Blogs and Articles Roundup: Sept 9, 2013

It’s been a crushing seven days for the D-backs.  After dropping the first two of the home games against Toronto to finish off interleague play, Arizona split a four-game set in San Francisco — nearly getting victimized by a perfect game along the way.  If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the team’s pitching has fared very well; Wade Miley bounced back from a terrible start on Tuesday to throw 7 innings of 2-run ball on Sunday, Brandon McCarthy twirled two gems, and Trevor Cahill contributed an excellent performance by relying on his sinker.  Patrick Corbin also got in on the action in a big way, bouncing back for an overshadowed start on Friday.

The thunderstorm is the offense.  Since the August 27 outburst, the D-backs have scored only 24 runs in 11 games, which is pretty horrendous.  The offensive slowdown was never so obvious as it was on Friday, when former Arizona castoff had a perfect game going until Eric Chavez lined a single with two down in the ninth.

Meanwhile, the chances of reaching the playoffs have completely slipped away in the last week.  In both of its projection formats, FanGraphs has the Arizona playoff odds at well under 1%, and even a 7 game sweep of the Dodgers would do little to change that.

It’s still of interest to see what we have, of course.

• At the main SweetSpot blog on ESPN.com, Matt Meyers put Yusmeiro Petit’s near-perfect performance into perspective (highly recommended).
• Also on ESPN, the team of Buster Olney, Jim Bowden and Keith Law ranked all 30 organizations in five categories, taking into account strength in minors, on-field performance, etc.  I’m not in the habit of spoiling Insider content, but let’s just say: Arizona is in the middle of the pack.  I had a Twitter conversation recently about whether we’d be better off with Houston’s player assets than our own, and these organizational power rankings are great for putting that type of thing into perspective.
• If you missed Sunday’s excruciating game, check out my guest recap at AZ Snakepit.  Also check out Jim McLennan’s recent work, including a look at Martin Prado’s Player of the Month performance in August and his recap of the near-perfect game.
• Don’t miss the recent work at AZ Central, including this look at Patrick Corbin’s innings, Dan Bickley’s examination of Kirk Gibson, and Nick Piecoro’s excellent notebooks on McCarthy’s turnaround and Gerardo Parra’s defense.
• Thomas Lynch at Venom Strikes explained why he rooted for Yusmeiro Petit to finish off the perfect game attempt — at least for a while.
• Fan of anagrams?  Well, then, it’s too bad you’re a Diamondbacks fan.  Allow William Juliano to explain over at Captain’s Blog.