This may come as a shock to most of you, but the Arizona Diamondbacks are the defending NL West champions. They beat out the Giants by 8 games and won 94 games on 
the year. It’s ok if you still don’t remember, the Dbacks are kind of buried out there in Phoenix and are led by some guys who are a little less than household names. The offense last season was the Justin Upton show. Upton was a top 5 MVP finisher and hit 31 bombs (The Link is cool, click on it, then come back to finish this article). The pitching staff was led by Ian Kennedy (21 wins) and Dan Hudson (16). After that, Josh Collmenter was the next best thing and he wasn’t very good. Aside from securing the middle infield, Arizona GM Josh Towers’ main mission this year was adding a pitcher to round out his top 3. He did that in a big way tonight, getting Trevor Cahill and Craig Breslow for Jarrod Parker, Colin Gowgill, and Ryan Cook. Parker was definitely the big haul for the A’s as he has top of the rotation stuff but Cahill is a elite talent with legitimate Cy Young aspirations and worth the price.
The A’s are going nowhere and doing it slowly. They’re holding out for a new ballpark before Billy Beane can put together a winning team but Arizona sees a window of opportunity. In my estimation, in order to make a serious run at it, the Diamondbacks need a big bat and big arm. In this trade they got that arm plus Breslow, a bullpen guy who will be an absolute stud for them. Cahill is the type of guy who’s a great back up to Daniel Hudson (the eventual number one) and Kennedy and sets this team up to actually compete in the playoffs. They won 94 games without this guy, if they add one more bat and everyone performs the way they did last year, you could be looking at an NL West dynasty.
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-Max Frankel
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