Well, that was a rough road-trip, Arizona going 1-5 – don’t forget, the Mexico City games officially counted as “home” ones for the D-backs. I do wonder if playing at an altitude of over seven thousand feet carried a detrimental effect forward, like playing at Coors Field on steroids. The Padres have also looked shaky since descending from the mountain, losing series at home to both sides of the Chicago baseball business. Overall, the two sides involved in the Mexico City series went 3-9 the following
week. [After the HOU-COL series there in 2024, the teams involved went 8-6. Though if anyone should be used to playing at altitude, it’s the Rockies]
Regardless of cause, it does seem the Diamondbacks are struggling right now. Or, perhaps this is simply a regression to expectations. Because the underlying metrics haven’t been very good for quite sometime. The high water mark for the season was likely on April 18, when the D-backs beat the Blue Jays, to secure the series win and move to 13-8. They’d gone 5-0-1 in series after getting swept by the Dodgers to open the season, and only three teams in the majors had a better record than the Diamondbacks.
But there were already indications this was unsustainable. Over those twenty-one games, Arizona had scored only three runs more than their opponents. The Pythag expected win percentage, based on runs scored and allowed, was over a hundred points below the actual one. Now, it is fair to mention that a significant number of the runs against had been allowed by James McCann and Joe Ross – 13 in 4.2 IP, to be precise. But, all told, the numbers were not those of the fourth-best team in the majors. On the pitching side, the ERA ranked 12th and the FIP 20th. Unusually, Arizona’s hitting was worse than its pitching: the OPS was 19th and the wRC+ 21st.
Averaging those out we get a 16th ranked pitching and 20th ranked hitting team. A little below average, but one where you could squint and, with a bit of luck, see a team which could possibly be in the wild-card hunt. That luck had shown up early in one-run games. After the Dodgers series, through the April 18 date, the Diamondbacks had gone 6-2 in those. But since then, they simply haven’t been many close games at all, which could bolster the team’s record despite the run differential thing. There now has not been a situation for Paul Sewald to save, in two and a half weeks.
A more concerning issue though, it that the team hasn’t just regressed to that mediocrity. The offense has been more like we expected, in a positive way. From April 19th through now, the hitters have the 11th-ranked OPS and 10th by wRC+, although the former is down from the 5th place they had last year. It has been okay – albeit relying on the fiery and unsustainable incandescence of Ildemaro Vargas being among the very best hitters in baseball for the month of April. But the pitching has completely fallen apart. Over twelve games and more than a hundred inning, the D-backs’ ERA is 7.51, worst in the majors by more than a run. The FIP (5.52) is also dead last.
In an unusual twist, it’s not the bullpen which has been driving this. In 12 starts, the rotation has an ERA of 10.10 – worst in the majors by more than three and a half runs. Its close to double the ERA of the bullpen. They are still ranked 23rd, which ain’t good. But at 5.17 it’s Tungsten Arm O’Doyle like in comparison to the D-backs’ starters, especially considering their rate of use. At least on this road-trip, they haven’t had to worry too much about who’ll pitch the bottom of the ninth inning, because there usually hasn’t been one. But James McCann has tied the MLB record for position player appearances by the end of April (and hasn’t allowed an earned run his last three times out).
I think the reality is, the D-backs true level of talent is somewhere between the heights of what they pretended to be over the first three weeks, and the depths determined largely by their dismal pitching since then. The good news is, the team should start to get pitching reinforcements soon. Last we heard, A.J. Puk should be able to start his rehab assignment later this month. Justin Martinez and Corbin Burnes will follow. But nothing is ever a sure thing coming back from Tommy John procedures. And even the return of a fully effective Burnes will take care of only one spot in the rotation, where only Eduardo Rodriguez now has an ERA+ above 100.
Let’s not exempt the offense and fielding from criticism either, because both of those have taken a palpable step back from last year. The wRC+ has dropped 11 points, from 109 to 98, and despite pronouncements from Torey Lovullo that tightening up the defense would be an area of priority, Arizona is currently on pace to commit more errors than they did last year. The K:BB ratio is worse than 3:1, and the highest it has been for the Diamondbacks since 2016. That’s despite the arrival of ABS, which has seen the ratio across all of baseball drop to its lowest figure in fifteen years. It’s all rather concerning.
It’s hard to say what, if anything can be done. On offense, the best-hitting prospect in Reno is Tommy Troy. But his OPS there is .883. As we saw a couple of weeks back, that likely converts to something in the low six hundreds at the major-league level, which is little if any improvement. Among the starting pitching, one wonders if we might see Mitch Bratt, who has a 2.63 ERA over six starts. But the problem is that Ryne Nelson is the only starter who can be optioned out: we’ve already got a starter turned long reliever in Brandon Pfaadt. Terrible though Merrill Kelly has been, he and his $20 million salary aren’t going anywhere.
With it being an off-day today, I figured it was a good point to throw up a post for discussing the team. Are they toast, or is it too early to say so? What can be done to turn them around? What do we hope to get out of the home-stand against the Pirates and Mets? Any and all topics should be considered on the table…
