Players generally are not geniuses, but they are bright enough to see what has happened in the last year to their contemporaries who have had their drug pasts outed, particularly in the Mitchell Report and especially Roger Clemens . Nobody wants to endure that public deconstruction of their reputation and accomplishments. I suspect past users who have yet to surface have been praying a lot recently that their network does not go public. I suspect those contemplating use are wondering whom they could ask for the stuff and truly believe will never turn on them. The combined chilling effect, I suspect, has greatly reduced the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Why should this help the NL more? Because the AL over the last decade-plus fell into Bash Brother baseball, willing to take on more older, inflated brutes to fill corner positions and, particularly, DH slots. If many of these players have been deflated or forced to act more their age by the absence of artificial assistance, you can imagine the AL being more damaged as a group.

Many scouts have related anecdotal evidence that some traditionally bigger players are smaller than in the past. One scout, echoing the view of many spoken to, said, "You want proof, go watch some of the guys you have thought of as great homer hitters recently take batting practice now. They used to put on shows. The show, even in batting practice, is over."

AL DHs began the weekend with a .399 slugging percentage. Since 2001, the year-end number has never been lower than .439. This is symptomatic of a dramatic, across-the-board offensive dip that is taking place for DHs (see chart).

There is potentially another drug-related factor to this. Amphetamine tests are not foolproof. But they are very reliable and very hard to beat. The anecdotal information within the game was always that uppers were far more prevalent than steroids as a way to counteract the relentless nature of a 162-game schedule - notably day games after night games and constant travel through different time zones. As one NL executive said, "This is the second year of amphetamine testing and we are starting to see the effects. They [uppers] were much more widespread than steroids [as a way to cope with] brutal travel schedules."

Why should this hurt the AL more? Again because AL teams were more willing to go with older players with long offensive resumes. If all players were upper-free, older players, generally, would be impaired more by lack of sleep and the grind of the season.

In a recent Sporting News article, David Pinto detailed how the largest concentration of plate appearances in the NL go to players between ages 24-30 while in the AL it is 31-34. And his research showed the NL is clobbering the AL in productive players in their prime years. Entering this weekend, among players 30 and under, 22 of the top 27 performers in OPS were from the NL.

The AL has dominated interleague play through the years, going a staggering 100 games over .500 in the past four seasons alone. But that might be about to change. For two decades starting in the early 1960s, the NL dominated the AL in the All-Star Game because they were quicker to fully integrate players of color. Now they might be on the brink of this turnaround because of a quicker devotion to younger players in the Age of the Rat.