Analysis: Arizona's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Year
Apparently, Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo doesn’t know how to count to three.
That was one of the many lessons we learned last Friday night, in a rather bizarre matchup between Arizona and the Los Angeles Angels. Heading into the tenth inning of that game, we had already witnessed 2 hit batters, 2 balks, and a game-tying homer with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. With the momentum on their side, Lovullo sent out reliever Ryan Buchter to shut down the Angels and set up a walk-off in the next half-inning.
Things started well enough for the Diamondbacks, as Jose Iglesias struck out for a pivotal first out. But then, the wheels started to come off for Arizona. Buchter committed the third balk of the game, which sent zombie runner Jared Walsh to third base. He immediately followed this up by hitting Taylor Ward in the next at-bat. This prompted Lovullo to take his pitcher out, but there was just one problem: Buchter had only faced two batters, not the required three. Thus, Buchter had to be summoned back to the field from the dugout, where he would promptly hit yet another batter and load the bases before getting taken out of the game for the second time. From there, you can imagine how things went - the Angels went on to score, the Diamondbacks couldn’t manage to bring in their zombie runner from second, and Arizona took the L.
For the Diamondbacks, this was yet another embarrassing loss in a month that has been filled with them. Between their win against Colorado on May 2nd and their loss against the Giants last night (in which they somehow gave up a 7-0 lead), they have only managed to win just five additional games. During that time, Arizona has suffered through two double-digit losing streaks, eight series sweeps, and an active stretch of 21 straight losses on the road (they can tie the all-time road losing streak record tonight in San Francisco). In other words, they have been the epitome of unwatchable baseball. And as a result, their record has fallen to 20-48, the worst record in Major League Baseball.
Yet despite all of this, it’s hard to fathom how this team has fallen so far from grace in 2021.
The Diamondbacks, for the most part, do not fit the mold of a typical last-place team. With teams like the Pirates, the Orioles, and the Rockies, you know exactly what you’re getting. When you have a mess of a roster, a mess of a farm system, and only one or two above-average players, you expect to lose 100 games. But while Arizona was not expected to do anything special this season, there’s nothing about the organization on paper that would have suggested this kind of embarrassment on the horizon.
It’s not that they don’t have talent. Between Ketel Marte, Zac Gallen, Carson Kelly, David Peralta, Eduardo Escobar, and Nick Ahmed, the D-backs have multiple All-Star, Gold Glove, and Silver Slugger-caliber players on their roster. It’s also not that those guys aren’t pulling their weight. In particular, Marte and Kelly have seemingly regained their 2019 forms (148 and 138 wRC+, respectively), while the slimmed-down Escobar has found his power again at the plate (15 home runs thus far). And it’s not that they don’t have guys stepping up behind them. The D-backs have the ninth-best farm system in baseball according to MLB Pipeline, and one that is already producing MLB-ready talent. For example, Josh Rojas and Pavin Smith are both contributing a 116 and 111 wRC+, respectively, and the former is currently on pace to put up 4 fWAR in his rookie season. Additionally, veteran bats like Asdrubal Cabrera and Kole Calhoun have been surprisingly productive (when they are in the lineup, that is).
Of course, they have lost many of those key players for weeks at a time due to injury (Marte, Kelly, Gallen, and Calhoun to name a few) and their pitching has been downright atrocious thus far (worst in ERA, third-worst in FIP). But even though these have contributed greatly to their downfall this season, these things alone can’t account for just how bad this team has been. In fact, it’s becoming quite obvious that the issue is far deeper than just injuries and a shaky bullpen.
While statistics and numbers are obviously useful in evaluating players and teams, sometimes they don’t tell the full story. This seems to be one of those times. The question of why Arizona is bad is a simple one to answer: they don’t score runs, and they sure as hell don’t prevent them. Any glance at the FanGraphs team leaderboards can tell you all you need to know in that regard. The real question here is much more nuanced and complicated, that being the question of why the Diamondbacks are this bad.
In more ways than one, the Diamondbacks are less than the sum of their parts. While most of their regular players (Kelly, Rojas, Escobar, Marte, Smith, Cabrera, and David Peralta) have had at least average offensive production (the lowest wRC+ of that group is 100), the Diamondbacks as a whole have the seventh-worst offense in baseball, with a team wRC+ of 89. Of the 35 losses the Diamondbacks have had since May 2nd, 19 of them were by two runs or fewer, and 10 of them were one-run games. And by Pythagorean W-L, their record is a full six games behind what it should be given their run differential (26-42 compared to 20-48).
So while it can be easy to blame Arizona’s struggles on awful pitching, situational hitting, and injuries, anyone who watches this team regularly can see what is really plaguing them. It is something that can’t be quantified, but is easily observable: The Diamondbacks have a culture of failure, and it is destroying everything that they have tried to build.
In Mike Hazen, the Diamondbacks found the right guy to lead the organization. In just a few years, he has single-handedly flipped around one of the worst farm systems in baseball and turned some of their aging stars into a decent core of talented current and future stars. Overall, besides his inability to build a bullpen thus far, it’s hard to find many faults with how the team has been run. However, what the Diamondbacks are finding out the hard way is that it doesn’t matter how good your GM and players are if they don’t have the coaching infrastructure to support them.
If you were to ask me what is wrong with the Diamondbacks, I would point to two key areas: coaching and development. One thing that has become painfully apparent over the past 10-15 years is that aside from a few hits here and there (guys like Upton, Goldschmidt, and Marte), the Diamondbacks are woefully incapable of developing big-league talent - particularly when it comes to pitching. To understand just how big of a problem this has been for them, all you have to do is look at the numerous examples all around the league.
When he was drafted 3rd overall in the 2011 draft, Trevor Bauer was billed as the next ace of the franchise. However, he repeatedly clashed with Arizona’s coaching staff at all levels about his training and development methods, which resulted in him being shipped off to Cleveland. Now, he is pitching for their biggest rival as the reigning National League Cy Young winner. Robbie Ray had two decent seasons with Arizona before devolving into a mess who was incapable of hitting the strike zone. Just one year later, Ray is enjoying a bounce-back year in Toronto with a career-low walk rate and a 3.45 ERA. After being shipped to the desert, Taijuan Walker spent most of his three years as a Diamondback on the injured list. Now fully healthy, Walker is finally showcasing his full potential in an excellent 2021 with the Mets. In 2019, Jazz Chisholm was Arizona’s top prospect, but he was sent to Miami for Zac Gallen after hitting just .204 in his first half-season at AA. Now, Chisholm is quickly turning himself into the face of the Marlins - and one of the frontrunners for Rookie of the Year.
I could go on. The recent history of the Diamondbacks is filled with stories of players who were either shipped off too soon, not given the right instruction, or just couldn’t stay healthy. Max Scherzer, Didi Gregorious, Daniel Hudson, Dansby Swanson. All started off as Diamondbacks, but all of them made their biggest contributions somewhere else. And this is still something we are seeing today, as former #1 prospect Jon Duplantier continues to struggle mightily at the big-league level along with fellow top prospects like Daulton Varsho.
Hopefully, their latest crop of prospects (e.g. Rojas, Smith, and Taylor Widener) can start to break that mold, but it’s going to be difficult with the coaching and development staff headed up by manager Torey Lovullo. After surprising everyone in 2017 by taking the Diamondbacks to the postseason in his first year, Lovullo’s tenure has been defined by disappointment, underperformance, and questionable decision making. Both 2018 and 2019 featured great starts followed by late-season collapses that doomed their hopes of a playoff berth and ended their season in mid-September. 2020 was an incredible disappointment by every conceivable metric, which prompted my first article in the “How are the Diamondbacks this bad?” genre. And now, it seems that things have somehow gotten worse between 2020 and 2021.
As much as the team wants to deny it, it has become obvious that the culture Lovullo has built around the team has fully suffocated the life out of it. This team has no fight. They have no energy. They have no soul. They have completely given up and resigned to lose - regardless of what the score may be. Why the front office has continued to stand by and allow this losing culture to fester year after year is beyond me, but it is painfully clear now (if it wasn’t before) that it has to be exorcised from the clubhouse before any progress will ever be seen from this franchise.
I can only hope that Arizona takes this rough stretch as the wake-up call that it is. A call to not only put the right guys at the top, but to also invest heavily in player development and coaching. A call to build a winning culture, not just a winning lineup. And, most importantly, a call to finally shake things up and bring some new energy and ideas into the clubhouse.
At this point, what else do they have left to lose?