We'll wrap up the division previews today with the NL West. Is it just me, or are all the tough calls in the American League this year? Maybe we're all wrong about everything.
1. Los Angeles Dodgers
2014 record: 94-68 (First place. Lost to St. Louis in NLDS.)
Offseason grade: B
The Andrew Friedman era in LA got off to a fast start, a flurry of trades with San Diego, Philadelphia, Miami, and the Angels drastically reshaping the roster of a 94-win team. The biggest takeaway is that they're all new and improved up the middle, with Kendrick and Rollins replacing Gordon and Ramirez for a notable defensive upgrade and not too much of a loss on offense. Yasmani Grandal replacing A.J. Ellis and Joc Pederson replacing Matt Kemp round out the changes to the lineup. They're banking on health from two pitchers who haven't shown a lot of it in Brandon McCarthy and Brett Anderson, but when you start your rotation with Kershaw and Greinke, the best 1-2 in the game, you can afford to roll some dice. With all due respect to the defending world champs and Extreme Makeover: San Diego edition, no team in the NL West is close to this good.
How it could all go right: Kershaw stops throwing the five or six pitches per game that aren't perfect, and he breaks every record. The rest of the rotation is healthy enough. Joc Pederson makes the most of his long-awaited opportunity to play center field for the Dodgers every day, and dominates the Rookie of the Year conversation. The Dodgers head into October with the best regular-season record in baseball.
How it could all go wrong: A long-term injury to either Kershaw or Greinke devastates the rotation, meaning the team has to scramble with Joe Weiland or give up one of their prize prospects in a deal for another starter. Anderson contributes nothing, and McCarthy fails to make it back-to-back healthy seasons. Decline from Adrian Gonzalez and failure to develop from Yasmani Grandal leads to a power outage. If all that and more goes wrong, I guess I could see the Dodgers winning as few as 80 games.
2. San Diego Padres
2014 record: 77-85 (Third place)
Offseason grade: A
A.J. Preller is the most exciting thing to hit San Diego since Ling Wong was pregnant. Taking over a boring, inexpensive team that hadn't done anything well in four years, Preller wheeled and dealed from his real life roster of real life baseball players like a bored, stoned 28-year-old Everlasting Dave with his Playstation and MLB11- The Show. Will it work? Were they all smart moves? That's not really the point. The point is to be interesting, and for the first time since they ditched the Tony Gwynn classic uniforms for a blue and tan fashion wasteland, the Padres are interesting. The choice for second place is between a team that just added a brand new star-studded outfield and a team that lost two of their best hitters and added nobody of significance. Yes, yes, the Giants Know How To Win, and Brian Sabean and Bruce Bochy are the baseball version of Yoda and Obi-Wan. Fine. I'm still taking new and interesting.
How it could all go right: Wil Myers, fully recovered from his 2014 wrist injuries, fakes center field defense well enough while continuing the climb that started before he was baseball's top prospect. Matt Kemp is also not finished. Tyson Ross and Andrew Cashner keep all their ligaments and tendons in place long enough to form a really strong rotation. Someone from the Middlebrooks-Gyorko-Alonso group of infield disappointments shows a sign of life. The Padres win a wild card spot, or, in the "Everyone in Dodger blue gets seriously injured" universe, the NL West title.
How it could all go wrong: James Shields' streak of healthy, innings-eating, sub-ace effectiveness comes to an end. Like the Marlins of 2013, no amount of outfield awesomeness can cancel out an infield full of pumpkins. The outfield isn't even that awesome, seeing as how it's made up of three left fielders and there's some pasture out there at Petco. Preller's job is merely half done, and the Padres don't escape from the not-terrible, not-contending rut they've been in for the better part of a decade.
3. San Francisco Giants
2014 record: 88-74 (Second place. Beat Pittsburgh in the Wild Card game, Washington in NLDS, St. Louis in NLCS, and Kansas City in the World Series.)
Offseason grade: D
This isn't just the lazy "Odd year/ even year" argument, even though that's what I used last year and it was correct. For the first time since the Giants became an every-other-October monster, they're bringing a team to Spring Training that is significantly, indisputably worse than the previous year's team. Buster Posey is on the short list of best players in baseball, and if Brandon Belt plays all year I think he'll be a good wingman. But until real-life superhero Hunter Pence returns, they're also the only guys on the roster who you really want in your lineup. Madison Bumgarner is an ace, Jake Peavy is serviceable as long as he's healthy, and backing them up are a useless Tim Lincecum, an almost-40 Tim Hudson, and a guy who's lost almost all his value in two short years in Matt Cain. This team had little margin for error in an 88-win sneak into the playoffs in 2014, and with the loss of two of their better bats, that margin all but disappeared.
How it could all go right: Angel Pagan puts a full season together. Posey and Belt have their best seasons yet. Matt Cain's elbow issues are behind him. Bochy finds a way to get some value out of Lincecum. Casey McGehee and Nori Aoki, imbued with Bochy/Sabean magic, hit well enough to justify their starting jobs. The same bullpen the team has had for five years delivers the same results it has for five years. The Giants' title defense makes it to October, where anything can happen.
How it could all go wrong: Cain and Lincecum are unusable, pushing Ryan Vogelsong and Yusmeiro Petit into the rotation while they wait for anyone in the minors to develop. That taxes the bullpen past the breaking point. The power drain brought on by losing Michael Morse and the Panda leads to one of the worst lineups in the league. The Giants sink to fourth place.
4. Colorado Rockies
2014 record: 66-96 (Fourth place)
Offseason grade: See below.
After the Winter of Preller, I decided I had to come up with a new most boring team in baseball. A team that wouldn't even force me to change my typical Padres season preview: "There's still nothing interesting to say about this team." After giving every team a few paragraphs over the past few weeks- and oh, I will have things to say about Dave Stewart's Diamondbacks as well, in the coming paragraphs and the months that follow- my finalists were Colorado, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Philadelphia was the first elimination, as they were excellent not too long ago, they possess baseball's shiniest trade chip at the moment, and they can swing the money hammer when they want to. The Twins were next out, as I said in their preview, because that would have been like calling the Nationals boring right before they called up Bryce Harper. So in the final boring-off, it came down to this: The Brewers have two legit MVP candidates, of whom great things are expected, and another guy who could find his way into the discussion with a lot of lucky breaks. The Rockies have two guys who used to be regarded that way, but they haven't been healthy in so long I don't know if other teams even want them anymore. Milwaukee's front office also has a history of making gutsy trades for elite players when the team's in the race. Jeff Bridich is new to the top job in Colorado, but he's been in their front office for a while, and his first winter at the helm fits comfortably into the team's long history of not doing much of anything. So congratulations, Colorado Rockies. Due to your forgettableness, I'm not even giving you an offseason grade or a best and worst case. You'll be better than the Diamondbacks and worse than almost every other team in the game. That'll have to be enough until I say the same thing, minus the explanation, a year from now. Don't go screwing that up by trading Tulo or making the playoffs in the meantime, k?
5. Arizona Diamondbacks
2014 record: 64-98 (Fifth place)
Offseason grade: D
I really want to snark out here, and explain that Dave Stewart has assembled a brick-red train wreck, that Tony LaRussa must be the dumbest person in the world to think that this is a good idea, that this team is the natural biological product of grittiness eating too much getoffamylawnism. But this is about baseball, not about silly quotes and philosophical differences that I suspect are overblown just so bloggers have something to blog about. And in a baseball sense, the first winter under Dave Stewart wasn't appreciably worse than the Kevin Towers years, was it? It's not like Stewart took the reins of the team, traded Braden Shipley and Aaron Blair for Willie Bloomquist, then cut Touki Toussaint because having a guy named Touki in his organization pissed him off. All he did was move some parts around, made room for Archie Bradley and Chris Owings on the major league team, decided his team doesn't need a catcher, and gave a big fat guy a lot of money to play a position he can't physically play. Not the best winter, true, but I didn't hate everything he did. Just look at the Wade Miley reports out of Spring Training and tell me the D-Backs didn't get away with robbery there. The Stewart/LaRussa collaboration still has many fine moments of blog fodder ahead of it.
How it could all go right: The organization's crown jewels, the pitching prospects, are healthy and effective. They find something productive for Yasmani Tomas to do. Mark Trumbo starts hot and the team is able to get something of value by trading him. Stewart and his scouts find the one can't-miss guy in a weak draft class, and nail the first overall pick. 2014 was their hitting bottom, and the D-Backs improve by as many as ten wins as the pieces start falling into place around Paul Goldschmidt.
How it could all go wrong: So many ways, but the most obvious are that none of the new position players are ready for the big leagues, and the pitching staff is the worst in baseball. Sadly for D-Backs fans, those are both pretty likely. There's reason to believe the good times will last once this starts to turn around, but it won't start in 2015.
