00:00We're jumping to the National League West here, and the reason we're jumping there is because as we opened our eyes on Wednesday morning, we saw a tie atop the NL West.
00:09We saw that between the L.A. Dodgers and the San Diego Padres.
00:13L.A. and San Diego both 68-52. Dodgers are 4-6 in the last 10. They've lost three in a row.
00:19The Padres won 7-10, including winning four in a row. The Dodgers are struggling in Anaheim right now.
00:24I don't know if it's the curse of Otani and the curse of Hawaiian real estate at the moment, but listen, man, the Angels, for some reason, have Otani's number at the moment, and the Padres are as hot as a match right now.
00:38The thing that jumps out to me about San Diego, number one, Peter started buying them, what, two, two and a half weeks ago?
00:44He said, I think they can win the division after the deadline, and it seems like that could surely be the case.
00:51San Diego has no weakness at the moment. That's the big thing that jumps out to me when I watch Padres baseball right now.
00:58They satisfied those weaknesses. You could talk about the lineup length. That's not a problem anymore.
01:06You couldn't even cite the bullpen as a weakness. It was already a strength, and now it's the utmost strength of any team I can even remember in recent memory.
01:17And now you have Mason Miller really starting to settle in here. And again, I'm thinking about Mason Miller a little bit less likely to get burned by the long ball, given that he's going from the launch pad that he had to pitch in in Sacramento to San Diego, which is one of the more pitcher-friendly ballparks.
01:35Excuse me. All of a sudden now, you can maybe trust a bit more that the ball is going to stay in the yard if you do make a mistake.
01:42And if you get away, as a closer, you get away with two or three fly balls that may have left the yard in Sacramento that don't leave the yard in San Diego.
01:51That makes a big difference. And I really do think that's going to just embolden Mason Miller.
01:56But you look at the length now of this lineup, top to bottom, we were talking about how top-heavy it was in the beginning of the year.
02:02Like, Tatis has now seen his OPS drop under 800, and you don't even really notice it completely right now because how good the rest of the lineup is.
02:10If Tatis is Tatis, which we, I think, still should expect to happen, this team is really, really good.
02:16And remember, they went toe-to-toe with the Dodgers last year.
02:19And are the Dodgers this year any better than they were last year?
02:23I don't know. I don't know if that would be the case.
02:27You do have Shohei back pitching, but unless Glasnow and Snell are fully healthy and fully throwing in the way that they're fully capable of being able to,
02:36and even then, I still think these teams are very, very comparable.
02:40My thing on the Dodgers, and the reason that I skewed that they're not as good as they were last year, is because Mookie hasn't been good.
02:47Like, that's my big thing. Mookie Betts this year looks like 60% of who we think Mookie Betts is,
02:54and last year he did when he was healthy. He looked like 100% of Mookie Betts,
02:59and we got 100% of Freddie Freeman, and we got the best hitting version of Shohei Ohtani that we've ever seen.
03:04Ohtani this year, it's holding surf. This is exactly what this guy is doing, and he's a future Hall of Famer.
03:10He's one of the best players, if not the best player we've ever seen play this game.
03:13Freeman is Freeman, and this guy continues to, I don't want to say turn back the clock,
03:19just like mature and evolve as a Major League Baseball player, and that's why he's ticketed for Cooperstown.
03:24The emergence of Will Smith almost makes it a net neutral for me, because you've got Smith trending up
03:30while Betts is trending down, but the complementary pieces for me, frankly, are like not as good.
03:37Andy Pahes has been a nice revelation there, but they had some big-time flaws on their roster last year.
03:42They have some big-time flaws on their roster this year, and that's what jumps out to me.
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