MLB.com reviews 20 years of interleague play.
Only eight players have hit for the cycle in an Interleague game. Texas’ Shin-Soo Choo was the latest to do so, finishing off his cycle with a ninth-inning triple in the Rangers’ 9-0 victory over the Rockies on July 21, 2015. The batter directly after Choo in the lineup, Delino DeShields, finished just a homer shy of getting his own cycle that night.
I highlight this fact due to the word “only”. That implies very few cycles came in interleague play. Since 1997, 10.6% of the games played were between an AL team and an NL team. With 75 total cycles in that time, 10.6% of the cycles came in interleague games. Pretty much what one would expect for a large sample size of games.
What’s much more interesting is the AL domination in the games. With teams carrying more pitchers in the bullpen, teams can’t afford to have a deep bench anymore. AL teams are forced to carry that extra bat in the person of a designated hitter, and that seems to be making a difference. Over the 20 years of play, the AL beats the NL by an average score of 5.0 to 4.4 in games with a designated hitter, just 4.5 to 4.4 without.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2hK0VVp
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