![]() There are more potent lineups with a bunch of teams." Anderson's Show of Powerīrady Anderson, the major leagues' surprising home run leader with 15, led off the first inning for the the Baltimore Orioles with home runs five times before yesterday. We should be talking about the good hitters. "In football, when scoring goes up, they don't talk about the defense they talk about the great quarterbacks and the rabbits who are running downfield and catching the balls. Phil Garner, the Milwaukee Brewers' manager, put it this way: If the theory is right, the pitchers better run for cover. pitchers but also than last season, the league's hitters have to be getting better, if the stronger-lineups theory is to be accepted. "In the National League, they have more specialty hitters and pitchers hit."īut for the league's pitchers to perform less effectively not only than N.L. "If you look at the teams in the American League, a lot of teams have guys one through nine who can hit the ball out of the park," Dobson said. Like Smith, he attributes the difference in pitchers' results to the difference in lineups. Pat Dobson, the Baltimore Orioles' pitching coach, spent the past three seasons in the N.L. Maybe in the American League, everybody goes for offense first and pitching second." Many clubs go seven, eight deep in hitters. "One thing I've noticed," Smith said, "is the different composition of the ball clubs in the two leagues. Compared with the last season before expansion, 1992, the N.L. was 16 percent and 13 percent higher than the N.L. In the corresponding periods the previous two seasons, the A.L. was the Chicago White Sox's 4.17, not only doesn't have any team under 3.00, it also doesn't have any team under 4.00 and has only five teams under 5.00. Two teams, Atlanta and Los Angeles, are under 3.00. The Tigers entered the weekend with a 7.17 e.r.a., more than a run higher than Colorado's N.L.-worst 6.08.īut the Rockies are one of only two N.L. Smith, who spent his previous 11 years in baseball with National League clubs, has inherited a shellshocked staff that epitomizes baseball's pitching problems. After only three weeks of conditioning last year, pitchers might have been able to combine for shutouts, but they weren't ready to pitch complete games in the early weeks. Pitchers had an edge on the hitters in the early weeks of last season because of the abbreviated spring training after the end of the strike, but if some form was to be followed, the number of complete games should be up this season, as it is in the National League. "That's amazing," the Detroit Tigers' general manager, Randy Smith, said when told that the number of A.L.
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