How Good Are the Dodgers?
Trick question: There is no good in the Dodgers. Their hearts are black; the souls of fans and players alike are corroded and crumbling, carried granule by granule away by a dark, howling wind to parts unknown and unspeakable. It’s a bad situation all around. Asked a different way: How talented are the Dodgers? Dave Cameron thinks they have the division wrapped up. Obviously, he’s freebasing hyperbole to make a stronger argument, but he's pretty convinced. I still think that the Dodgers rotation will hurt them. Billingsley's pretty fantastic, but counting on Randy Wolf is like counting on Chris Snelling or Cliff Floyd. And while Kershaw is a pretty special talent, it's tough to expect any 21-year-old to be a 200-innings kind of rotation cog. I also think that Russell Martin, James Loney, and Rafael Furcal can be a lot better than they've been so far. So even if the rotation does falter, they could still win quite a few games. I can't really argue with Cameron's article. I’ve never been a fan of that particular argument, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. You usually read it closer to the playoffs, and I understand the concept: You have a known quantity (the Dodgers are 20-8), so you want to take that into account when predicting the rest of the season. It just feels…icky. Again, I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s not what I want to read? Yeah, that’s probably why. It's too early to worry about All-Star ballots, much less a team running away with the division. I just wanted to know what y'all thought about the FanGraphs article linked to in the title of this post.



