Steve Henson is the MLB editor for Yahoo! Sports. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, where he covered Major League baseball, college football and college basketball and did investigative reporting.

Arizona Diamondbacks – Baby ‘Backs have grown into Adolescent ‘Backs and the pitching is postseason primed. But should they lull themselves into complacency because the rest of the NL West is pathetic and fail to land a bat, they will regret it in October.

Los Angeles Dodgers – GM Ned Colletti brought in Greg Maddux at the deadline two years ago and came up empty last year. Always loath to part with his cadre of inexpensive producers, landing sorely needed power (Matt Holliday) or sorely needed starting pitching (Rich Harden) is a longshot.

Let’s see Western reporter, with mostly Western contacts, with NL West teams wanting bats. Uhm, yeah, like we’re just going to give Matty away to the frickin’ Dodgers or D-backs. I’m certainly glad that O’Dowd’s holding out for that astral plane, here.

After reading so many comments by Mets fans on other sites over the last few hours, I’m seeing this frame of reference as common to Boston/New York/Philly fans where there’s this sense that anything short of the highest possible standard of achievement from day one is failure. “If you’re not first, you’re last,” to quote Ricky Bobby.

In O’Dowd’s statements I see a more nuanced zen-like approach, where he deflects the concept of these nebulous expectations, yet a higher standard is still held which can only be reached through the perfection of smaller tasks (locating pitches, relaxing swings, etc…) on the way to the ultimate goal. For a born again Christian, this is a surprisingly Eastern influenced philosophy to take. It still could be self-preserving BS, but the underlying philosophy is a much better frame to mount a comeback with than the “You’ve already shown that you’re losers, the only way for this team to succeed is start with somebody else who will show that they’re different” approach.

The strikeout ratio is a big concern, but it’s not nearly the impossible to improve flaw that you make it out to be. In fact, his near 30% line drive rate in his MLB career and the big time power he’s shown is a huge plus that shows that his skills could still translate to stardom at the MLB stage.

Not every decent pitcher that’s employed the inside heat, breaking balls in the dirt strategy has been successful with it, which tells me that the capability to correct this is there with Ian and it seems to be an issue that improves with practice for him.

I don’t know, I’m thinking we’re both carrying fairly substantial biases into this argument, so I’m trying to figure out where a more balanced and neutral view would lie, but I can tell for sure that the K issues are not quite as extreme and problematic for Stewart as you insist.

When assigned to a minor league squad, and since Herrera was just sent down, he was inelligible to be called right back up.

Sunday, but won’t pitch in a game yet. He’ll pitch bullpens first, having last pitched in a game on May 15 or so.

is the Rockies have to play a suddenly hot Royals team on the road. Rockies have to win series if not sweep. 4-2 would be ok, but I’d rather have another sweep.

Our hole is a big one.

Apparently the link doesn’t work. Anyways, it’s on the MILB.com front page.

last night. But they only showed highlights, of course. Seeing the entire thing is even funnier.

why Q isn’t a good nickname. He’s sharing it with this guy:

When we were 18 games under .500, so it would still be a comparable miracle, but the D-backs sure are spoiling the fun by losing so much. We could have had a really good shot at the greatest comeback ever had they won a few more games in May.

Phillips is a class of athlete that would be hard to take a pass on. He’s definitely one of my favorite parts of watching Reds games, and that was before I came here. As with any trade, I would think it would come down to not giving up too much, but he’d be worth quite a bit. I’m going to say that people are still overplaying Atkins’ value, but I’d be willing to give up Stewart for Phillips anyway and take the decline phase with Garrett.

I have one caveat and that would be for the club to also go out on a monetary limb for Chris Dominguez as a higher potential Atkins heir than Holcomb.

last off season, every trade conversation seemed to start w/ the other team asking for Stewart/Morales…Now…I’d move both of them for Phillips