NL West shocker: Dodgers win!

Dave Paisley

Here we are in the most boring part of the baseball season - the post-holiday lull. Still more than a month until spring training, we have to put up with headlines like "Paul Quantrill admits he was snowmobiling, not tobogganing", and "Bill Swift re-signs with Seattle." Rats, I was hoping that was "resigns from", not "re-signs with".

No matter, with no big deals on the horizon and only a handful of lame free agents left, it's time to start analyzing the big winners and losers in the offseason wheeling and dealing.

Not surprisingly, I expect one of the big winners to be the Los Angeles Dodgers. When you step back and take stock of what it will be like to have Kevin Brown anchoring the rotation in Dodger Stadium, it's really quite breathtaking. With Brown, Valdes, Park, Perez and Dreifort, the Dodgers will have a rotation that possibly rivals that of Atlanta, but with the advantage of working in the pitcher-friendly confines of Chavez Ravine.

One drawback is their lack of offensive support, but even that promises to be modestly improved over last year. Although Hundley's health and durability is a huge question mark at catcher, his performance should easily eclipse that of the anemic Charles Johnson the Dodgers suffered with through the end of last year.

Karros, Young and Grudzielanek aren't particularly great, but are adequate, while Beltre should improve at third. In the outfield, Sheffield and Mondesi return, while Devon White solidifies the center field spot. Not a great offense, barely a good one even, but maybe a little better than last season. Add that to a stellar pitching staff, and the Dodgers should easily be the class of the NL West.

And what of the rest of the division? San Diego lost Brown, and have been unable to replace him with anyone remotely comparable. They switched Joey Hamilton for Woody Williams in a deal with Toronto, a move that does nothing but age the pitching staff a bit. And they re-signed Mark Langston in yet another desperate bid to get more than some remaining dregs of utility out of him.

The fact remains that once you get past Ashby, Hitchcock and Williams, there's not a lot there, and the bigger loss may have been pitching coach Dave Stewart. On the other hand, they gained a lot offensively by losing Steve Finley to free agency. The outfield may be a patchwork quilt next year, but anything will be better than having the black hole of Finley's bat out there on a regular basis. Overall, not a great year for the Padres, but not as bad as some people think.

Of the rest, the Giants don't appear to have changed much, which means if they get lucky they may end up on the fringes of the wild card race again. The Rockies' big signing was Brian Bohanon, and that's a sad case indeed. With the continued burden of carrying Dante Bichette's ego around, they are going nowhere fast. It will be interesting to see how quickly Jim Leyland can make an arm fall off one of his pitchers, though.

Which brings us to the new, deep-pocket kids on the block, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Apparently, it only took a season for Jerry Colangelo to figure out what he wanted, because he sure went out and bought a lot of it. Unfortunately, he's something of an indiscriminate buyer. Along with Randy Johnson, he took Todd Stottlemyre. Not too bad, especially when partnered with Andy Benes, but then he also got the oft-injured Armando Reynoso. Throw in Omar Daal and it's not a bad rotation, but it could get a tad uneven.

His worst offenses, though, were mostly to do with the offense. Along with the already overpriced Matt Williams and Jay Bell, he insisted on paying the aforementioned Steve Finley way too much money. Add him to Bernard Gilkey and Luis Gonzalez (actually a halfway-decent player) and this is the most anemic outfield since perhaps the Mets of last year, which also featured, coincidentally, Bernard Gilkey.

The only way this could have been worse would have been to get Brian Hunter from Detroit instead of Gonzalez. The offense will probably be quite horrible, and I predict Randy Johnson will blow his top sometime in June when he loses his third straight 1-0 game.

Overall, prior to any numerical analysis, and pending any trades and signings, I expect the NL West to finish: Dodgers, Giants, Padres, Rockies, Diamondbacks.

about the author

If you look at Dave Paisley in just the right light, he looks like a Bizarro World version of Ron Darling. Him tell you goodbye if you write at drdjp@strikethree.com.