Currently viewing the tag: "Patrick Corbin"

Go to Chase Field this April, and you may notice some sliders missing. In addition to that glaring omission from the stadium menus, Patrick Corbin may be throwing his best pitch less often — and “throwing his best pitch less often” doesn’t exactly sound good. Corbin has had a lot of his success by limiting his fourseam usage in favor …

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Look, there’s plenty of competition for the fifth starter race, but at the end of the day, that spot’s going to Robbie Ray. Competition is fine and all, but if everyone remains healthy, the job is his. He earned last year and he’s pitched very well this spring. It’s a pretty easy call as far as I can

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It would appear that Robbie Ray is some kind of Inside the ‘Zona favorite. In the short time that he’s donned Sedona Red, he’s been covered here at length. Initially it was talking about the trade that brought him to Arizona. Then it was talk of his new breaking ball and how he was getting the job done with

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Analytics allow you do some really fun things. You can slice and dice numbers to create new ways of evaluating players that, frankly, weren’t possible just five years ago. One such metric, and one that I’m a big fan of, is the arsenal score. Eno Sarris has been rolling these out over at RotoGraphs for a few seasons now (his …

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Strikeouts were a problem for the Diamondbacks’ pitching staff in 2015. As a collective group of pitchers, they were 19th in the majors in strikeout rate. The starters were 18th and the relief corps ranked 24th. It was a bottom-third result when you put it all together in terms of strikeouts. We like strikeouts, but as you’ve hopefully noticed here, …

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I’m frequently surprised by how aggressive some people are in negotiation — and how frequently it works. I tend to stake out ground and defend it, rather than go all over the place. The benefit of that kind of general reasonableness is that you get to take an unreasonable position from time to time and garb it in that same …

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The baseball arbitration dance is set to its own rhythm. Things become a little more clear once players and teams have filed figures, but a lot is happening behind the scenes right now, and more will happen before figures are exchanged on January 15th. At that point, the game has fewer dimensions — and maybe no negotiation dimensions, if the …

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I like Patrick Corbin. I like A.J. Pollock. I like most things and most people, at least initially. My good feelings about the Diamondbacks’ lefty and center fielder have endured because they strike me as fine young gentlemen who do good thing routinely for the Arizona Baseball Diamondbacks.  They’re similar in certain ways and very different in others. …

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With Daniel Hudson‘s second TJ continuing to haunt the team in the background, Patrick Corbin was brought back very gingerly in 2015 — he made his debut more than 16 months after his surgery, with a unusually high number of simulated games and a handful of minor league rehab appearances. As a result, Corbin threw just 85 innings in …

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We know that the Diamondbacks’ rotation will be better in 2016. Part of that is because it would have been hard to be worse, but there have also been some notable additions. You may have heard about this. I’m guessing you did. For a team with big aspirations, a boost to the rotation was at the top of the holiday …

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They say you have to have at least two pitches to make the majors. Three if you want to start. Having any number of “average” major league pitches is impressive, really, but they’re certainly not all created equal. Some guys have one “plus” pitch they can lean on to get the job done most of the time – a pitch …

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Pretty often here on the internet we talk about non-elite pitchers as being more or less crap shoots. It’s true, pitchers tend to be more volatile than hitters, mostly because they get hurt more often. Luck can swing an ERA pretty wildly and trying to make bets on run-of-the-mill pitchers is just hard to do in confidence. What will Chase

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The D-backs have a great young team of position players, and the makings of a pitching staff that could be at least solid. With the team on the upswing and organizational memory of .500 seasons in both 2013 and 2014, it’s easy to focus on how high the team can go. That’s important, and maybe the most important thing. Still …

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Let’s just skip the introductory paragraph. I’m not a fan of beating a dead horse and that’s what all of these starting pitching posts seem like after a while. The starters were 27th in WAR, 21st in ERA, 24th in FIP, 26th in HR/9, 22nd in BB/9 and 18th in K/9. That’s bad and …

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When the Wheels Fell Off of 2015

On September 17, 2015 By

Once upon a time, the Diamondbacks were a relevant baseball team. If it seems like that was a long time ago, it’s because it kind of was. If it seems like that wasn’t a long time ago, it’s because it kind of wasn’t. I don’t really know what that means – it was a middle amount of time ago? The …

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D-backs position players rank 3rd in the NL this season in FanGraphs’ version of Wins Above Replacement. Sure, they could be better — two teams actually are — but for a team that finished last in baseball just last year, that’s a pretty enormous accomplishment. Hitting is a big part of it. The D-backs currently have a 96 wRC+, and …

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