Perhaps no division in baseball is as mediocre as the American League West. Despite having a 100-win team last year none of the division’s teams can expect to win over 90 games in 2009. The Angels, the marquee franchise of the division, has demonstrated an inability to consistently put a competitive offense on the field, its smartest team appears to be going all in with a rookie rotation this year, and its two bottom feeders are along varying paths of rebuilding.

Oakland Athletics (86-76 Division Champs)

With the addition of Matt Holliday, Jason Giambi and Orlando Cabrera the Athletics were able to significantly improve their offense which last year was built around a number of role players such as Travis Buck, Daric Barton and Jack Cust.  While Holliday’s fantasy statistics will dip from years past after leaving the freindly-confines of Colorado, he is still an elite hitter.  The question for the Athletics is with their extremely young pitching. The team looks to be starting the season with Dallas Braden, Sean Gallagher, Gio Gonzalez and Dana Eveland in the rotation, with Justin Duchscherer on the Disabled List and top prospects Brett Anderson and Tim Cahill waiting in the wings. While there is little room for upside with this group, the guess here is that their above average offense, league average starting pitching and strong bullpen will be enough to win the division.

Team MVP: Matt Holliday
Player to Watch: Brett Anderson

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (85-79)

The Angels were a true enigma last year when they outperformed their Pythagorean record by 12 wins. Conventional wisdom says that having a strong bullpen with K-Rod, Scott Shields and Jose Arredondo helped them to accomplish this feat. Despite having what will again look like a strong bullpen, the Angles will likely revert back closer to their expected win projections, particularly as their offense and starting rotation look to have taken a step back from a year ago given the loss of Mark Teixiera and elbow injury to Ervin Santana.

Team MVP: Vlad
Player to Watch: Brandon Wood

Seattle Mariners (76-86)

Seattle had such great designs for 2008 that they traded away their top prospect and future center fielder for Eric Bedard. Bedard failed to live up to his 2007 career year, and the offense floundered. As a result the Mariners will pick second overall this year. While the roster has some solid starting pitching and a good bullpen, not even the reintroduction of 1993 Ken Griffey Jr. will ignite this offense. Jose Vidro and Adrian Beltre are decent role players; however they are not middle of the order bats for a contending team.

Team MVP: Ichiro
Player to Watch: Felix Hernandez

Texas Rangers (73-89)

The Rangers are likely the team to watch in the division in the long term; however, they will again likely lack the necessary pitching to compete in a lackluster division. With Josh Hamilton, Ian Kinsler, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Chris Davis the Rangers will have a great offense again. The team’s top prospects, including Neftali Feliz, Justin Smoak, Derek Holland and Max Ramirez, have the team built for 2010 and beyond.

Team MVP: Ian Kinsler
Player to Watch: Justin Smoak

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Today’s post is the first of a six part division-by-division baseball preview, starting with the National League West. The NL West was disparaged last year as being one of the worst, but due to the division’s young talent look to see a leap in its overall performance as these players continue to improve.  As a result  I see the division producing this years National League Wild Card winner.

Los Angeles Dodgers (92-60, Division Champs)

Last year the Dodgers were galvanized by the acquisition of Manny Ramirez into winning the division.  Despite a drawn out negotiating period, Manny’s return to the team will help it to improve on its 84 wins of a year ago.  While there are some question marks about the depth of the pitching staff, the lineup should be markedly improved with a full year of Manny, and development by Matt Kemp, Andre Ethier, James Loney and Russ Martin.  The rotation is anchored by 24-year-old Chad Billingsley but after that has a number of question marks: can Jason Schmidt return from injury? Can Clayton Kershaw improve upon his rookie performance? Can Hiroki Kuroda replicate his form despite having only 5.6 strikeouts per nine innings last year?  Can young pitchers like James McDonald and Scott Elbert make a significant contribution?  Including Randy Wolf the guess here is that the Dodgers will have enough pitching to capitalize on having the clear cut best offense in the division.

Team MVP: Manny
Player to Watch: Clayton Kershaw

Arizona Diamondbacks (89-63, Wild Card Champs)

After getting off to a scorching 20-7 start last year, Arizona finished the season at a paltry 62-73 clip as the teams offense came off the tracks.  Despite all of this the team was almost able to hold off the Dodgers to win the division.   Expect to see youngsters like Stephen Drew, Chris Young, Justin Upton, Miguel Montero and Conor Jackson take large steps forward.  Being anchored by All Stars Brandon Webb and Dan Haren, the rotation has the potential be as strong as any in baseball.  There are some questions about the rotation’s depth including about Jon Garland’s continued viability as a starter after having a WHIP of 1.5 last year; however, he should have an easier go of it facing the offenses of the NL West rather than the AL.

Team MVP: Stephen Drew
Player to Watch: Chris Young

San Francisco Giants (80-82)

San Francisco’s projected improvement is based solely on its rotation as its offense will not likely show significant improvement over last year when it scored an anemic 640 runs, good for second last in all of baseball. Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez are as good a reason to be optimistic about San Francisco’s ability to improve this year as anything.  Lincecum was a right-handed version of Johan Santana last year on his way to winning the Cy Young.  Along with the siging of Randy Johnson, the Giant’s young threesome should be able to overcome the fact that Barry Zito will be starting every fifth day.  As stated, San Francisco’s Achilles heal is the offense, when Bengie Molina is a middle of the order bat, you know your team is going to have problems.  The Giants do have some exciting young talent coming up through their system such as Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey, Angel Villalona and Conor Gillaspie, but until their offense markedly improves the Giants will be unable to seriously contend.

Team MVP: Tim Lincecum
Player to Watch: Pablo Sandoval

Colorado Rockies (73-89)

Despite making it to the World Series in 2007, the Colorado Rockies’ promising core of talent has essentially evaporated as players have seriously regressed or been traded away due to contract concerns.  While expectations were likely a little unrealistic for 2008 after the team won 21 of 22 games to make the playoffs and then the World Series, injuries to Troy Tulowitzki, Todd Helton, Jeff Francis and Franklin Morales derailed their ability to defend the NL championship before the season really got going.  The Rockies will need to see breakthrough years by Tulowitzki, Chris Iannetta, Ubaldo Jimenez, Ian Stewart and Carlos Gonzalez, as well as rebound years by Garrett Atkins, Brad Hawpe and Francis.  If everything goes right, the Rockies could contend, but there are likely too many questions on both sides of the ball.

Team MVP: Troy Tulowitzki
Player to Watch: Ubaldo Jimenez

San Diego Padres (63-99)

San Diego picks third in this years draft, but expect them to pick even higher in 2010 as the Padres have the potential to be the worst team in baseball.  Beyond Jake Peavy and Adrian Gonzalez the team appears to be lacking any type of impact position players or pitchers.  In addition, there is mass speculation that Peavy will not be finishing  the year  in Southern California.  The Padres do potentially have some more talent on their roster if Chris Young can regain his health or if Chase Headley and Kevin Kouzmanoff can live up to their potential; however, this still would not be enough to get  the Padres close to contention.

Team MVP: Adrian Gonzalez
Player to Watch: Jake Peavy

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Its not like we should be surprised by Saturday’s revelation that A-Rod is a cheater. Given that he reportedly came clean this afternoon with Peter Gammons, he deserves more credit than any of the players previously caught using steroids or most of the writers who have jumped all over him in the past two days.

Anyone who was involved with baseball during the “steroids era”, including players, management, the Players Association and the baseball media, are to blame for the situation.  A-Rod’s three seasons worth of steroid usage, while bringing further unwanted attention to the situation, did not make or break the public perception of this continuous scandal.

While the ancillary parties were not the ones injecting themselves with banned substances their propensity to turn a blind-eye, and failure to enforce any reasonable interpretation of the laws of the United States or the rules of Major League Baseball is tantamount to collusion to the offense.

The Players Association has handled this situation poorly at every possible turn.  By shortsightedly following the interest of players in the immediate spotlight it has failed to look after the best interest of ALL of its constituents.  In a round table discussion on Sunday morning on MLBTV Harold Reynolds stated that the Players Association has always catered to the needs of its wealthiest members.  While this is not particularly surprising, Reynolds described a system where journeymen and players on the lower levels of the salary structure felt obligated and pressured to support the best interests of the games highest paid players.  The same type of confusion as to its mission led the Association to so vociferously fight against any type of regulation or implementation of rules outlawing the use of PEDs and has thus led the league into its current predicament.  The Union’s general failure was manifested again when Gene Orza reportedly attempted to cover up the exact number of guilty players in 2003 in order to thwart new testing policies (H/T: Shyster Ball.)  This continued behavior by the Major League Players Association has significantly hurt baseball players reputations and ability to honestly do their job.

This is not to say that Baseball or the Yankees as we know them are going to end as Jason Stark, Tim Kurkjian and the majority of New York’s sports media would have you belief.  The surprise and outrage of these ‘journalists’ is reactionary hypocrisy of the worst order.   It was these writers who failed to ask questions about the rates in which balls were flying out of parks in the late-1990s, it was these writers who never called for any substantive investigations or change and it was these writers who anointed A-Rod the savior to Barry Bonds’ tainted record without any evidence to support their claims.  To suggest that a 24 year old A-Rod was responsible for destroying baseball when men over a decade older than him had been taking advantage of the same loopholes for fifteen years is hyperbole to the extreme.

At the same time writers, such as Steve Hulkower, who flippantly try to dismiss A-Rod’s actions as being minor, unquantifiable and irrelevant, or as an example of aesthetic vanity are doing the issue an even greater injustice.  With A-Rod, the steroids are reportedly were present during three of his prime and thus relatively unquantifiable in comparison to Barry Bonds whose career was on a downward slope before he supposedly started juicing.  Just because we are unable to tell exactly how much A-Rod benefited, and how many home runs he would have hit without the juice, does not mean to say that there was no benefit.

With Bonds, the performance increase was so staggering relative to his decline, we have a better idea of the extent of how much he benefited.  Bonds had five of his six best years in terms of home run production following a four-year decline in his power production.  Would the slope of his decline have naturally trended down gently or would it have had a year of two of average (approximately 33 home runs/ year) or above-average production no one can say at this point.  What we can say is that if Bonds had averaged 33 home runs a year until he broke Hank Aaron’s record he would have had to play at that level until the age of 44 (next season).  Steroids, particularly HGH, have the reported ability to help a player recover from workouts and injuries, an affect of increased importance for a player looking to prolong his career.  Bonds’ body likely eventually broke down because of his steroids use, but the odds are that he would have broken down even sooner without it.

Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds are two of the games greatest players regardless of whether or not they took steroids.  One of Tim Kurkjian’s arguments in the past two days has been that voters have demonstrated that they will not vote for steroid users.  This incredibly small sample size essentially refers to Mark McGwire who was never going to be a sure thing first ballot Hall of Famer without allegations of steroids usage. While Rodriguez and Bonds have certainly sullied both the reputation of baseball and their own personal reputations, they will still go down as two of the best players of all time.  Steroids were relevant in the performance of both individuals but they could not have reached their relative levels of success without being two of the premier players in the game’s history.  Kurkjian may be right when he says that they will never make the Hall, but it would be a monumental shame.

Then again, if this had not happened, I probably wouldn’t be so relaxed about all of this.

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Apparently there was a football season after Tom Brady got hurt in Week 1.  My understanding was that the NFL planned to suspend its operations until number 12 was ready to return.  I failed to notice my mistake until I tuned in for the Super Bowl this past weekend.

While I don’t have any significant analysis of what was a tremendous game, I”ll make one observation: Ben Roethlisberger deserves a lot of credit for his performance in the game.  I still think that Big Ben would struggle to make my  list of top-10 QBs in the league (Brady, P. Manning, Brees, Rivers, Palmer, Cutler, McNabb, Warner, Ryan, Romo), but his ability to keep plays alive, while unsustainable, was the major difference in the game.

Moving along to more pressing matters: the Patriots announced yesterday that Matt Cassel would be given the team’s franchise tag, guaranteeing him $14.6 million dollars; however, based on positive reports about Tom Brady’s health its doubtful that Cassel will be on the team at the start of next season, as Coach Belichick will not want over $29 million tied up in one position.

The maximum the Patriots can receive for Cassel is two first round picks, an amount that is considered relatively unrealistic, but there are a number of factors out there that suggest that a large return can be expected.  In January Mike Lombardi and Floyd Reese argued that due to the dearth of quality quarterbacks in the league the Patriots should expect a high first round pick and a number of other high picks.  Via a top-10 list Bar Stool Sports wrote that they expected a team to sign Cassel outright, giving up two first round picks in the process.

Maybe its irrational optimism, but I tend to agree with this analysis.  At the end of the day Quarterback is the most important position in the NFL and there are too many teams experiencing mediocre play.  While Matt Stafford and Mark Sanchez could be great players, their contracts will likely have significantly more guaranteed money than Cassel’s eventual contract and the recent track record of top-10 QBs is not impressive (see Messrs Vick, Carr, Harrington, Leftwich, Smith and Young).

A list of NFL teams and their likely current starter show the amount of teams that could conceivably be interested in an upgrade:

1. Detroit - Dan Orlovsky?
2. St. Louis - Mark Bulger
3. Kansas City - Tyler Thigpen
10. San Francisco - Shaun Hill
13. Washington - Jason Campbell
15. Houston - Matt Schaub
17. NY Jets - Kellen Clemens (even though the Pats are not voluntarily sending Cassel to Jersey)
18. Chicago - Kyle Orton
19. Tampa Bay - Jeff Garcia/ Brian Griese
20. Detroit - I say again Dan Orlovsky, the guy who ran out the back of his end zone.
22. Minnesota - Tarvaris Jackson

While some of these higher draft picks are clearly wishful thinking I see Minnesota, Detroit and Washington as the three most likely suitors.  Assuming John Kitna is not returning, Detroit cannot go into the season with Orlovsky running the offense.  His defenders will say that Jason Campbell has had four different Offensive Coordinators in four years, but whatever the reason his lack of development calls into question his future potential.  Minnesota is my favorite to strike a deal as they are a decent QB away from being a serious contender in the NFC. Tarvaris Jackson was the difference between the Vikings and the Eagles in the playoffs this year.

Either way, I hope this Trojan nets us this Trojan.

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