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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
National League preview: Now that the Red Sox have won a World Series, how about the Cubs at least getting to one?
Mar 31, 2005 | When we left off of baseball five months ago, the Boston Red Sox had just won the World Series, the most amazing thing that's ever happened anywhere in the world since the beginning of time etc. etc., unless Boston's come-from-behind win over the Yankees in the A.L. Championship Series was.
Since then it's all been about steroids, as you may have heard. But now it's spring. The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming and the perfect emerald blanket yadda yadda American pastime pop of the leather and crack of the bat fathers sons smell of hot dogs endless possibility of a clean scorecard time is here.
Where have you gone, Enzo Hernandez?
OK, steroids. Check. Lyrical ode to spring. Check. Where have you gone line transposed humorously to an obscure player of more recent vintage than Joe DiMaggio. Check. Let's get to this column's annual fearless and almost certainly wrong predictions.
Last year, I correctly predicted exactly one (1) of the six division winners, down from two (2) in 2003, and matching the one (1) correct pick in 2002. I'm really bad at this, but at least I'm consistent lately. In 2001 I went wild and got three (3!) right, but that was before I decided on principle not to pick the Yankees or Braves to win their divisions.
We'll look at the National League first, and then turn to the American League Friday.
National League West
We're about to see the difference Barry Bonds has made for the Giants these last few years as he starts the season on the shelf, nursing a bad knee and trying to puzzle out why so many people are so happy about his misfortune.
His teammates can't be among those happy about it. They've got enough problems, what with so many of them still trying to collect back pay for their service in World War I. The Giants are old, is what I'm trying to say, and they responded to that problem this offseason by going out and getting older, not even counting the fact that the holdover players have gotten a year older, as is their wont.
The Giants probably should have rebuilt about three years ago, but they've been shuffling and shuffling, trying to keep the team in contention for as long as Bonds keeps putting up stratospheric numbers. No sense paying Bonds all those dineros to put up a 1.400 OPS for a losing team. The future has been now for a long time. Well, the real future showed up when Bonds bonked his knee on a table last month, and it's not going to be pretty for a little while.
That leaves this weak division open to the Padres and Dodgers, who are both on the upswing. While the Dodgers, who have a smart general manager and a loaded farm system, are going to benefit the most in the long run, I think the Padres will sneak in and take the division this year.
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