For most of the season, I've heard it time and time again.  I've heard it from Dick Bremer, I've heard it from various ESPN analysts, and I've heard it from Twinkie Town commenters.  "The AL Central is the worst division in baseball."  "The Twins might be able to pull out of the weak AL Central." 

The AL Central is not a great division.  The AL Central win percentage, 47%, ranks last in all 6 divisions.  The top team in the divison, Detroit, is only 9 games above .500.  How could I argue that this isn't the worst division in baseball?

The answer is simple... you have to account for the difference between leagues.  I'll start by doing a very simplified version, based on interleague records, and also show you a very complex version, done by someone much smarter than me.  Below are the interleague records for the last 5 years.

As you can see, and as you probably all ready know, the American League has dominated the National League.  The AL win percentage has been 56.7% over the last 5 years.  Not an insignificant amount.  I've heard people say that the DH rule is the main reason for the difference.  Thinking that the difference in rule accounts for any significant portion of the AL's domination is really silly - it's only one person, most NL teams have a pinch hitter that can be used, the AL doesn't get to use the DH in half the games!  Us as Twins fans know how much of a boost we've gotten from interleague play, and this is the first year we've had a DH to talk about.  To be safe, I'd be willing to drop it down to 55%, so a 5% boost.  Below is the table of winning percentages for each division over the course of the season this year.  I then added 5% to each division in the AL, and took away 5% from each division in the NL.

As you can see, the AL Central now has a healthy lead on any division in the NL.  You might say that this isn't the proper way to do things, just adding the 5% to the AL and taking it away from the NL, and you'd be partially right.  It isn't the greatest way to do things; you aren't taking into account the fact that some of the games being counted were interleague games.  But adding just 3%. less than half of the actual advantage the AL has over the NL, the ALC still comes out just behind the NL Central and ahead of the other two NL divisions. 

Yes, that was an overly simplistic way of doing things, but that doesn't mean my conclusions are wrong.  I primarily did that because I feel that some people are going to ignore the more complex statistical method shown below. Like I said above, I will show another method, this using numbers from someone much smarter than me.  Beyond the Box Score is an extremely useful website, showing a primarily statistical view on baseball analysis. Each week, they do their power rankings.  These power ranking are similar to Baseball Prospectus' third order wins, which use wOBA, tRA, and other statistics to calculate an expected winning percentage, instead of just using actual winning percentage and adjusting for strength of schedule.  They also use a league adjustment, but this one is much better than the crude one I used.  It is calculated by using interleague records, players that have switched leagues, and other information.  The expected win% column is a measure of how many wins a given team would expect to win if all teams were in one big league and played eachother equally.

I took an average rank, and an average expected win % for each division, and my results are below.

As you can see, the AL Central edges out all 3 NL divisions once again.  Because it is adjusting for strength of schedule, the AL East gets a big boost, and the NL Central takes a big hit.  The others stay about the same, only with a small % change for league adjustment. 

I hope that one of the two methods shown has gotten through and that people will start to understand that while we aren't in an elite division, it is still an average or slightly better than average division.  If we manage to shake off this last horrible loss and come back to win the division, we should be proud.  We may have gotten to play the Royals quite a bit, but noone in the NL has to play teams as good as the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees.