The Arizona Diamondbacks made the following roster moves. The D-backs\u2019 40-man roster is at 40.<\/p>\n
Abner didn\u2019t exactly cover himself in glory, during his brief stay on the big-league roster. When he came into Friday night\u2019s game, it was already out of hand, the D-backs trailing 7-1 in the top of the sixth. Seventeen pitches from Phil later, it was really out of hands, the Nationals have scored five runs on two home-runs, one of them a grand-slam. He has pitched 3.2 innings in the majors this year, with an ERA of 17.18. That kind of performance is more likely to get you a ticket to DFAville. To be fair, Abner only turned 24 last month and being a lefty, also gives him a longer leash. His 5.12 ERA over a large sample size in Reno is also better than team average (5.56).<\/p>\n
But to illustrate something I said in the GDT yesterday: the performances of Abner, Kade Stroud and Drey Jameson since getting called up illustrate\\ the lack of depth in the D-backs bullpen. All told, Arizona\u2019s relief corps is firmly in the middle of the pack. Their overall 4.13 ERA ranks 16th, and at the risk of flogging a deceased equine, that\u2019s considerably better than we\u2019ve managed in most of Mike Hazen\u2019s tenure. But there\u2019s a huge gulf between the regular guys and the ones we\u2019ve asked to fill in. Below is a breakdown of all the relievers used by Arizona this season, in descending order of innings pitched.<\/p>\n
Excluding Brandon Pfaadt – who was only in the bullpen as a failed starter, and is now down in Reno – the top eight all have an ERA below 3.50. Small sample sizes, but the ones below them have all have an ERA of 5.40 or worse: and the best among them is actually third-string catcher Adrian Del Castillo. If you add up all the work by those two groups, here\u2019s what you get:
A-bullpen: 157.2 IP, 111 H, 50 R, 44 ER, 11 HR, 43 BB 142 SO, 2.51 ERA
B-bullpen: 30.1 IP, 48 H, 41 R, 38 ER, 8 HR, 23 BB, 23 SO, 11.27 ERA<\/p>\n
Obviously, every bullpen is going to have its weak links. But it\u2019s striking that if you exclude the position players from the B-bullpen, the overall ERA of the remaining pitcher would go up. So far, we\u2019ve been remarkably lucky in terms of the A-pen being almost entirely healthy. If that doesn\u2019t continue, it could pose major problems over the next few months.<\/p>\n
Oh, and in case you\u2019re wondering. This is not an early Gameday Thread, it\u2019s an early game. A 12:15 pm start, because it\u2019s on Peacock. I wonder how many people will show up at Chase expecting the usual 1:05 pm first pitch?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Arizona Diamondbacks made the following roster moves. The D-backs\u2019 40-man roster is at 40. Abner didn\u2019t exactly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2404],"tags":[146,22,75962,4314,5,38,4],"class_list":["post-719935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arizona-diamondbacks","tag-arizona","tag-arizona-diamondbacks","tag-arizona-diamondbacks-discussion","tag-arizonadiamondbacks","tag-baseball","tag-diamondbacks","tag-mlb"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116710264233735888","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}