PHOENIX — Our eyes have burned. Our souls have been scarred. We’ve seen a lot of bad things in Arizona sports history.
We’ve never seen anything like this.
The Diamondbacks avoided the Hall of Shame on Sunday, defying elimination with an 11-2 bludgeoning of the Padres to end their regular season. And now, we must all wait and hope.
The Braves and Mets will play extra baseball on Monday while two baseball cities teeter on the brink of epic collapse. For the Diamondbacks to make the playoffs, they need one of the teams to sweep both ends of a doubleheader.
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Will the sporting gods finally give us a break? Will they finally smile on the Valley?
If not, there will be heavy hearts and heavier questions.
“Yeah, I might be a little pissed right now,” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said. “But you reap what you sow.”
Alas, the Diamondbacks were once the hottest team in baseball. For a few precious moments, they were the best team in baseball. They flashed again on Sunday, breaking open a must-win game by scoring six runs in the span of 12 pitches. The sudden tsunami of offense temporarily rescued a team that had gone scoreless in 43 of their previous 53 innings, raising all sorts of alarming questions.
Did they peak too early? Were they gutted by that Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee when they coughed up an 8-0 lead? Or did that happen 24 hours later when Ketel Marte kicked off the last week of the season by asking for a day off?
Maybe the answers are right in front of our eyes. With excellent depth and shrewd in-season additions, the Diamondbacks scored the most runs in Major League Baseball by a country mile. Twenty-one times in 2024, they scored 10 or more runs in a game.
But offense comes and goes. And the type of offense Arizona needs to be a dominant team requires full commitment and grind from every player in the lineup, working counts and sacrificing for others. It’s a lot of work and takes great discipline and focus to sustain.
Meanwhile, the pitching was a huge letdown. Despite paying for two frontline starters in free agency, Eduardo Rodriguez, Jordan Montgomery, the Diamondbacks finished 27th in team ERA. Statistically, they are in a neighborhood full of terrible baseball teams.
It’s shameful. The Diamondbacks showed great resilience in shaking off a slew of injuries. And they might end up giving away what they fought so hard to get back.
The Diamondbacks badly need to stack playoff appearances to build real momentum within their fan base and to build real political capital in their quest to secure stadium renovations and a future in downtown Phoenix.
It’s been a rough decade. The Diamondbacks lost a World Series. The Suns lost the NBA Finals, imploded in two other postseason performances, and lost their iconic voice, Al McCoy. Arizona State’s football program was caught cheating during the pandemic and penalized by the NCAA. And we lost our NHL team to Salt Lake City.
Now, the Diamondbacks need a big assist. Or they will join our long list of what could’ve been and what never was.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Lovullo said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. We made this bed. We’ve got to sleep in it. But we’re going to hope for the best.”
Reach Bickley at dbickley@arizonasports.com. Listen to Bickley & Marotta weekdays from 6 a.m. – 10 a.m. on Arizona Sports 98.7.