Dodgers: Insider Predicts LA Eventually Comes Out On Top Over Padres
The Dodgers have won the National League West in nine of the last ten sesaons. Meanwhile, a baby born the last time the Padres won the West would have its driver's license now. But last October, San Diego got the last laugh by beating Los Angeles in the NLDS, three games to one.
This offseason, the Padres have added Xander Bogaerts, Seth Lugo, and Matt Carpenter and brought back Robert Suarez and Nick Martinez, while the Dodgers have had a relatively quiet offseason. L.A. finished 22 games ahead of San Diego last year, but the Padres will also get a full season of Juan Soto and more than the zero games of Fernando Tatis Jr. they got in 2022.
Over at MLB.com, Anthony Castrovince believes the Padres will win the West for the first time since 2006, but it's not all gloom and doom for the Dodgers.
Have the Padres overtaken the Dodgers?
Prediction: Yes … sort of.
...
And it says here that, yes, the Padres will win the NL West. It’s time.
Where it will get goofy, though, is in October. The seeding will be such that the Padres will never even get the opportunity to face the Wild Card-winning Dodgers, because they’ll be taken out in the NLDS (again, I’ll let you know the winner shortly). Little, underdog L.A. will be the only NL West team still standing when the LCS begins.
This really doesn't even qualify as a prediction. It's a guess, a headline-grabber during a lull in the offseason. It could definitely happen, though. The Padres are probably the favorites in the NL West right now, and anything can happen in the postseason.
During this ten-year stretch, 2018 and 2021 are really the only seasons the Dodgers have even been seriously challenged in the NL West. In 2018, they had to play a Game 163 against the Rockies to determine the division winner, and in 2021 they finished a game behind the Giants despite winning 106 games. The closest it has been in any other season was in 2016, when L.A. won the division by four games despite being swept by the Giants in the final weekend after the division title had been clinched.
It will be exciting to have a more competitive division race this year, even if that means more stress in the regular season. It might have affected Los Angeles last year that by the time the playoffs started, they hadn't played a truly meaningful game in about three months (they led the division by 9.5 games at the All-Star break and never looked back). Of course, in 2021, when the battled down to the final day, they ran out of gas in the NLCS.
Maybe the Dodgers can find a happy medium this year. Win the division with four or five games left so they can set up their postseason rotation without getting too rusty. But if Castrovince's prediction comes true and L.A. loses the NL West, at least some postseason success would make up for it.
Because, spoiler alert: He predicts the Dodgers will beat the Yankees in the World Series.
