Yahoo!: Brown - Kuroda’s one-hitter is a sunny delight

Five teams, half-a-season in, the NL West has seen one winning month: April, in Arizona. The rest has been bleak enough that the next few months promise to be a real pillow fight, stray feathers and all.

Another hot five or six weeks – from any of them, really – could be enough to carry the division, advance on the playoffs, rally a town and, who knows, maybe save a job or two.
...
Meantime, [the Dodgers] arrived at the ballpark Monday night (fresh from that heroic 5-2 trip) a half-game behind the Diamondbacks, who couldn’t look less like that April team if they dressed like Smurfs and sang show tunes.
...
With Furcal out for the next couple months because of back surgery, Nomar Garciaparra a strained something-or-other waiting to happen, and the heavy-legged middle infield of Garciaparra and Jeff Kent turning groundouts into singles, general manager Ned Colletti appears to be focused on upgrading at shortstop. That is, acquiring a player who will give him better at-bats than Angel Berroa and greater range than Garciaparra, all while hoping Furcal prays to the same healing god Albert Pujols does.

Then there’s the added intrigue of what this means for Colletti, who won the NL wild card in 2006, his first season as GM, and has spent a lot of money for what turned out to be average teams since. In L.A., people are starting to talk about Colletti like they did Paul DePodesta a few years ago, and that didn’t end well for DePodesta.