April fuel or April fools?
Here we go. Corbin Burnes makes his first start as a Diamondback. He will be facing the reigning American League champions, who blasted the Brewers for 36 runs in their opening series – which was only three games. And the very first batter he will face is likely the greatest position player in Arizona franchise history, Paul Goldschmidt who is now a member of the New York Yankees. He had a very solid set against the Brewers, going 5-for-12 with three walks and a home-run, but his OPS of 1.250 is barely above the Yankees’ average figure of 1.231. The disturbing thing is, their BABIP was only .275. They simply have been cranking balls out of the park, with a HR% of 12.1, compared to league average of 3.4%.
By OPS, this pits the #1 offense Yankees in 2025, against the #2 offense Diamondbacks. Small sample size, to be sure. But the same two teams were #3 and #2 respectively, by the same metric, across all of last year, so I’m inclined to take the over on the runs in New York. It also pits the leaders in home-runs for the American and National League against each other, with Aaron Judge and Eugenio Suarez respectively. Who will come out of the series ahead? After the Cubs series, I must admit I’m glad we have Burnes starting this game instead of Eduardo Rodriguez. The D-backs definitely would seem to have the pitching edge here, Yankees starter Will Warren having only five career starts, with an ugly ERA above ten.
On the other hand, nobody on the D-backs has any experience against him, and we’ve certainly seen cases where a lack of familiarity can be a problem. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait in the Gameday Thread before we get the first “Why are we making this scrub look like a Cy Young candidate?” comment of the year? 🙂 I won’t be around for much of this one, since we’ll be heading downtown for dinner, before going to the Orpheum to watch the All Puppet Players dismantle Predator [there’s another classic eighties action film you young whippersnappers need to watch!] I’ll try to check in to the GDT as connectivty permits, and hope to see Arizona come away with a debut victory on the road.