Here’s to better… things
Hopefully, the fireworks scheduled for after tonight’s game will be victorious ones. If loss-flavored tacos, like we got last night, are unimpressive, then the same goes for the Pyrotechnics of Defeat. The team certainly need to play more fundamentally sound baseball than they did last night, across the board. Not walking people would be a good start for the pitchers. Discounting the injury curtailed start, Zac Gallen only had one game all last year where he had as many walks as innings pitched. Oddly, that was also against the Cubs, on July 20th at Wrigley Field, where he walked six across five innings. It was start #16, and the first of the year where he walked more than three. That happened a lot quicker this season.
There was technically only one error made in the field by the D-backs, that being Eugenio Suarez air-mailing a throw to Josh Naylor in the first inning. But there were a number of other plays which could/should have been made: the most impactful obviously being Geraldo Perdomo’s ill-fated decision to go the short route on Pete Crow-Armstrong. Not exactly the impression you want to make, in your first major-league game after you have signed a $45 million contract extension, just the previous month. But it’s important not to over-react to these things. One game is one game, and as mentioned in the Snake Bytes comments, the Cubs were statistically lucky to have won that one.
But if we are going to have a knee-jerk reaction, it’s perhaps my GDT comment about games being decided by whether or not we score more runs than the opposition. While that’s almost Yogi Berra levels of obvious, it has a deeper meaning, in that we may not win many low-scoring games. I should add “again” to that. Because last year, the D-backs had only nine wins when held to fewer than four runs scored. That was the fewest such wins of any teams in the majors. Hell, the White Sox, the worst franchise in the recent history of the game, had eleven such victories. Even after Gallen left, the bullpen allowed six runs on eight hits and two walks over five innings. That’s not a recipe for success.