Down 1-0 with a runner on first in the top of the second inning of Saturday’s game against the Cardinals, Diamondbacks third baseman Sean Burroughs sacrifice bunted. Yes, in the second inning of the game.

That’s the sort of low-reward tactic that usually makes us apoplectic. But in this case, manager Kirk Gibson — who hit 32 three-run home runs in his career — might’ve been forgiven for not playing it like Earl Weaver: His team was facing Chris Carpenter.

Sacrifice bunting, especially in early innings by fulltime hitters is a tangible form of respect for a pitcher. It’s a not-so-subtle way of acknowledging that you don’t play to score many runs off an established ace like Carpenter. We thought it would be interesting to see how the Cardinal rotation stacks up in a statistic that no one really pays much attention to but that may reveal something about how much attention opposing managers are paying to the guy on the mound.

As you can see, not even Carpenter has seen a first-inning bunt yet this season, though he has had one in the second inning; fellow veteran Jake Westbrook is the only other Cardinal starter with at least one that early in a game. Jaime Garcia and Kyle Lohse haven’t yet earned the respect to draw a non-pitcher sacrifice bunt earlier than the fifth inning. The number of sacrifices tracks with how veteran a player is: Carpenter and Westbrook are the longest-tenured in the rotation, so it would make sense that their reputations precede them these days.

As Major League Baseball rounds second base on the basepaths of the season, the standings reflect some of the usual sights, like the Red Sox, Yankees and Rays battling in the AL East, the Phillies and Braves neck-and-neck in the NL East, and the Cardinals and Brewers locked up in the NL Central. But look a little closer at the American League and you’ll notice something else: A relative parity between the teams.

The American League hasn’t been this closely bunched (measured by variance) at this point in the season since 1993, before the wild card began and when the league had only two divisions and the best team — the Blue Jays — had a winning percentage of .576, and the worst — the Brewers — were at .415 on July 7. Sure, the Red Sox and Yankees are still the best teams in the team, but even they aren’t head and shoulders ahead of everyone else, with respective winning percentages of .598 and .593. And at the bottom end, no AL team is below .409.

Why the parity? Well, the junior circuit has been trending that way for a while now, with a steady decrease since 2001 in the statistical variance (a measure of how far a set of numbers are spread out from each other) of teams’ winning percentages, going from .011 in 2001 to .003 this year (with a hiccup last year of .008).

The glory of the once-indomitable Yankees has faded a bit in recent years, to be sure, but the so-called second division teams have improved. The Cleveland Indians are one such club, going from a team that more closely resembled Charlie Sheen’s “Major League” version, with a .393 winning percentage last year at this time, to a division-leading .547 today. To be sure, they may be playing a bit over their heads, given that their Pythagorean winning percentage is only .519. But the same is true in reverse for the Kansas City Royals, whose league-worst .409 winning percentage belies their Pythagorean record of .443. Even so, .409 is a pretty solid win rate for the worst team in the league. And the Baltimore Orioles, who last July 7 carried an MLB-worst .298 record, are playing better, at .424.

As a result, no one is running away with any division just yet. Compared to last year, when the games difference between the top three teams in each division averaged four games, this year it is under three. Even the Seattle Mariners are within two games of .500 and 4.5 games of the division-leading and pennant-defending Texas Rangers.

One possible explanation is the winter migration of key players. This past winter, a few impact players moved from upper-crust teams, to lower-tier teams or switched leagues. The biggest balance-shifting move of all was the Rangers — and, as it turned out, the Yankees — losing Cliff Lee to the NL’s Phillies. Another highly successful AL team, the Red Sox, saw some offseason change, as well. Although Boston brought in Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, it lost two key players when Adrian Beltre signed with the Rangers and Victor Martinez left for the greeer pastures (as in $50 million) of Detroit.

The parity showed in interleague play, too. The best of the West, Texas, went only 9-9 against NL teams, and Boston went 10-8. Two of the AL’s worst teams, however, didn’t fare much worse, though: The Twins and Athletics each went 8-10 against the Senior Circuit.

Will the American League finish with the same kind of parity it has seen in the first half of the season? If recent history is any indication, it likely will. With the exception of the aberrant 2010 season, in which the league’s parity greatly increased by the end of the season, the AL hasn’t had much change in parity from July 7 to October. The Yankees, Red Sox and Rangers may return to the playoffs, but fans in Kansas City, Baltimore and Oakland can at least look forward to being relatively competitive in the second half.

During a recent game, Mike Shannon and John Rooney remarked upon how David Freese was such a tough two-strike hitter. Earlier this season, we looked at the example in reverse, disproving the conventional wisdom that Colby Rasmus was a poor two-strike hitter, so let’s now check on the Cardinals’ recently-returned third baseman.

We’ll employ the same methodology that we used with Rasmus. First, Freese’s splits with two strikes compared to his overall numbers:

Like Rasmus — and perhaps all hitters — Freese hits worse when the chips are down: 82% of his typical OBP rate, and 71% of his slugging percentage. But to really determine how good (or bad) Freese is with two strikes, we need to compare him with an average hitter:

So, like Rasmus, Freese is indeed a good two-strike hitter, hitting better relative to his own overall numbers than the league average does. Ironically, though, the player who is conventionally held to be just the opposite — Rasmus — is actually a bit more productive (again, relative to his own overall production) than Freese. And the two players are also nearly a wash on an objective basis — look at their Gross Production Average:

So why does one player have a rap as a bad two-strike hitter and the other a rep?It’s probably due to the fact that Rasmus strikes out more often:

Rasmus appears to be a victim of style bias that elevates hitters who “shorten” their swing with two strikes in the belief that it yields better results, whereas Freese benefits from the bias. As Rasmus and Freese show, though, a player can be a productive two-strike hitter regardless of the approach.

During the broadcast of the Cardinals-Reds game Tuesday night, ESPN ran a quick piece asking who the first-half MVP was. Now, MVP means different things to different people, but surely everyone can agree that the league leaders in Wins Above Replacement should at least be part of the conversation. As of Wednesday, the NL leaders look like this:

Cardinal fans will notice that Matt Holliday is 13th and would have been higher had he not missed time due to his appendectomy. In fact, Holliday doesn’t even appear on rate-stat leaderboards because he doesn’t qualify. But if we look at WAR per 162 games (batters only), Holliday jumps up the board:

We’re not advocating that Holliday be considered as fourth-best, only that his impact to the Cardinals has been even greater than his total WAR implies. And while we’re on the subject of impact Cardinal players, here’s the per-season WAR pace for the team leaders (in addition to 162 games for batters, we used 35 starts and 65 relief appearances for pitchers):

Holliday’s and Lance Berkman’s values are well-known, but when adjusted for missed playing time, we see that Allen Craig and David Freese are vital to the team, as well. And, even in an off-year, Albert Pujols is still one of the team’s most important pieces, even if to this point he may not be grouped in a 2011 version of the famous “MV3″ triumvirate.