Currently viewing the tag: "Chase Anderson"

The D-backs have adopted an aggressive old-school approach to building a baseball team. Maybe we should have seen it coming after renowned experimenter Tony La Russa took the helm; you can almost imagine him taking the job as Chief Baseball Officer in part because of some zeal in adopting strategies he wished he could have adopted as a manager. However …

Continue Reading

Saturday’s news of the trade that sent Aaron Hill, Chase Anderson, Isan Diaz and cash from the D-backs to the Brewers for Jean Segura and Tyler Wagner  was shocking without a doubt. The team had tried hard to upgrade second base – the price was too steep for Howie Kendrick (apparently) and Brandon Phillips  vetoed a trade (thankfully) …

Continue Reading

After signing Zack Greinke and trading for Shelby Miller (albeit with Aaron Blair), the D-backs had more major league starters than they were likely to need; it made sense to move some of that depth for other kinds of talent more likely to help the team in the immediate future. With Nick Ahmed a staple of the ground ball

Continue Reading

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, …

Continue Reading

Its not that often that I feel like the scales have fallen from my baseball eyes, but it just happened, and I’m excited to share why. It’s not that this one thing Explains All Baseball, but the effect seems to be enormous: whether or not a pitch has a platoon split has much to do with how vertical the movement

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

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

Continue Reading

A year after doing an excellent job protecting its players from the Rule 5 draft, the D-backs had their work cut out for them this season. After cutting Jamie Romak, trading for Chris Herrmann and trading Jeremy Hellickson away, the team had just two spots to use if it kept everyone else on the 40 man roster. All that …

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

With the way the Diamondbacks have hit the ball in 2015, everyone knows that the pressure will be on the team to improve the pitching staff. That was a concern heading into the 2015 campaign and acquiring Rubby De La Rosa, Allen Webster and Jeremy Hellickson served as more of a band-aid than a solution. Robbie Ray’s earned …

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

The D-backs staff’s ground ball percentage has tailed off a bit from where it was earlier this season, but it’s still up there — 46.1%, ranked 12th — and that’s still some kind of small shock, considering it entered the season with a staff of fly ball pitchers. A huge part of that is the relentlessness with which they’ve pitched

Continue Reading

According to Western Civilization’s finest accomplishment—Wikipedia—Abraham Maslow considered a “self-actualizer” to be “a person who is living creatively and fully using his or her potentials.” The idea of potentials is easy to conceptualize in our beautiful game of baseball, maybe especially for pitchers: getting as many outs as possible, pitching as deep into games as possible, winning the …

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

Even before the season started, it looked like the pitching staff would be a difficult puzzle to solve in August, and even if there have been fewer comings and goings than we might have guessed, that might start to change here pretty soon — and we are looking at some interesting questions as 2016 starts to be more of the …

Continue Reading