Walker Buehler is plenty familiar with the NL West.<\/p>\n
But the right-hander has spent his career looking down from the mountaintop. Buehler\u2019s two World Series rings have dozens of sapphires arranged in an interlocking \u201cLA\u201d on beds of diamonds. The only time his Dodgers didn\u2019t run away with the NL West during his time in Chavez Ravine was in 2021, when the Giants shocked everyone with a 107-win season.<\/p>\n
The Padres haven\u2019t won an NL West title in two decades, but their 2022 knocked the Dodgers off their perch \u2014 and out of the playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember being on the other side of it and how big of a threat San Diego has been,\u201d Buehler said. \u201cBeing in this uniform, (I\u2019m) hoping to kind of add to that. (The Dodgers have) had a ton of success and have done a lot of things really well, but I\u2019m excited about what we have here as well. Looking forward to a good year.\u201d<\/p>\n
A good year very well could hinge on what happens elsewhere in the NL West.<\/p>\n
The Dodgers have won the last two World Series and chose to give Kyle Tucker $240 million over four years and closer Edwin D\u00edaz $69 million over three years, pushing this year\u2019s projected payroll to just under $400 million. That total is almost what the Padres ($208 million) and Giants ($204 million) will pay their players combined, according to Fangraphs.com. The Dodgers have won every NL West title since 2013 save for the Giants\u2019 2021 ambush and have twice set the franchise record for wins in that window.<\/p>\n
And the 2026 Dodgers could be their best team yet, manager Dave Roberts says.<\/p>\n
The rest of the NL West certainly will not punt the division. But beating up on each other frequently \u2014 beginning with the Giants\u2019 visit to Petco Park on Monday \u2014 very well could be the likeliest path to a postseason spot.<\/p>\n
Consider: the second-best NL West team has won a wild-card spot in each of the last six years, with the 2023 Diamondbacks riding an 84-win season all the way to the World Series (after eliminating the Dodgers).<\/p>\n
Arizona won even more games the next year (89), but still finished four games behind the Padres and missed the postseason.<\/p>\n
As for the Giants? They haven\u2019t won more than 81 games since their 2021 uprising, have just two postseason appearances since their 2014 World Series title and this year are asking rookie manager Tony Vitello to become the rare coach to translate collegiate success to the majors.<\/p>\n
Both teams have stars \u2014 Corbin Carroll, Ketel Marte and Geraldo Perdomo in Arizona and Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman and Willy Adames in San Francisco \u2014 that rival the Padres\u2019 nucleus of Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s why projection models at Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus have all three clubs winning between 79 and 82 games.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Diamondbacks are always sneaky, no matter who they throw out there,\u201d Merrill said when asked about the lay of the NL West beyond the Dodgers. \u201cThey\u2019re a sneaky team. They compete. Torey (Lovullo) does a great job over there, too. It\u2019s insane to watch him manage the way he does. \u2026 I think the Diamondbacks are a sleeper always and the Giants are always there. It\u2019s just whether they finish the job. It\u2019s the same with us.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to finish the job and stay hot.\u201d<\/p>\n
The gulf between the NL West\u2019s middling trio and the Dodgers boils down to one thing: Money.<\/p>\n
The discrepancy of the payrolls is one thing \u2014 the Dodgers ($397 million) rank first in the majors, the Padres ($208 million) rank ninth, the Giants ($204 million) rank 11th and the D-backs ($195 million) rank 13th \u2014 but the cable money that each team reels in really separates the haves from the have-nots.<\/p>\n
The Dodgers receive $330 million a year from their local cable deal, nearly four times as much as the $90 million or so in TV money that the Giants pull in.<\/p>\n
The Padres and Diamondbacks make a fraction of what the Giants do; Major League Baseball owns the clubs\u2019 streaming rights. Television revenue is one battle line being drawn as owners prepare to push for a salary cap during collective bargaining negotiations after the season.<\/p>\n
Count Machado among the players who see the real problem to be the teams that don\u2019t spend, not the teams that do. Forget that Tucker is the\u00a0highest annual earner in major-league history, that Ohtani agreed to defer $680 million of his salary and that the Dodgers are paying nearly $30 million to their eighth- and ninth-inning pitchers this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI (expletive) love it,\u201d Machado said. \u201cI mean, honestly, I think every team should be doing it. \u2026 I think every team has the ability to do it. So, I hope all 30 teams could learn from that. \u2026 We started it a few years ago with Peter (Seidler), you know. So everyone could do it. It\u2019s just a matter if they want to or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe.<\/p>\n
Maybe not.<\/p>\n
But the Dodgers setting the bar high has served the Padres well. San Diego has made the postseason four times in the last six years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s good to have teams that are elite, that are kind of setting the pace and having a lot of other teams that can go ahead and play at that level,\u201d Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller said. \u201cWe look at it in the NL West: you\u2019ve got to be really good to come out of there. It\u2019s made us better over the last few years, and it makes the league better, honestly.\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a good challenge for us. It\u2019s something that we\u2019re looking forward to seeing if we can get to that level.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walker Buehler is plenty familiar with the NL West. But the right-hander has spent his career looking down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[181,1334,74,76,75,2611,127,1696],"class_list":{"0":"post-242499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-latest-headlines","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-san-diego","11":"tag-san-diego-headlines","12":"tag-san-diego-news","13":"tag-san-diego-padres","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-top-stories-sdut"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}