Posts by: Jeff Wiser

It’s been fun profiling a couple of upcoming spring battles lately. There’s going to be some kind of rotation battle between some young, talented starters, and it’ll be intriguing to see how all of the infield pieces fit together. Avoiding the bullpen has been purposeful to date given the team might not be done adding there (more acquisitions today!), …

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The Diamondbacks have shuttled infielders around like nobody’s business over the last few years. There’s been little consistency, though there are holdovers from year to year. Gone are Didi Gregorius, Aaron Hill and Jean Segura. You can actually add Dansby Swanson to that list, too. There are plenty of new faces, and as of today, I count 11 …

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Pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training in about a week. That’s cool, and plenty of Diamondbacks are already in Scottsdale given the team’s headquarters fall inside the Cactus League boundaries. You don’t need a refresher on how the starting staff fared last year. It was a disaster, and even Robbie Ray‘s bright spot (strikeouts) had it’s own detractors …

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The Arizona Diamondbacks are getting a little less buzz this offseason than they did a year ago. Spending big and falling on your face with do that to you. They’re not a sleeper like the Rockies may be, and they’re surely not front runners like Dodgers. The biggest move was trading away arguably their most productive player from last season’s …

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How do you know if something is broken? Usually, you give something a go and don’t get the desired effect. Maybe you try again and still get an error. Other times, after a second try, everything works just fine. There always little blips on the radar of life. I mean, we all have to cycle our routers once in a …

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What are some things you love? Maybe it’s special people, maybe it’s a good cup of coffee, maybe it’s a cold one after a long hard day, maybe it’s a trip on the water to wet a line. Maybe you love that perfect song, a perfect steak off the grill, an evening on the patio watching the sun slip below …

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There’s not much going on in the world of baseball right now. The Diamondbacks made some minor moves after the first of the year, but there’s been little since. They just signed Chris Iannetta to support Jeff Mathis and Chris Herrmann, citing his on-base skills and power as selling points. There wasn’t much talk of his poor framing numbers, …

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“Where were you when you heard the news?” you probably won’t ask a friend or baseball-talking colleague some indeterminate chunk of time from now. “You know, the news that Big Pete got traded and Rubby’s coming back as a reliever?” The odds of one remembering that time and place are slim to none. That’s because most of us lead lives …

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It’s Friday in these parts. Maybe it’s Friday in your parts, too. If it’s not, maybe you wish it was Friday in your parts. Friday’s are great because that’s when the fun is about to begin. And let’s face it, those moments before the fun begins are quite often better than the fun itself. Realities like these are part of …

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A new year provides an opportunity for reflection. I was doing a bit of that recently, thumbing through some old episodes of The Pool Shot while being delayed at the airport again. The experience was fun and while I’d like to think we were right more than we were wrong, the episodes help harken back to a time that the …

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It’s easy to look at a complex situation and see it as a problem. We do this all the time — some might even call it a habit. When the answer to a question is jumbled and convoluted, we tend to see it through a lens of negativity. The Diamondbacks have too many starting pitchers at the moment. But that’s …

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Things have been a little quiet on the Diamondbacks front of late. After a flurry of moves in the front office and with the big league club, things have seemingly tapered off a little bit. This was to be expected to some degree. First, there was the trade that brought to the desert Taijuan Walker (and a piece) for …

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In case you missed it, we published our Offseason Plan the week before last. In that piece we, like we have done every year, looked for ways to the make the Diamondbacks a better baseball team. As we started out we developed some large goals, ones that are hardly unique if you read this site regularly. Upgraded catching, more athletic …

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It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Kevin Towers was relieved of his duties and we all did the happy dance, more or less. Sure, Tony La Russa might have been an unconventional choice as a pseudo replacement, but he had a pretty compelling on-field record to back up the logic. The appointment of Dave Stewart was maybe a …

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We’ve known for a very long time that the Diamondbacks were in need of bullpen reinforcements. Things looked kind good in early 2016 with Daniel Hudson, Tyler Clippard, and Brad Ziegler all being better than average relief arms. That group was due to make something like $14.3 million in 2016, and while the triumvirate proved effective more often …

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News broke late Wednesday night that owners and the Major League Players Association (MLBPA) had reached an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This was good news because it means baseball will enjoy five more years of labor rest and a lockout was avoided. But as the terms began to leak out, well, the deal began to look …

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