Welcome to Rates and Varyl. It's Monday, February 12th.

Derek Van Riper, Enosaris, here with you.

With another team preview edition of the podcast.

We're going to move through most of the NL West today.

We quickly discarded the Rockies last week, so they are out of the way.

We're going to focus on the meat in the NL West sandwich, the three teams that will likely be in the middle.

That, of course course would include the defending

National League champion Diamondbacks, the Giants, and the Padres. So three fun teams to look at.

I think you can make of them what you wish, really. You could talk yourself into these teams

being playoff teams. You could talk yourself into 10 games below 500, and I think you could have a pretty

fun conversation either way.

Yeah, this is the lottery.

This is what is the dice roll section of the division.

I do have more confidence in one of these teams than the other two, though.

Well, let's start with the defending National League champions. Is it the Arizona Diamondbacks? We'll play guess who. Is that the team you feel better about? Of course. Projections like them better. Yeah. They're clearly projected for number two in the NL West. Right. Are they? Oh, in the NL West. Yeah. I thought you said NL for a second. No. No, I mean, you come off the recency bias of them being in the World Series and, you know, you might think that there are a better team than they actually are. So I think they're a pretty good team. I don't think that I would say that they're a favorite to get back to the World Series.

Yeah, I think that's very fair.

Offseason addition so far, really one particularly big one with Iohanios Juarez,

just given how much they struggled to get production from their rotation at third base last season.

So that's a pretty big boost for them just from that perspective.

They retained Lordes Greal Jr.

So they didn't have to go out and find a replacement for him.

It's a similar group of hitters to what we saw last year.

...