eastern League, and last year's Washington Nationals would have lost to the Tampa Bay Media Softball All-Stars, behind the pitching of Bubba the Love Sponge.

In 2008, the Toronto Blue Jays finished well out of the playoffs and in fourth place in the brutal AL East, which includes the powerful Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. But in an adjusted schedule where all teams played one another, Toronto's actual .531 winning percentage that year would have been .564, with the improvement coming from playing the National League teams more often.



That would have put Toronto in seventh place in the 30-team league, good enough to make the playoffs. That year's World Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, would have finished in ninth place, out of the playoffs.

Yeesh, that puts David Wright behind Cody Ransom on my depth chart.

And, in case you're wondering -- no -- the article has no reference to Javier Vazquez.