I believe I'm the newest addition to Beyond the Boxscore and I'm certain this is my first post here, so I thought I'd introduce myself. My name, as you can see above, is Richard Wade. I run a blog, Friar Faithful, and as you can no doubt see from the title, I am a San Diego Padres fan. Without further ado, here is my first post here: A SportsNation poll this past week asked several questions about the NL West. The two questions I found most interesting were numbers three and four, which asked which NL West contenders had the best rotation and bullpen. The Padres topped both lists and were followed in the same order both times by Los Angeles, Arizona and San Francisco. There were two things I took issue with. The first is that 30.8% of respondents believed a team other than San Diego had the best bullpen. The second is that only 7.2% of people gave the Diamondbacks the credit they deserve as having arguably the best rotation in the NL West. Here are the relevent data:
| Padre Bullpen |
| Name |
VORP |
| Rudy Seanez |
9.7 |
| Chris Hammond |
8.9 |
| Scott Linebrink |
7.7 |
| Trevor Hoffman |
5.0 |
| Akinori Otsuka |
2.6 |
| Dennys Reyes |
0.7 |
| Brian Falkenborg |
-0.1 |
| Darrell May |
-0.7 |
| SDN Bullpen |
34.5 |
| SDN Top 6 |
34.6 |
That's a combined VORP of 34.5 from the full San Diego Bullpen. The Giants are second in the division at 10.4. If you'd like the stats for all four contenders, you can find them
here. As for the starting rotations, you can judge that for yourself, but it's much closer than the poll would seem to indicate.
| Diamondback Rotation |
| Name |
VORP |
| Javier Vazquez |
15.7 |
| Brandon Webb |
14.5 |
| Shawn Estes |
11.9 |
| Brad Halsey |
4.4 |
| Russ Ortiz |
1.9 |
| ARI Rotation |
48.4 |
| ARI Top 5 |
48.4 |
| Diamondback Rotation |
| Name |
VORP |
| Jake Peavy |
28.4 |
| Adam Eaton |
9.4 |
| Tim Stauffer |
4.6 |
| Brian Lawrence |
3.9 |
| Woody Williams |
3.3 |
| Tim Redding |
-13.4 |
| SDN Rotation |
36.2 |
| SDN Top 5 |
49.6 |
As you can see, the argument comes down to whether or not you want to look at everyone who has been primarily a starter for their respective team or if you only want to look at the top 5 guys in each rotation. For the other two contenders,
click here. Now, I anticipate a number of you should take issue with how I've drawn my conclusions. Rather than answer those criticisms now, I've decided to wait until they are brought up. Any and all feedback will be appreciated.
