After a huge momentum building series victory over the West leading Los Angeles Dodgers, the Dbacks looked to build upon not only their momentum but also their Wild Card lead over the Padres by taking advantage of a matchup against one of the weaker teams in baseball in the Colorado Rockies. The fellas and I discussed last episode that sweeping the series would be the most ideal outcome, but sweeping even the worst teams in baseball is no guarantee (they are still professional ball clubs so they aren’t just automatic wins) but a series win over the Rockies would be the minimum requirement since they are starting to run out of “easy” opponents on their schedule.
The Diamondbacks went into the Mainstays start on Wednesday needing him to continue his stretch of solid outings and bring home a series victory for the snakes and end the homestand on a high note, unfortunately that would not be the case as Merrill surrendered 6 earned runs across 5 innings of work with most of the damage coming from Brett Sullivan’s 3-R bomb in the 2nd and Zac Veen’s 2-R pool shot in the 5th for the 24th and 25th home runs surrendered by Merrill in 2026 (most since allowing 29 HR in his rookie season in 2019).
Gabe, Brandon and I all agreed that the biggest issue that we saw from Kelly in this outing was mostly the lack of control on most if not all of his pitches. Merrill is the kind of pitcher who won’t blow the doors off many hitters, so location being as pinpoint as possible is always the best recipe for success for Kelly. When he is missing either over the heart of the plate or so far outside that the hitters can spit on it right out of the hand, leading to a lack of swing and miss and weak contact.
The Dbacks will need the Mainstay to get back to the kind of pitcher he was in July if they want to have any hope of making this push for October a success.
When Does Noot Get the Boot?
The Dbacks lone move from the deadline has been talked about endlessly by not only us here at Dbacks Dispatch, but by other writers and twitter accounts, and for understandable reasons. We all knew that we wouldn’t be getting a big power bat in lars Nootbar and that his best quality at the dish would be his plate discipline and ability to work the count and work walks. WHile that part has been as advertised in the first 8 games of his Dbacks tenure (7 walks to only 4 K’s so far), the lack of hits from the Noot has had us and other fans start to get frustrated and maybe even a bit worrisome with what we’ve been seeing.
It’s no secret that the Snakes have had a lack of offensive production from some key areas in their lineup, mostly at 1st base (.609 OPS, worst in baseball) and at DH (.621 OPS, 2nd worst in baseball) and it’s mostly why the fan base was so frustrated with the lack of moves to address those areas at the deadline. Lars wouldn’t have been the option first 1st base, but seeing as he has seen a majority of his starts in the desert as the Designated hitter it makes his .120/.313/.160 slash even more frustrating to watch, especially when the offense puts up a performance like they did in Wednesday’s loss.
The fellas and I discussed just how long of a leash we should give Nootbar and when we should really start to worry about what we are seeing. Granted its only been 8 games and just 25 AB’s, but this isn’t like an early season struggle like what we saw from Nolan Arenado where we at least have time to see him work his way out of it, this is a critical part of the season and having a black hole in the lineup as the DH isn’t the best plan for success in the tight Wild Card race.
Gabe brought up the similar numbers that Lars Nootbar (.240 AVG and a .738 OPS in 1800+ career AB’s) and Pavin Smith (.241 AVG and .719 OPS in 1400+ career AB’s) have career wise in saying that we moved on from Pavin (another black hole in the lineup during his time in 2026) just to trade our #5 prospect for a different version of Pavin Smith. Even just using their numbers as Diamondbacks in 2026 (Yes Lars has about 1/3rd the amount of AB’s Pavin did so not a 1 to 1 comp), Lars has even worse numbers than what we saw from Pavin (.141/.236/192 slash in 78 AB’s) before his eventual DFA, so it doesn’t seem unfair from us or other fans to say that our frustrations could start to reach a boiling point and start to ask if there is any other options we have over Noot Noot.
While the Snakes were unfortunately unable to even win the series over the Rockies, mostly due to a lack of clutch hitting in the two defeats (especially Wednesday’s historically bad performance), there were still some positive moments that the crew wanted to highlight from this final series of the homestand.
Gabe was yet again impressed from what he saw from the bullpen, as the lone run the pen allowed in their 11.2 innings of work was off of Kevin GInkel in the 7th inning of Tuesday’s 3-2 defeat. Zack Littell provided some much needed length in relief of Soroka on Monday, leading to his first win as Snake, and Gerardo Carrillo continues to impress with his disgusting arsenal of pitches as he had 4 K’s in his 2 shutout innings on Wednesday thus lowering his ERA to 0.71. Adding Justin Martinez to the mixture of available arms out of the pen could make this bullpen one to truly fear come October (as long as we get there that is).
Brandon wanted to give his praise to the performance that Mitch Bratt turned in on Tuesday. Yes it ended up a no decision and a 2-R HR from Kyle Karros ended his impressive scoreless inning streak, it was back to back starts of Bratt going 6+ innings which is something that the 3 of us agreed is very important to see more of as he continues to adjust to Major League hitters and develop as the big league level.
All 3 of us also wanted to make sure Corbin Carroll got his praise as well for what he did in Wednesday’s frustrating loss. Corbin not only added another triple to his tally (14 on the season) but also continued to smash left handed pitching, sending a Brandon Bernardino sinker the opposite way for his 18th home run on the season, and the 100th of his young career. With that homer in the 8th Corbin became just the 2nd player in MLB history to have 50+ Triples, 100+ HR and 100+ SB within 650 games, joining the legend WIllie Mays.
The Diamondbacks head into Atlanta to face the 2nd best team in the NL record wise in the East leading Braves for the first time these teams since their series split back in early April. Brandon, Gabe and I were all in agreement that this is a series where you really have to pick your poison whether its Drake Baldwin, Ronald Acuna Jr, Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson or even Austin Riley, there is a lot of names in the lineup that can do some damage and put up crooked numbers.
This series is the start to a pretty tough stretch of ball clubs the Snakes will have in their way for the rest of the month of August, so getting a series win and starting off the last half of August on a high note is very crucial to this team regaining momentum and keeping up with the Phillies, Padres and even Cubs for 1 of the 3 NL WIld Card spots.