Where They Stand Now: NL West

Our division-by-division look at how the MLB offseason has gone so far.

Hope everybody had a great Christmas and a great first night of Hanukkah—which is to say I hope that everybody found exactly what they wanted under the Christmas tree… and I hope that the socks you definitely got while lighting the Menorah are warm and fuzzy.

Here at JoeBlogs, I spent the day watching football, eating badly, marveling at how many Hallmark Hanukkah movies there are (“Hanukkah on Rye!”), and plotting a whole bunch of fun changes for our little site here in the New Year. We’re going to try a lot of stuff in 2025, I can’t wait to start sharing some of those changes with you in the coming weeks (though I should add: the nonsense will continue until morale improves). What I can say now is that there won’t ever be a better time to subscribe.

We have the three National League Divisions to go in our year-end, “Where They Stand Now” series, where we take a quick peek at all 30 teams, what they’ve done so far in the offseason, and how things look going into 2025.

Los Angeles Dodgers (98-64, Won the World Series)

• Hello: Blake Snell, Michael Conforto

• Goodbye: Walker Buehler

The expectation from the start is that the Dodgers will sign Japanese sensation Roki Sasaki. But because of the complicated process here, we won’t know anything until mid-January, I guess, and until then we will be hammered with story after story about other teams who are trying to court him. Heck, just before Christmas, it was reported that the Rangers and Giants met with him. That was just days after reports of the Mets and Yankees recruiting him. The Cubs want in. The Padres are planning “a full-court press.” Etc.

If the Dodgers get Sasaki—and he’s as good as expected—they might just be the most-loaded team we’ve seen in our lifetimes. I mean, you take that team that rolled through the World Series last year—that team that has Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman hitting back-to-back-to-back—and you give them a pitching rotation with Sasaki, Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Kershaw (just for the nostalgia) and one of five or more brilliant young arms, um, this is like the ’97 Bulls.

How will Shohei pitch in 2025? The Dodgers are loading up for. every scenario. (Masterpress/Getty Images)

Here’s the thing about the Dodgers: Since Dave Roberts became manager in 2016, they’ve made the playoffs nine straight years, won 100 games six times, had the best record in the league five times, won four pennants and two World Series… and there’s this sense among some that they’ve underachieved. It’s wild. They’re Stengel’s Yankees, they’re Sparky’s Reds, they’re Jeter’s Yankees, and yet, because of the way baseball is structured now, they don’t win every year, they lose short playoff series sometimes, they go into October bruised and diminished by injuries.

And so they’re always looking for ways to counter the immense luck factor that’s a part of baseball today. The other big dogs, like the Phillies and Padres and Braves and Mets, are trying to do the same. I don’t know that a team ever can fully repel the luck that just comes in this era of short series and pitching injuries and gigantic bullpens. If the Dodgers get Sasaki, we’ll find out.

San Diego Padres (93-69, lost to Dodgers in NLDS)

• Hello: Is it me you’re looking for?

• Goodbye: Kyle Higashioka

There will be more goodbyes for the Padres—Ha-Seong Kim, Jurickson Profar, David Peralta, these guys are almost certainly not coming back. There have been a lot of rumors surrounding Luis Arráez and Dylan Cease. It looks like GM A.J. Preller will be doing a lot of work in the coming weeks.

The Padres were SO close in 2024. They had the Dodgers on the ropes—they blew a lead in Game 1 and then lost Game 4 when they bizarrely started Cease on short rest against a Dodgers team that seemed to enjoy facing him. The Dodgers were forced to throw a bullpen game that day, and the bullpen was electric and held the Padres to 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position. San Diego was beaten and didn’t even put up a fight in Game 5.

But it was a fun season regardless, one of the most fun seasons in the team’s history, and the temptation for some would be to try and keep that team together. For better and worse, that’s not Preller’s style. He DOES stuff, that’s just the way he rolls. He’ll build around the wonderful energy of Jackson Merrill, the consistent strength of future Hall of Famer Manny Machado and the mercurial talents of Fernando Tatis Jr. They should remain a threat in 2025.

Arizona Diamondbacks (89-73)

• Hello: Josh Naylor

• Goodbye: Christian Walker, Joc Pederson

I don’t think any of the surviving teams in the National League were sad to see the Diamondbacks get eliminated from the playoffs on the final day. In 2023, the Diamondbacks somehow made the playoffs despite getting outscored by 15 runs, and they romped all the way to the World Series. They were much better in 2024. They were going to be a scary team to play.

And they can be a scary team in 2025… but, in my mind, they need to get busy. They’re in absolutely perfect position to do so. Their best player, Ketel Marte—who finished third in the MVP voting—is being wildly underpaid for his value. He’s locked in for the next three years at $48 or so million and then the team has a $13 million option on him for 2028. When you consider that he was worth more than FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS in 2024, by FanGraphs numbers, um, yeah, the Diamondbacks have a bargain on their hands.

Then you remember they’re paying Corbin Carroll less than $6 million—his real money doesn’t kick in until 2029.

Zac Gallen is just in his first year of arbitration. Merrill Kelly is on a $7 million team option. Superstar shortstop prospect Jordan Lawlar looks ready to go. They’re out from under the big money they would have spent on Joc Pederson and Christian Walker. I mean, they have no excuses: This team can be a World Series contender in 2025.

San Francisco Giants (80-82)

• Hello: Willy Adames

• Goodbye: Blake Snell, Michael Conforto, Thairo Estrada

It’s a familiar story: The Giants are seemingly in on every free agent, in on every possible deal, in on every baseball-shattering move… and they just haven’t been able to pull any of them off. Right now, they’re supposedly close, maybe, possibly, feasibly, conceivably, to signing Corbin Burnes. We’ll see.

I really think the Giants near-misses the last few years wore down fans, who mostly cheered when the club evicted one of the most brilliant men in baseball, Farhan Zaidi, and replaced him with Giants’ superhero Buster Posey. I’m not saying they were wrong for doing so; at some point results are results, and the Giants have been a sub-.500 team for the last three years. But I am saying that a lot of this seems to be built around the hope that Posey can somehow unleash some of the 2010s magic by simply being Buster Posey and winning some of these free-agent races and, even more, bringing some old-school hardball back to the Giants.

Make no mistake: Buster Posey is bringing back the hardball.

“If the industry is paying a guy to have an .850 OPS, but he only drives in 40 runs, well, where’s the incentive to drive in runs if it doesn’t matter,” he told The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly. “So the challenge, from my perspective, is that driving in runs does matter to me. There’s probably a lot of people who’d disagree with me and say they are all based on luck, right? I disagree with that. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a mindset and a want-to.”

Buster Posey has forgotten more about baseball in the last week than I will ever learn in my entire life, so please take it with a grain of salt when I tell you that I have no idea what he’s talking about. The last person with an .850 OPS who drove in 40 runs was Richie Ashburn in 1958. I can’t speak to Ashburn’s mindset or want to (or that of John McGraw in 1899 when he had a .994 OPS and drove in a mere 33 runs), and I realize that Posey wasn’t speaking literally, but it would scare the bejeebers out of me if my team’s general manager were on the hunt for RBIs.

Colorado Rockies (61-101)

• Hello: Kyle Farmer, Thairo Estrada

• Goodbye: Cruel World

I always struggle to say anything about the Rockies because I have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. It’s not like they’re without talent. Their 22-year-old shortstop, Ezequiel Tovar, led the league in doubles* and won a Gold Glove. Brenton Doyle at 26 put up a 4 WAR season thanks largely to his electrifying centerfield defense. Ryan McMahon’s bat just isn’t developing as they hoped, but his third base defense is outstanding. They’ve got a couple of Top 20 prospects in Charlie Condon and Chase Dollander, both not too far away.

*Here’s a bonkers stat for you: Coors Field, as always, was the best doubles park in the National League. Before the days of the humidor, Coors was easily the best doubles park in baseball, but these days, Fenway Park is No. 1, with Coors being No. 2. But the point is that when I saw Tovar led the league in doubles, I thought, “Well, sure, that’s the Coors Field effect.” Au contraire! Tovar did not only hit more doubles on the road, he hit A LOT more doubles on the road—he had 28 doubles on the road against only 17 at Coors. Baseball!

The thing is—and forgive me for sounding like a broken record—I just don’t see the plan here. What are the Rockies trying to be? The thing that becomes clearer and clearer to me the longer I’m around this wacky game is that just trying to be “good” is no plan at all. Good at what? How are you going to beat the Dodgers? The Phillies? The Brewers? What will you have that they don’t have?

Will you become the best defensive team in all of baseball? OK, maybe I can get behind that plan, but you can’t also have a pitching stuff that strikes out 200 fewer batters than any other team in the league.

Will you try to take advantage of your hitters’ park with a 1-through-9 lineup that’s a nightmare to get through? OK, maybe I can get behind that plan, but your batters can’t also strike out 100 more times than any other team in the league.

The Kris Bryant fiasco signing has been talked about and talked about and talked about—incredibly, there are still four more years and $108 million to go—and I know the Rockies are trying to move past it. But I don’t think they can get past it until they come up with a real plan, something beyond incrementally trying to get from 103 losses to 101 losses to 97 losses to 91 losses… that’s a losing game. The Rockies need to be about something.

Also: Can we talk for a moment about Bud Black? I’m not sure: Has anyone in recent memory had a managerial/coaching career quite like that of Bud Black? He was the manager of the San Diego Padres for 8-plus seasons, and the Padres lost more games than they won, and they never reached the postseason. He did win NL Manager of the Year in 2010 when the club jumped from 75 wins (on his watch) to 90 wins. The Manager of the Year Award is so funny.

Anyway, I’m not sure how you explain a manager in today’s baseball getting nine Opening Days with such little success. I think it’s because everybody around the game likes and respects Bud Black. And I get that. I do too.

OK, then Black was hired by the Rockies, and immediately, the team improved after the jettisoning of Walt Weiss. They won 87 games in 2017 and even qualified for the postseason as a wild card (which they lost). Black finished third in the Manager of the Year balloting. The next year, it was even better—they won 91 games and won their wild-card game against the Cubs. Sure, they were then swept in the NLDS by Milwaukee, but it was a good run, and Black again finished third in the Manager of the Year balloting.

In the six years since then, the Rockies have had a losing record every year—they have lost 151 more games than they’ve won over those six seasons. They are the worst team in baseball over those six seasons.

And yet… Bud Black is back as manager in 2025. He’s also the fourth-longest tenured manager in baseball behind Dave Roberts, Brian Snitker and Torey Lovullo, who, you know, have had a bit more success.

To be clear: Black should not be solely blamed for the Rockies’ erratic ways. But also, to be clear: He’s repeatedly at the scene of the accident. In the win-now world that is 21st-century sports, it’s astonishing that Bud Black has not once but twice survived years and years of losing baseball. Yes, he’s well-liked. Yes, he’s much-respected. I’m still not sure how this is happening.