NL West: Week in Review (April 21-27) « Intentional Blog on Balls

NL West: Week in Review (April 21-27)

April 27, 2008 — richardbrianwade

Rk	Team	Overall W-L	Week W-L	Pythagenport Win %	Trend	Comment
1	Diamondbacks	18-7	5-2	.708		The Arizona Diamondbacks are looking like they just might run away with this division. 25 games into their season, the Baby Backs are six games up on second place. Even with their offense crashing down toward league average this week, they still managed to continue winning thanks in large part to their pitching staff which allowed 2.4 runs per game in their five wins. All seven of their games this week were against other NL West teams and their 5-2 record pushed their record on the year to 17-5 against the West. If I might steal a quote from a Padres promotional commercial, “If you want to win the West, you’ve got to beat the West.” Well, that seems to be working out just fine for Arizona.
2	Dodgers	12-13	5-2	.572		Bad news for the rest of the division: Los Angeles is starting to see results consistent with their run differential. After splitting series with Cincinnati and the first place Diamondbacks, L.A. swept the Rockies over the weekend. Their pitching wasn’t exactly dominant, but it was for the most part very solid. Their offense, though, was something approximating dominant as they scored an average of 6.3 runs per game. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, they find themselves chasing a very hot Arizona team and going 5-2 only allows you to keep pace, not make up ground.
3	Giants	11-15	2-4	.324		How do you go 2-4 and actually move up in the standings? Them’s the breaks, I guess. Their record this week shows they’re dedicated to getting back into the cellar and their Pythagenport winning percentage does as well. Unfortunately for them, Colorado and San Diego had different plans for at least one more week. I wouldn’t worry too much, though. They’re not as good as their 9-10 record would suggest and the Rockies and Padres certainly aren’t as bad as their records suggest, so within a week or two, we ought to see this remedied.
4	Rockies	10-15	1-6	.399		Colorado dropped six out of seven contests this week, but at least they can thank bad luck for some of that as half of their losses were of the one-run variety. The four, two and eight run losses on the other hand are still quite ugly. Philly, Chicago and Los Angeles are all good teams, but as the reigning National League champs the Rockies expect to be able to hang with and even beat good teams. They most likely will start to play at a higher level, but with Arizona looking like they might run away with the division, they had better start clicking sooner rather than later.
5	Padres	10-16	1-6	.341		It wasn’t a good week for the Padres. They opened the week in Houston where the Astros outscored them 2 to 1 en route to a 3 game sweep. They then traveled home to drop two one run games to the San Francisco Giants who also outscored them by a ratio of 2 to 1. With the Diamondbacks coming in for a three game series over the weekend, the Padres looked like a good bet to go winless this week, but thanks to a walk-off home run in extra innings by the normally punchless Tadahito Iguchi, the friar faithful were treated to at least one victory in what was an otherwise dreadful seven days.