NL East preview

New York Mets 95-70

Santana, Wright, Reyes, Beltran, Wagner: good. Surprisingly worse than I realized: their rotation after Johan. Imagine if they didn’t pull that trade off and were heading into the season with Pedro Martinez, John Maine, and Oliver Perez as their one-two-three. That could have been one of the worst rotations in baseball. It seems like the key to the season will be Pedro and Maine, who will have to duplicate his performance from last year. Still, there’s too much fire power on this team for them not to make the playoffs in the National League.

Philadelphia Phillies 90-75

Sort of built like the Mets: lots of good position players scattered around the diamond but they have issues in their rotation. This may be the best lineup in the National League, even less heralded starters Pedro Feliz and Geoff Jenkins will be solid. Brett Myers is going to have to recover from a poor 2007, and stop punching his wife in the face, for them to win the division. I doubt he'll do either.

Atlanta Braves 80-82

Having Mark Texeria in the lineup for the whole year will be huge, as will calling up shortstop Yunel Escobar, but, again, they could run into problems with their starting pitching. By ‘run into problems with their starting pitching’ I mean that two of their top three starters are old enough to be my father. Could this be Jeff Francoeur’s breakout year? He won’t be taking any walks, but he could hit 30 home runs.

Florida Marlins 74-89

When will they trade Hanley Ramirez, and how much could he go for on the open market? If he stays at shortstop, Han-Ram could eventually be in for A-Rod type money.

Washington Nationals 72-91

Manager Manny Acta single-hadidly wills this team to more than 70 wins. According to Top Ten’s Phil Barnes, the Nationals new stadium, 90% of which was built with public funding, took all its money from the public schools, and has essentially caused them to shut down. So they got that going for them.