The Arizona Diamondbacks have a storied history. They won The World Series Championship in just their fourth year in existence, 2001. They didn’t do much after that until 2007, when they reached the National League Championship Series, losing to the Colorado Rockies in four games. WEAK!
They won The National League West Division Title in 2011, but lost to the Milwaukee Brewers in five games. MORE WEAKNESS!
Last year they had a great year. They won 93 games, although they finished second to The Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West. EVEN MORE WEAKNESS!
The team was managed by Torey Lovullo, formerly the bench coach for the Boston Red Sox.
Their leaders? First baseman Paul Goldschmidt, one of the most talented players in baseball. Goldschmidt is a great all-around player – a great slugger, who hits for average, gets on base, plays good defense and even steals a base or two. While Goldschmidt clearly doesn’t have the personality type of a leader, he is the team’s best player, at least after the departure of J.D. Martinez.
According to the conventional wisdom Zack Greinke, one of the best starting pitchers in terms of individual performance over the past ten years or so, was the leader aka the “Ace” of the Diamondbacks rotation. However, Greinke, like Goldschmidt, does not have a leadership personality type. The team’s true Ace is Taijuan Walker, a young starting pitcher who the team acquired prior to the 2017 season.
Relief pitcher Archie Bradley led the way in the bullpen.
Those players were surrounded by a supporting cast of Robbie Ray, AJ Pollock, Jake Lamb, Daniel Descalso and a plethora of other highly talented Major League Baseball players.
Heading into the 2018 season, things looked bright. At least to the feeble minded conformists in the SABRmetrics community.
I picked the Diamondbacks to win just 77 games and miss the playoffs this year.
They got off to a great start this year. “Oh great,” I said. Wrong again!
Not so much actually. All through the month of April, while the Diamondbacks were off to a historic start to the season, I wasn’t buying the hype. I was referring to them as a “bubble” rather often on my Twitter page.
Here are some examples:
After the Diamondbacks won two out of three against my pick to win the NL West, the San Diego Padres, during the weekend of Friday, April 20th, I sent out some tweets explaining my reasons for saying that they are an Early Season Bubble:
(Walker suffered damage to the UCL in his pitching elbow and elected to have Tommy John surgery around this time).
A week later, I sent out this tweet:
Did I call the Diamondbacks bubble bust perfectly? No. I didn’t. Still, here’s what happened after I sent out that tweet …
the Diamondbacks went 5-3 over their next 8 games. Then they completely fell apart. They went 2-15 over their next 17 games.
It was a total collapse. The team was 13 games over .500 on Wednesday, May 9th. By Memorial Day they were back to .500.
While everyone in the media was going goo-goo-ga-ga over the Diamondbacks in April, I was calling them a “Early Season Bubble.” And my name is SABR Skeptic. And I didn’t look up a statistic for two years prior to starting this blog in March of this year.
Then they collapsed, “surprising” everyone except for me.
What happened?
The four factors I cited on April 23rd as major areas of concern with the team explain it.
- Bad bullpen chemistry – The Diamondbacks didn’t need to acquire Brad Boxberger this past offseason. Sometimes less is more. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Archie Bradley had just had a tremendous breakout season as a reliever. There was no reason to add an established closer to the bullpen when he easily could have stepped in and filled that role.
When the Diamondbacks collapse was well underway on Saturday May 19th, Archie Bradley blew a lead in a key spot.
2. Taijuan Walker’s injury – Players are more than their statistics. Personality type matters. A lot. Robbie Ray had a great individual season last year – he had a 15-5 record with a 2.89 ERA. Zack Greinke did as well – he had a 17-7 record with a 3.20 ERA. Walker meanwhile had a 9-9 record and a 3.49 ERA, the worst season of the three individually. Still, Walker clearly was the Alpha Male of the group. He was clearly protecting both Ray and Greinke, and was a key piece to the team’s structure as a whole, being the leader of the rotation.
3. Paul Goldschmidt’s personality type – While Walker’s injury left a leadership void in the starting rotation, there wasn’t much leadership in the lineup in the first place. Last year, the Diamondbacks were The Shark. They coasted for much of the season on talent. Plus, Taijuan Walker was healthy, and JD Martinez was on the team from mid-season on. The team could fall back on them – Walker and Martinez – when adversity did strike.
This year with Walker injured and Martinez in Boston the team was left with Goldschmidt to shoulder the burden when adversity struck. The thing is, Goldschmidt isn’t a leader type. Without any effective leaders on the team to fall back on, the team crumbled. See, again, my tweet from April 23rd:
4. Torey Lovullo’s bad karma – Torey Lovullo was the bench coach for the Boston Red Sox for many years. As I have said before, New England is awash in bad karma. Thus, his leadership was compromised. It’s no wonder, then, that the team collapsed.
I speak on this matter with a great deal of authority. Why? I predicted the team’s collapse.
Where do the Diamondbacks go from here? I sent out the below tweet on Tuesday:
Since, the Diamondbacks are 3-1. They are now three games above .500. Will they rise again to the heights they reached early this season? Why? So they can just collapse again? No chance. This team is finished. They will be well below .500 by the All Star Break. When that happens, I’ll let you know where the team should go from there.
SABR Skeptic 