I've covered baseball for two decades, and I've never seen an entire division collapse like what's happening in the NL West right now.
Every single team in the division – all five of them – has combined to lose 19 consecutive games. Nobody can buy a win. It's like the entire West Coast caught some kind of disease.
The Dodgers? Losing. The Giants? Losing. The Padres? Losing. The Diamondbacks? Losing. The Rockies? They're always losing, but still.
Nineteen straight losses as a division. This is historically bad baseball.
Every night, NL West teams take the field with a chance to end the streak. And every night, they find new and creative ways to lose. Bad pitching. Worse hitting. Defensive breakdowns. Managerial blunders. You name it, the NL West is doing it.
It's gotten so bad that fans are joking about checking the water supply in West Coast stadiums. Something has to explain this level of futility.
The standings are a disaster. Every team is bleeding games to the rest of baseball. The division race doesn't matter when everybody's losing.
"I don't know what else to say," one NL West manager said after another loss. "We can't hit. We can't pitch. We can't catch. We can't win. It's brutal."
Brutal is right.
This isn't just a slump. Slumps last a few games. This is a full-scale organizational collapse happening simultaneously across five teams. It defies logic. It defies probability. It defies everything we know about baseball.
Someone's going to win eventually – they have to. The law of averages says this can't continue forever. But right now, the NL West is the laughingstock of baseball.
Other divisions are watching this and thanking their lucky stars they're not part of it. The NL East? They're fine. The AL East? Rolling. The NL Central? Doing just fine.
