In the same league?

Reader question:

Please explain “same league” in the following”:

The Washington Post reported that BP discovered an enormous new oil reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico... BP had no definitive word on the discovery’s size, but said it was “in the same league” as their other large Gulf fields. BP’s largest working Gulf platform, Thunder Horse, produces 300,000 barrels per day.

My comments:

It means that the new discovery is large, and probably as large as the largest existing oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.

A league is a sports term referring to a group of teams playing regularly together for an annual championship. The NBA, CBA (Chinese Basketball Association), English Premier League football, Euro-League basketball are all sports leagues, pitting players of comparable age and abilities against each other.

Yes, comparable age and abilities. In American baseball for example, the adults play in the Major League while teenagers (minors) play in what is called Minor League.

Hence therefore if someone or something is described as “in the same league” as others, it means that they share the same qualities others have.

However, this term is most often used in the negative, i.e. someone or something is “NOT in the same league” as someone or something else. In other words, they’re not at all as good as others. Yi Jianlian, for instance and literally speaking, plays in the same league, the NBA, as does LeBron James, but figuratively speaking, he’s not in the same league as LeBron in terms of physical strength, skills level, work ethic and especially the desire to win.

Neither is Yi’s team, the New Jersey Nets, as good as LeBron’s team the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavaliers, for instance, have the NBA’s best record, winning 61 of 82 games in the just-concluded regular season for 2009-10. The Nets on the other hand boast the worst record at 10-72, winning only 10 games out of 82. And so it is not far-fetched at all to suggest that the Nets are not in the same league (figuratively speaking) as the Cavaliers.

Alright, here are two media examples:

1. Cristiano Ronaldo is not in the same league as Lionel Messi, says Xavi (The Guardian, May 26, 2009)

It is the debate that will not go away in the build-up to the Champions League final but the Barcelona midfielder Xavi ­Hernández has refused to compare Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo because, he says, the Portuguese winger would come off so badly.

Xavi revealed that, as well as Ronaldo, he is a big admirer of Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard but insisted that Messi is simply untouchable. “Messi is the best player in the world by a distance, he’s the No1,” Xavi said. “There is nobody at all like him. I don’t want to compare him to anyone because it’ll just damage the other player if I do. For me Messi is easily the best.

“All due respect to Ronaldo and all the other great players on the world stage but Messi is proving that he is better than ­everyone else. The world can see that he’s the boss. I’ve never seen anything like it. In a game, in the training sessions, never. I wouldn’t swap him for any player.”

2. Indulgence (The New Yorker, April 19 [issue], 2010)

On October 31, 1517, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, Dr. Martin Luther, put the finishing touches on a series of bullet points and, legend has it, nailed the result to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany—the equivalent, for the time and place, of uploading a particularly explosive blog post. Luther’s was a protest against the sale of chits that were claimed to entitle buyers or their designees to shorter stays in Purgatory. Such chits, known as indulgences, were being hawked as part of Pope Leo X’s fund-raising drive for the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica. The “Ninety-five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” touched off a high-stakes flame war that rapidly devolved into the real thing, with actual wars, actual flames, and actual stakes. The theological clash that sundered Christendom didn’t just change the face of Western religion; it birthed the modern world.

Half a millennium later, the present agony of Catholicism is very far from being in the same league, even though the National Catholic Reporter has called it “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history.” The crisis is not about doctrine, at least not directly. It’s about administration; it’s about the structure of power within the Catholic Church; it’s about the Church’s insular, self-protective clerical culture. And, of course, like nearly every one of the controversies that preoccupy and bedevil the Church—abortion, stem-cell research, contraception, celibacy, marriage and divorce and affectional orientation—it’s about sex.

It’s also about indulgence—the institutional indulgence, fitful but systemic, of the sexual exploitation of children by priests. The pattern broke into public consciousness in the United States a quarter of a century ago, when a Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to thirty-three counts of crimes against children and was sentenced to prison. Since then, there have been thousands of such cases, civil and criminal, involving many thousands of children and leading to legal settlements that have amounted to more than two billion dollars and have driven several dioceses into bankruptcy. In 1992, Richard Sipe, a Catholic psychotherapist and researcher who served for eighteen years as a priest and Benedictine monk, told a conference of victims that “the current revelations of abuse are the tip of an iceberg, and if the problem is traced to its foundations the path will lead to the highest halls of the Vatican.”

America’s liberal system of tort law, along with the enterprising reporting of journalists at newspapers like the Boston Globe, brought the problem to light earlier here than elsewhere. But it can no longer be dismissed as an epiphenomenon of America’s sexual libertinism and religious indiscipline. In Ireland, for example, where Church-run orphanages and other institutions for children are supported by the state, a government commission reported last year that the Dublin Archdiocese’s preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.