The Dbacks are getting back to their roots of pitching and defense for 2025 and they have assembled quite the rotation. Just how good can the 2025 rotation be?
The 2025 season is just around the corner, and this team appears to be getting back to its roots. During the teams annual MVP Fan fest at Chase Field, Hazen spoke a little bit to this. “We talk about pitching and defense a lot, and that has been something that Torey and I have talked about for 9 years now, wanting to be really good at that. Knowing that’s the backbone for every good team. We got away from that a little bit last year. We led the league in runs and it didn’t even get us into the playoffs. With [good pitching and defense] every night you are walking out there with a good chance to win.”
I couldn’t agree more with this ‘new direction’ for 2025. Like Hazen said, you can be a lot more consistent with good pitching and good defense.
So I’ll cut right to the chase. We know the Dbacks starting pitching should improve in 2025 due to the Burnes addition and some better health and performance luck, but just what could the ceiling of this rotation be?
To keep things relatively simple, I chose to just look at WAR. There is no perfect all-encompassing stat to evaluate pitching, but at least WAR offers us a way to benchmark this rotation against historical rotations in a fairly apples to apples way.
In taking each of our starters best season, this was the best rotation I was able to come up with:
So what does a 24.1 WAR out of your rotation mean? To find out, I looked back at the last 30 years of SP WAR output for context:
Only 2 rotations in the last 30 years have put up more than 24.1 WAR out of their starting pitching unit. The Braves with 3 Hall of Famers in Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz from 1996-1998, and the 2011 Phillies.
Now I fully recognize that for the 2025 Dbacks rotation to have a season like this, a lot has to go right. First and foremost injuries. In 2024 this rotation was marred by injuries to almost every single one of their starters.
In addition to health, a lot has to go right from a performance standpoint as well. Is it reasonable to expect all of these guys to return to their prime form all at the same time? I believe it is. The common factor that is going to benefit everyone is having one of the best defenses in baseball behind them. Defense can be a tough thing to metric, but according to Savant the Dbacks are 2nd in MLB only to the Brewers in Outs Above Average (OAA) and Runs Prevented since the start of the 2023 season. Even more impressive is that they are almost double the runs prevented of the 5th best defense indicating a wide gap.
The other thing that I could see being a benefit to these guys is having so much pitching talent and expertise around them. Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling in the past have discussed how much the competition between the 2 of them brought out the best in each other. For example, I could see us getting a lot more out of Zac Gallen the night after Burnes just cut through the opposing team’s lineup for 8 innings. And it just growing from there for Kelly, Erod, and Montgomery.
Enos Sarris, mastermind behind Fangraph’s Stuff+ metric, gave several reasons on the Rates and Barrels Podcast as to why we should have optimism for Burnes. “Burnes is a bit of a tinkerer… He has a sweeper that he breaks out in September every year and one year he is just going to throw it all year… Breaking out the sweeper more often could make him even better against righties and you could see some return to the old strikeout rates.”
Sarris also highlighted in 2024 Burnes “had an early season dip in the efficacy of the cutter, but he got it back, and got back an extra inch or 2 of vertical movement… He was back to a 26% strikeout rate when the cutter was good at the end of the season.”
The elephant in the room and much a topic of conversation has been Jordan Montgomery. He is in a walk year of his contract, prior to 2024 had been one of the most consistent starting pitchers in all of baseball, and showed up to camp 20-25 pounds less than 2024. Erik Kratz on Foul Territory last week was reminiscing with Torey Lovullo about his time catching Monty. According to Kratz, “2020 I caught every single one of his starts before we shut down for COVID, and that was the best shape he had been in in his life. He had dedicated himself… If he is in that shape, its going to be good because he was sitting 94-97 popping some 98’s. It was exciting that spring training.” Because of all of this, he is an easy candidate for comeback player of the year.
The other thing this rotation has going for it is depth. According to Fangraphs, Brandon Pfaadt was the best pitcher in this rotation in 2024 and was good for 3.1 WAR. What a great insurance policy to have if any of the above guys falter. It is very likely Pfaadt starts the season in Reno despite being a 3 WAR MLB pitcher. That is absurd. There were 8 teams in 2024 that didn’t have a single starting pitcher accumulate 3 or more WAR! And he is going to likely be on our AAA team… It is reasonable to project however that if this rotation does suffer an injury or underperformance from someone, Pfaadt could certainly step in and right the ship and even potentially improve his mark with further development.
My purpose of writing this was to hopefully generate some awareness for just how special this season has the potential to be. I fully recognize it is not likely that all of these pieces will fall into place. However, I also believe there is reason to optimistic.
It appears as though this team has really doubled down on what has gotten them the most success in the past, pitching and defense. I for one couldn’t agree more and I am curious to know what your guys’ thoughts are. Here’s to 2025!