The D-backs’ 2-4 week, complete with a sweep at the hands of the Dodgers, was one to forget — and yet just days after Archie Bradley took a line drive off the bat of Carlos Gonzalez, it sure seems like one we’ll remember for a long time. After Bradley was removed in the second inning of that Tuesday contest, …
Continue Reading →And things were going so well. After a sweep at the hands of the Pirates, the D-backs stand with an 8-10 record a little over a tenth into the season, more or less on the 70-something pace for wins that we might have expected coming into this season. If there’s any consolation, the pitching has been not just better than …
Continue Reading →Paul Goldschmidt had an OPS over 1.000 entering Sunday’s game, and after a walk and a home run in 5 plate appearances, he left it with an OPS of 1.088. That’s extremely good; 5 bombs in two weeks puts Goldy on a pace for 65, and what is “normal” for Goldy might be a pace of 3 per two weeks. …
Continue Reading →The D-backs bullpen looks like a really good bullpen — it let up just two earned runs (shame on you, Evan Marshall!) through the first five games before allowing four more yesterday. And that looks super fortunate, because the bullpen has already had to contribute 24.2 innings in six — that’s more than 4 innings per game.
The bright …
Continue Reading →The Opening Day 25-man is now set, and it’s how it was set that should catch your eye. Yasmany Tomas struggled, and was sent to Triple-A Reno for work. Jake Lamb and Nick Ahmed looked great, and earned starting roles to begin the season. Archie Bradley looked somewhere between “dominant” and “ready,” pushing Trevor Cahill halfway across the country. Pitchers …
Continue Reading →Doing The Pool Shot podcast is only getting more and more fun, especially with some killer questions on Twitter that were absolutely fascinating to think about. Why is baseball so damned fun that way? All I know is: the season is about to start, and we’re about to have tons more to notice, work through and discuss, both on these …
Continue Reading →If you know me even a little, you can probably appreciate just how much I enjoyed thinking about the idea of a six-man rotation, a question put to us by two people (Joseph Gonzol and Jon Klingman) for the last episode of The Pool Shot. It’s not that a six man rotation would necessarily be a good idea for most …
Continue Reading →It’s been a great week — Jeff and I just concluded our Spring Training trip that coincided with the SABR Analytics Conference. We really enjoyed meeting a ton of new people. And on behalf of both of us, I want to express our thanks to the entire D-backs Communications Department for helping us get a closer look at the team …
Continue Reading →Let’s lead right off with the important stuff: Jeff and I will be at Zipps Sports Grill next Sunday at noon, the idea being that we will be thirsty before heading over to Scottsdale Stadium for the 3:05 game against the Giants. Jeff picked the meetup locale, so I can neither confirm nor deny that it was chosen because of …
Continue Reading →The D-backs may have quite a few players that they’d like to renegotiate salaries with, but after purging Miguel Montero‘s contract and shuffling some deck chairs in the offseason, there are probably only three contracts that the team wishes it could outright delete right now. I’ll give you a hint; their three 2015 salaries/offseason commitments total about $33M. The …
Continue Reading →On Episode 16 of The Pool Shot, we spent much of the first half hour talking through the impact of the news that in the “final offer”-style arbitration in which he filed for $6.9M and the D-backs filed for $5.3M, the three-person panel picked Trumbo’s number. The impact is not colossal, but it’s not good, either. $1.6M is nothing …
Continue Reading →When the deadline for clubs and players to exchange arbitration figures finally arrived, the D-backs had just two arb players unsigned: Addison Reed and Mark Trumbo. A couple of weeks ago, I dug in on those arbitration cases and thought that while settling with Trumbo would be reasonable, there were extraordinarily compelling reasons for the club to go to …
Continue Reading →When GM Dave Stewart “listed” Rubby De La Rosa and Allen Webster with Josh Collmenter and Jeremy Hellickson as penciled into the rotation, it was probably, in part, a way to talk up the recently-completed Wade Miley trade. Fair enough. As Nick Piecoro wrote yesterday morning, the gap probably comes after Collmenter and Hellickson, and I agree that those are …
Continue Reading →For a slow news week in Diamondbacks land (thanks for that, Super Bowl), we sure had a hell of a lot to stuff into our most recent episode of The Pool Shot. We had a fantastic conversation, and I think Episode 13 is a great example of why we’re podcasting in the first place.
The first major topic we tackled …
Continue Reading →You may have seen this back at the Worldwide Leader: Rob Manfred interviewed with Karl Ravech of ESPN in a video that aired yesterday, and promoting offense appears to be one of Manfred’s priorities. Among the options Manfred said the league would consider: rules changes to cut down or eliminate defensive shifting in baseball. I don’t know how likely this …
Continue Reading →Tickets are on sale for Spring Training, which makes it feel like we’re closing in on the 2015 season. Gone are the main rites of the offseason, the victory parade, the non-tender deadline, the Winter Meetings, the voting results for the Hall of Fame. A ton has happened for the D-backs during that span (well, other than the victory parade), …
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