Have Dodgers impressed you more than their NL West rivals to open 2025 season?

Coming out of their series sweep of the Rockies, the Dodgers are 14-6 and third in the National League West behind the Giants and Padres. They're still recovering some pride after three hard-to-watch series against the Phillies, Nationals, and Cubs, and we have to withhold any early claims that they've redeemed themselves from that stretch, given that the team they swept is the worst team in baseball.

The Dodgers gave up sole possession of the No. 1 spot on April 6, after their second loss to the Phillies, and they haven't regained it since. The Padres have now been in first place nearly as long as the Dodgers were to start the season, and their undefeated streak of winning at home ended just this past Tuesday, when they fell to the Cubs by one run.

Compared to the rest of the league, the Dodgers are doing incredibly well. Third place in the NL West still means they have the third-best record in the game through Wednesday. However, with the Padres' and Giants' unexpected (and annoying) successes to kick off the years, the Dodgers are sort of paling in comparison.

Dodgers currently sitting at third in NL West behind Padres, Giants despite historic initial record

We can look at run differential as a good marker for where the Dodgers are in comparison to the Padres and Giants. The Dodgers are sitting at +7 after their series with the Rockies, but the Padres and Giants are at +37 and +34, respectively. That makes it pretty obvious that the Dodgers are the inferior team right now.

Perhaps the best way to approach this is to think about how much each of the Dodgers, Padres, and Giants were perceived to have going into the season compared to what they've actually been able to show on the field. The Dodgers were obviously the most stacked team in baseball, whereas the Padres did close to nothing this offseason and lost a number of players from their stubbornly good team last season, and no one was even thinking about the Giants as a real competitor for the other two.

Basically, the Padres and Giants have been able to do more with less, and that's a pretty bad look for the Dodgers. Although LA's .700 record clearly makes this a high class problem that a lot of other teams would kill for, it's still fair for Dodgers fans to be worried about how this team is going to fare through the rest of the year. The NL West was always going to be competitive, but nobody could've predicted that it would be quite this intense.