The NL West

Another stupid Padre fan...

In response to my assertion that RBI's are highly lineup dependent:

Maybe only to you stat geeks who made up a bunch of useless, crap stats to make you sound like you know wha you're talking about.

Title Track

At this point, 83 wins should be enough to win the division. Currently, all 5 teams mathematically have a shot at that number. The table below shows the record each team would need to maintain to capture the NL West crown:

Team	W	L	W%
San Diego	25	20	0.556
Arizona	27	16	0.628
Los Angeles	30	15	0.667
San Francisco	32	13	0.711
Colorado	38	5	0.884

The odds of any team in the NL West playing .600 ball over the remaing 40+ games aren't good. If the Padres can manage to not get swept by the Diamondbacks and Dodgers, they shouldn't have a problem winning the division.

I've actually heard people on the local radio stations say they would rather lose the division than win it with a sub-.500 record. [hyperbole]That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.[/hyperbole] What are those people thinking? Were the 2004 Red Sox, 2003 Marlins, and 2002 Angels so ashamed of making the playoffs despite not winning their division that they didn't show up? Did the 2000 Yankees say that an 87-win team didn't deserve to be in the playoffs and phone it in? Your regular season record has nothing to do with how you do in the playoffs. The 1998 Yankees are the only 100+ win team to win the Series since they added the Wild Card and they're also the only team to rank as high as second in regular season wins the year they won it. In 2000, the Yankees were 9th in regular season wins.

The playoffs are a crapshoot and if the Padres can make it, they have as good a shot of winning it as just about anyone else.