The last two posts here have focussed on extending Diamondbacks first baseman, Paul Goldschmidt. The first installment crunched the numbers to seek a reasonable figure, for both Goldy and the team, to keep the slugger in Arizona past 2019. The second installment discussed the problems with even a relatively team-friendly deal, notably paying a sum of money annually to …
Continue Reading →Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’ve fully come to terms with the success the Diamondbacks have experienced this season. The team was projected to win 77 games entering the season, and after what we witnessed last year, you can understand why. There were very few changes to the squad in the offseason. It was mostly the same …
Continue Reading →The Diamondbacks came from behind yesterday on a well-timed homer from Chris Iannetta, only to end up dropping their third game in a row. As Torry Lovullo said postgame, basically, baseball giveth and baseball taketh away. Perhaps another manager, Ron Washington, encapsulated it best, saying, “That’s the way baseball go.” You can pick your own favorite euphemism, …
Continue Reading →There are those times, in my journey to learn about baseball, that I’ve legitimately had my mind blown. Most of them occurred early on, when I learned that saves were made up by some guy in the late 60’s, RBI’s were mostly a function of guys getting on base in front of a hitter, and pitchers don’t have all that …
Continue Reading →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 …
Continue Reading →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 …
Continue Reading →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 …
Continue Reading →The D-backs have several starting pitchers who fell short of expectations in 2016, and while Shelby Miller most likely headlines that list, Patrick Corbin was arguably the bigger disappointment. Before yielding 32 ER in his final 36 innings in 2013, Corbin was that ultra-rare thing: a pitcher who outperformed expectations in a D-backs uni. Since returning from UCL reconstruction …
Continue Reading →The playoffs started yesterday, and that’s both good and bad. Playoff baseball is fun (good), but with every passing final box score, we’re reminded that the long, cold, dead, baseball-less winter is fast approaching (bad). The Jays beat the Orioles in a game that’ll remain notorious for Buck Showalter neglecting to use Zach Britton, the best reliever in baseball, …
Continue Reading →One of my favorite debates within the baseball analytics community is how to evaluate pitching. We’ve collectively moved on from ERA since it has some obvious problems. The first is the most glaring: ERA tells most of the story of what happened, not how talented a pitcher is. We don’t really care what happened, we care mostly about how good …
Continue Reading →There’s no denying that the signing of Zack Greinke and the trade for Shelby Miller took the pitching spotlight off of Patrick Corbin. After all, he was a guy that the team knew they could count on and the moves this winter were meant to support him, rather than have him go it alone as the rotation’s only proven …
Continue Reading →Patrick Corbin and Robbie Ray have more in common than pitching left-handed. This season, both have doggedly stuck with a changeup, despite poor results in the past. And while Corbin’s slider had been one of the best in the game and Ray’s had been one of the worst, they’re both using a fourseam fastball, sinker, breaking ball, and changeup, in …
Continue Reading →One of the first evolutions in sabermetrics was the idea that pitchers didn’t control nearly as much as was widely believed for a very long time. Some things pitchers clearly do influence heavily: strikeouts, and walks. And with those “defense-independent pitching” principles, we got the first generation of “ERA estimators,” statistics that derive most of their meaning from the outcomes …
Continue Reading →In case the secret isn’t out yet, Diamondbacks starters have had a bit of a rough go of things to start the season, with home runs allowed serving as the main bugaboo – 17 allowed by the starting rotation in their first 19 games. As Ryan wrote about after the team acquired Shelby Miller, the mix of his fastballs has …
Continue Reading →Earlier this spring, Ryan wrote a really fantastic piece about Patrick Corbin and his slider. By association, the piece was also about Patrick Corbin’s changeup. As Corbin put it to MLB.com’s Steve Gilbert, the changeup is a point of emphasis this seasons
…Continue Reading →“My changeup is probably something I’m trying to get to where I can throw it as much as
It’s that time, sports fans: Opening Day for the Diamondbacks and 19 other teams. If you follow the D-backs, you’ve survived a slow death to the season in 2013, a 2014 that was derailed before it got going, and a 2015 season that included some long-lasting experiments that were at least as frustrating to watch as they were smart to …
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