Blogs and Articles Roundup: Aug 26, 2013

It’s been a difficult week for Diamondbacks fans, who watched their team drop 3 of 4 to their competition for the wild card in Cincinnati and 2 of 3 to the wayward Phillies.  Count me among those feeling thoroughly exhausted at this point, after the 18-inning (7 hours 6 minutes) affair on Saturday night.  The win there was great (check out this story by David Schoenfield), but didn’t alter the story line.  Even Patrick Corbin struggled, giving up a career-high 9 runs (8 earned) as  he was left in as long as possible with the bullpen running on fumes.

Personally, I’m not quite ready to turn the page on the 2013 season — stranger things have happened, and as I wrote on Friday, the team would only need one of the NL Central teams to fall off a cliff.  As of Monday morning, ESPN and coolstandings.com give the Dbacks a 10.0% chance of making the playoffs, whereas Baseball Prospectus puts the playoff chances at 3.5% (2.8% of wild card, 0.6% of winning the NL West).  As we scoreboard watch, though, we’re not really rooting for St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to beat up on each other equally — we’re looking for one of those teams to just get pummeled.  It would be best if it were Cincinnati.

The baseball writing around the blogosphere was not very optimistic about Arizona in the last week.  We’re almost two weeks removed from The Walkoff Series against Baltimore, but with the road trip concluded, we should at least see how the Diamondbacks fare back on their home turf.  26 of the remaining 33 games are against teams with losing records — and the other 7 are against the Dodgers.

• Nick Piecoro took a look at how great a hitter Aaron Hill has been since his acquisition (13th in the majors in OPS).  He also examined A.J. Pollock’s stellar defense and delved into the 18-inning game.
• After declaring the season dead, AZ Snake Pit’s Jim McLennan took a look at the September call-up mix.
• The Diamondbacks’ Randall Delgado showed up in Bill Petti’s list of pitchers who lost at least 1 mph on their fastball as compared to July of last year, over at FanGraphs.  Coincidentally, Delgado game out of the gate firing on Saturday at the beginning of the marathon, throwing 71 fastballs and topping out at 96.01 mph.  The average speed on his sinker was 93.49, which is pretty damned good.  One wonders where the velocity came from…
• Daniel Rathman at Baseball Prospectus was as attracted as I was to delving into the details of Corbin’s start against the Reds last week.  Check out his take, and check out mine if you missed it.
• Also at BP, Craig Goldstein wrote an interesting piece on five non-prospects that could break out.  There’s a hole that Goldstein could really fill here, as there’s plenty written about prospects and guys who have already broken out, but very little out there on guys who have exhausted rookie eligibility but could still pan out in a big way.  Go read Goldstein’s piece, which is not behind the normal BP paywall — two of the five players he profiled are Diamondbacks.