Looking at the NL West in preseason it was easy to see the defending champion San Francisco Giants and the big spenders of the offseason Los Angeles Dodgers as the favorites to win the division.  Now, 50+ games into the season it is easy to see the Dodgers not making the playoffs at all and the Giants having a little more trouble making it this year.  The biggest surprise about the Giants and Dodgers not being atop the division is not that they’re not there, it’s who is and how those two teams have done it.

The Colorado Rockies were a mess last season.  The team tried to implement a four man pitching rotation that backfired to the tune of a 5.22 team ERA to end the season.  That ERA was the worst in the league by nearly half of a run, so it is easy to see how people looked past them before the season started.

The Rockies have turned it around this season, and sit in a tie with the Giants for second place because of it.  After 53 games, they are 2.5 games back of first place and are three games above .500.  One key to their success has been improving their pitching staff.  The Rockies made a lot of changes in the starting rotation in the offseason and it has brought results with a team ERA of 3.72, good for 11th in the league and eighth in the National League.  No one could have predicted that the Rockies pitching staff would improve that much, but with this improvement it is easy to see why the Rockies are where they are right now.

The pitching alone is not all that is helping the Rockies surge in the early part of this season, the offense is healthy and they are hitting.  One of the stars of the offense, Troy Tulowitzki, spent most of last season on the DL. This year, he is healthy and is playing at his expected all-star caliber.  The offense as a whole is in the top 10 in the league in batting average, HRs, runs scored and just about every other category you can think of.  With a healthy Tulo this is a different team on offense because the opposing teams have more to worry about than just Carlos Gonzalez.  When a team can pitch and hit like this, it doesn’t matter who stands in the way, the team will win, and that is exactly what the Rockies are doing.

Even as well as the Rockies are playing, they are only in a tie for second in the NL West behind the surprising Arizona Diamondbacks.  The D-Backs being this good is a surprise, but not because they don’t have a good team.  They have plenty of quality players.  It is surprising because the D-Backs traded away two of their biggest offensive stars of the last few years, Chris Young and Justin Upton, as well as a highly rated pitching prospect Trevor Bauer.  There were quite a few people who thought the D-Backs may have made a mistake as they traded these guys away because of their attitudes rather than because of their play on the field.  That’s not usually how a General Manager builds a winning team, but the D-Backs have focused more on clubhouse chemistry and depth on the roster than having star players in the lineup.

So far this season, everything the D-Backs have done has worked.  The trade of Young brought back both solid veteran Heath Bell for the bullpen and Cliff Pennington who has been great in pressure situations this season for the D-Backs.  The trade of Bauer has been the real bright spot for the D-Backs, though.  It brought Didi Gregorius and Tony Sipp to the team, both of whom have been big parts of the team’s early winning record.  Gregorius has been solid at SS and is an early frontrunner for rookie of the year with his offensive play.  Sipp hasn’t been fantastic for the D-Backs, but he has been a solid addition to the bullpen for them.  But, the biggest surprise of the D-Backs is that the trade of Bauer freed up a spot in the rotation for Patrick Corbin who has been fantastic in his 10 starts so far this year.  They also added veteran starter Brandon McCarthy to an already deep rotation, and although the pitching staff has not performed up to standards, it is one of the deepest rotations in the NL.

So do these teams have a shot at taking the NL West from the Giants or even one of the Wild Card spots in the playoffs this year?  Yes, and they surely have a better shot than the Dodgers.  One, if not both of them have a real shot at winning this division.  The D-Backs are currently on pace to win 90 games, which would have been good enough to take last season’s second wild card spot, and these projections put them three games ahead of the Giants for the lead in the division. 

The Rockies will have a harder time as they’re only projected to win 84 games at their current pace, but they still have half of their remaining games at home and any improvement on their current road record would put them in position to win the division or possibly the wild card, although that would be tough the way the Pirates, Reds and Cardinals are playing right now.  Expect both of these teams to be making noise in the last week of the season, even if only one of them are going to make it in.