A CITIZEN'S BLOG

I don’t know what to think about the NL West. Could be competitive, but maybe not.

Proj. Standings:
San Francisco Giants
San Diego Padres
Los Angeles Dodgers
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies

The San Francisco Giants are finding the window of opportunity closing fast. Barry Bonds can’t play baseball forever and this team is chock full of veterans in their mid-to-upper 30s (their starting outfield has a collective fifty years of MLB experience). Omar Vizquel is 37. Moises Alou is 38. Mike Matheny is 34. These guys were signed to win a pennant. If they don’t win in 2005 or 2006, I think you’ll see a long-term rebuilding effort by the Bay. So enjoy Giants fans. You have a beautiful city (my wife & I stopped by for two nights last year on our way to our honeymoon in Hawaii and loved it), a goregous ballpark and a team that had better win or else. The good news for Giants fans is that I think they can do it, even without Barry Bonds in the lineup … I like the Padres. I think the Padres could win a lot of games. They made major strides as the season wore on offensively, but they need to improve their pitching and defense before they can make a run for first place. They’ll be a contender in 2006 … the Dodgers: I haven’t loved Paul DePodesta’s wheeling and dealing in the offseason: replacing Adrian Beltre (Runs Created, 2004: 120) and Shawn Green (76 Runs Created) with oft-injured J.D. Drew and Jeff Kent? I’m a little baffled. I think signing Derek Lowe is a good deal, especially with the new, pitcher-friendly dimensions of Dodger Stadium. But this team just isn’t going to be that good. They will be winning lots of 2-1 games this year, which works for them, but on the road they are going to have difficulty scoring. I also question the wisdom of giving a massive multi-year contract to a guy as injury-prone as Drew. I’m sure there is a method to the madness that I see, but I don’t see it. Still, this team is good enough in its pitching and defense to win 85-87 games. I’m not sure they can catch their old New York rivals though … Is there an MLB franchise that was worse than the Diamondbacks in 2004? They had the Big Unit and still (still!) ranked fourteenth of sixteen teams in Fielding Independent Pitching. From the fiasco of hiring and firing Wally Backman to showering money on guys like Shawn Green and Troy Glaus, this team doesn’t know what it is doing … Why do the Rockies bother? I’m serious. They should just hold batting practice for fans to watch Todd Helton clobber home runs and just stipulate that they can never win more than 70 games a season. These guys finished fifteenth of sixteen teams in FIP and sixteenth of sixteen in Defense Efficiency Ratio (DER). Thanks to their ballpark they are an offensive jauggernaut, but an absolute disaster defensively. They will never lure pitchers to the Mile High City and they don’t seem to care about defense. Enjoy the view of the Rockies, enjoy the 10-8 slugfests, and enjoy fifth place, Denver.