Another Friday night, another tough loss. This week’s episode featured outstanding starting pitching from the hologram himself, Eduardo Rodriguez, as well as some incredible defense. Unfortunately, the offense didn’t come along for the ride and is now riding a streak of 3 runs scored in 27 innings since that 3-run go-ahead bomb off the bat of the rarely-seen-again Jose Fernandez. Sewald will get plenty of hate for his role in this outcome, but feel free to let me know the last time a team won a game when scoring 0 runs.
Eduardo Rodriguez truly does look like a new pitcher after the WBC and this offseason where he lost 30 pounds (per the Apple TV broadcast tonight). He was extremely efficient, needing 90 pitches to go 7 strong innings and rarely feeling like he was in trouble. The defense made a couple spectacular plays to back up ERod and our setup man, Juan Morillo. Corbin’s leaping grab in the first and Alek’s diving play in the 8th highlighted everything the Diamondbacks were hoping for when building out this roster this offseason: run prevention.
Unfortunately, the other side of the run prevention coin is run generation, and the Serpientes just couldn’t get anything going on that front, feeling like they were stuck in mud all night. Feel free to fact check me on this, but I don’t believe a single Diamondback reached third base all night. Grant Holmes was very effective and the 8-9 tandem of Suarez and Iglesias is top-shelf, but the Snakes just didn’t seem like they were able to make anyone work for their outs and they missed the few mistake pitches they were given. The lineup is extremely top-heavy right now, and if the Big 3 don’t do damage (combined 4-28 in the last 3 games), this team doesn’t have anyone left to reliably pick up the slack. When will Torey and the Front Office start pulling levers to try and jolt the offense? Too early to make big changes or should we just let it ride and hope to a return to the mean for our scuffling offense?
For the final bit, I’ll write about Paul Sewald. His velocity was down at 90mph on his two meatballs that were turned into the go-ahead home runs. I’m not gonna kill Torey for turning to him. The results have been there early on in the year and you gotta fire the bullets you have. However, this was the risk of building out the roster in the way Hazen did. We have a roster that’s costing almost as much as last year’s record-setting payroll, but we’re still here relying on Paul Sewald or a guy who signed a minor league contract to close out games for the foreseeable future. How much leash does Paul have? Is Loaisiga just going to be same story different character?
Loss Probability and Box Score
The GameDay Thread was a humming along all night, finishing at 247 comments at time of publishing. Tonight’s COTG goes to Dano with this anti-AppleTV statement:
The Diamondbacks face the Braves for the third game of this series and still trying to get their first win of the set tomorrow afternoon with a 4:15pm start time on FOX. Right-hander Bryce Elder (1-0, 0.00) will take the mound for the Braves and the immaculate Michael Soroka (1-0, 0.00) takes the ball for the good guys. Another national telecast, let’s hope the boys don’t embarrass themselves!