Game Result: Phillies 11, Jays 6. The Jays winning streak is stopped at 5.

Star of the Game: Bobby Abreu - 3-5 with 4 RBIs. He's good.

Unsung Hero: John McDonald whose hustle allowed him to go from 1st to 3rd on a single to left and score on a shallow fly ball after an entertaining sequence at the plate.

Boxscore: If you insist

Elsewhere: The Red Sox win again. The Jays sit 5 games back.

All Stars: Here are the rosters. Halladay, Ryan, Glaus, Wells and Rios will represent the Jays in Pittsburgh.  Rios will miss the game due to his injury.

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Now that interleague play has ended what can we conclude? The NL isn't that good. They got hammered in interleague play, it's been awhile since they won an All Star Game, and they've lost the last 8 World Series games.  What else can we find out?

Let's go to the Data Tables! (Magpie would be so proud)

The AL standings today look like this:

But if we only included AL games against AL teams it would look like this:

That's right, the Jays would be 2 games ahead of the Red Sox and essentially tied with the Yankees.

Here's how the AL fared in interleague played:

A few things jump out:

* The AL's record was 154-98.  This winning percentage works out to a 99 win team . Which means that the NL's winning percentage works out to a 63 win team. The NL is close to being considered AAAA.

* 5 AL teams dominated with at least 14 wins (out of 18) - the Tigers, White Sox, Twins, Red Sox and Mariners. That's right, the Mariners.

* Just 4 of the 14 AL teams were below .500, with the worst being just 7-11.

* The AL Central had a combined .700 winning percentage - even with the Royals who more than held their own at 10-8. The Twins won 16 out of 18 and only made up one game on the Tigers and two on the White Sox. The AL Central is thinking about kicking the Indians out - they went just 8-10.

* While the Twins didn't gain much ground by dominating the Red Sox did - their 16 wins were 7 better than Toronto and 6 better than NY.



And now a similar look at the NL - here's the standings today:

But if we only included NL games against NL teams it would look like this:

And here's how each team fared in interleague play:

A few notes:

* The Mariners were the surprise of the AL and the Rockies are the surprise of the NL going 11-4.

* The only other NL team over .500 was the 8-7 Giants - that's it, just two teams better than .500 against the AL this year.

* The NL Central was the worst division going 30-62 for a nice .326 winning percentage. Even the Royals are better than that!

According to BP Interleague play looked like this prior to this season:

2005 American: 20
2004 American:  2
2003 National: 22
2002 National:  6
2001 American: 12
2000 American: 21
1999 National: 19
1998 American:  4

This season the AL was + 56.

Buster Olney on his ESPN.com blog offered a few explanations for the difference:

* The AL's average payroll is at $83.4 million while the NL was at $72.4 million. There's more impact players moving from the NL to AL in the offseason than vice versa and this has been going on for a few years now.

* The AL has more teams like the Twins and A's who've done well with small payrolls - part of which is an indication that they also have better younger players.


I can't disagree with that.  The AL seems to have the better younger players and whenever there's a significant player switching league it seems like the AL gets the better of things as a whole as Leigh pointed out back in January.  I think we can see the difference in pitchers switching leagues as well.  If Bronson Arroyo was in the AL do you think there's any chance that he's going to make the All Star team?

While there might be some elements of certain AL teams being hot, certain NL teams being cold, and normal randomness it's pretty hard to argue against the AL clearly being the superior league after this year's interleague games.