‘Hard questions’ await D-Backs
The Diamondbacks came into the year expecting to have a lineup filled with tough outs, a rotation that would regularly give them a chance to win and a bullpen that would keep games close. They expected to be a playoff team — even before the postseason field was widely expanded.
Instead, they enter the season’s final stretch with one of the worst offenses in the majors, one of the worst
rotations in franchise history and a bullpen that needs to be reconstructed. At 20-34, they have been eliminated from postseason contention and sit in last place in the National League West.
Ranking disappointing Diamondbacks seasons is no easy task, not with a franchise that has made a habit of falling flat when hopes are at their highest. But this season certainly is up there.
The year raises a host of uncomfortable questions for the organization, none which can be untangled from the trickiest question of all, one that was inherent from the minute baseball embarked on its shortened schedule in July. What do we make of all this?
For some in the game, the answer, in a global sense, is not much. The season is but a fraction of its normal length. There are no fans in the stands. The health and safety protocols have altered the sense of normalcy.
“I don’t know what to think of this whole year,” a high-ranking evaluator with an American League club said. “I’m kind of stunned seeing guys who aren’t performing anywhere close to how good they are. Every team has those guys.”
Still, players and teams overperform and underperform every season. And, in most cases, baseball’s division leaders are not wildly out of line with projections. There are some surprises in the standings, both good and bad, but few are as stunning as where the Diamondbacks reside.
A scout with a National League team noted that just a year ago, the Washington Nationals started off poorly only to win the World Series. However, he pointed out that such a turnaround is far from the norm.
“I don’t think you can reasonably argue that anybody that’s not playing well this year would win the World Series if the season were 162 games,” he said. “That would be a stretch.”
The Diamondbacks themselves — publicly, at least — are putting some degree of stock in what has happened. They are owning their record and their poor play. And they are saying the tough questions will be confronted this offseason.
“We are going to sit down and talk about it as a staff,” GM Mike Hazen said. “We’ll talk about it as a front office. We’re going to ask a lot of hard questions. We’re going to have a lot of hard conversations about being in last place, because that isn’t where we started out this year, intention-wise, nor do I feel talent-wise. But we are where we are.”
Individual disappointments
Part of the question surrounding what went wrong this season is whether the Diamondbacks were as close to being a true contender as they believed last winter. They were coming off an 85-win season in which several players emerged as productive major leaguers. Ketel Marte had a monster season. Carson Kelly looked for stretches like a future All-Star. Christian Walker established himself as an everyday player. Eduardo Escobar and Nick Ahmed had the best seasons of their careers.
With the exception of Walker, none of those players have come close to repeating their performances, a massive disappointment for an organization that made several win-now moves — namely, signing lefty Madison Bumgarner and trading for center fielder Starling Marte — under the assumption that the 2019 was not a one-off.
Hazen said he believed so strongly in the group because of the players; he was betting on both talent and character, performance and work ethic.
“Making decisions off four or five years of history is probably less volatile than one,” Hazen said. “But when we believe in the progress these guys were making from an offense, defense, whatever standpoint, we felt good about that. I still feel good about it.”
He also doesn’t want to read too much into what occurred over a relatively small sample. He says — somewhat paradoxically — that the team’s performance cannot be excused but that the individual seasons within it can be.
“We have to own the record,” Hazen said. “We did that as a team. I do think individual short-run performance is the area we need to pull back on in my mind — that getting 600 plate appearances is a heck of a lot different than getting 150 plate appearances.”
Perhaps no player has been as disappointing as Ketel Marte. Last year, he seemed to impact a game each turn through the lineup from either side of the plate. He finished fourth in MVP voting. But after slugging 32 homers last year, he had hit just two before landing on the injured list two weeks ago.
The organization, Hazen included, called Marte a “superstar” this spring. It seems fair to wonder if the Diamondbacks put too much stock in Marte’s 2019. Hazen doesn’t think so. He again described him the same way, but insisted the team never went into the season counting on Marte to repeat last year’s offensive showing.
“Yes, Ketel is our best player,” Hazen said. “He’s a superstar. I think asking him to shoulder the offensive load is not how we built this team. It’s not what we talked about in the offseason or heading into the season. I feel like the strength of this team was having seven to eight really good hitters every night. But we just didn’t do that. It wasn’t just one player.
“Every player is going to have some seasons that are better than others. I would hope that if we’ve done our jobs we aren’t going to go into a season expecting Ketel to carry the offensive load. I don’t think we’re going to be built to do that, ever.”
Should front office have stepped back?
Hazen and his group took over a team that lost 93 games in 2016, retooled the roster and won 93 games in 2017. But this year marks the third in a row in which they have fallen short of the postseason. This year, in particular, raises doubts about the direction the front office has taken and about the club’s current trajectory.
Should the Diamondbacks have continued to stick with this core of players? Or should they have taken a step back, either after the post-2018 exodus of Paul Goldschmidt, Patrick Corbin and A.J. Pollock or at 2019 trade deadline, when their then-.500 team compelled them to consider dealing multiple veterans before settling on a Zack Greinke trade?
Hazen said his tenure might be defined by those questions. He said asking them is fair, adding, “I think that’s going to be question I could ask myself.”
“Maybe it would have been easier to do that: sink to the bottom, draft in the top three for a few years in a row and just watch the younger guys come up and focus on player development,” Hazen said. “I just felt like we had too much talent here and I would be artificially doing that. I feel like we’ve had the opportunity to continue to have a good team.
“I don’t think we put a team out there that was expecting to win 70 games that won 65 games. Every team that was put out there has had the expectation of playing at least into the 80s, in my opinion, and see where it goes. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet, yes, you certainly can question the direction I’ve led us in. I don’t regret the players we acquired. I don’t regret the teams we put out there. And I feel like being competitive is my job. I do.”
The White Sox are the latest club that has pulled off what appears to be a successful teardown and rebuild. After the 2016 season, they began trading away veterans — including Chris Sale, Adam Eaton and Jose Quintana — and acquiring young talent. After three ugly years, they have a talented young core with a handful of veterans surrounding them. They are in first place in the AL Central.
Hazen makes the point, however, that the organization has been able to accumulate young talent even without bottoming out, a claim supported by various farm system rankings that have placed the Diamondbacks within the top 10 in the game.
“I feel like we’ve acquired a lot of really good, young players over our time,” he said. “It has not, to this point, impacted us just yet, but I believe it’s starting to and it’s going to. I’m not sure that losing in the regular season, having a team that doesn’t win and picking in the top 5 of the draft ever year, I don’t know how much further ahead or behind we would be with regard to that.”
In a call earlier this month, Hazen mentioned in passing how so few of his moves have worked out this year. In particular, the Bumgarner contract — five years, $85 million — does not look good. The Goldschmidt trade does not look as promising as it did a year ago.
Smaller moves have not panned out, either, including tendering a contract to infielder Jake Lamb and nontendering Taijuan Walker.
Positioned for 2021 turnaround?
Still, Hazen says he believes his club remains well-positioned for a turnaround next year. He likes the club’s starting rotation, apparently assuming Bumgarner will rebound and Merrill Kelly will come back healthy from surgery to address thoracic outlet syndrome. His position players will return largely intact, though he may need to address center field after Starling Marte was dealt at the deadline. Hazen admitted to having “some work to do” with his bullpen.
Not everyone is as confident. “I definitely have some concerns going forward now,” said another highranking American League scout. “You just wonder about a lot of things. (Ketel) Marte was fantastic last year and you wonder if it was a little bit of an aberration. Maybe he’s something in between what we saw this year and last year. And I’m not sure they have that anchor at the top of their rotation like they were expecting Bumgarner to be.”
Still, there are many in the industry who are willing to explain away the year based on — to use Hazen’s phrase — the “short-run performance.” They figure that with another four months, Arizona could have played its way into contention — or that the club would have never stumbled so badly had it known it had a full six months to gather itself.
Hazen did not entirely rule out the idea of taking a step back on contention, but it seemed clear that was not how he expected the offseason to play out.
“I don’t know why I would feel that much different (about next year) than I did at the beginning of this year,” he said, before referencing the players he traded in August. “Knowing that replacing Archie Bradley, Robbie Ray, Starling Marte and Andrew Chafin — I think we’ve done some of that already, but we’re going to have to do that. We’re going to have to work on that this offseason. Look, it’s a long offseason. I feel like we have a lot of good, young players. We’re going to try to be as creative and aggressive as possible. We’ll see where that takes us. I still have a fundamental belief that this is a talented team.”
Calhoun player of the week
Diamondbacks outfielder Kole Calhoun was named NL Player of the Week on Monday, the first Arizona player chosen for the weekly honor this season and his first such award. Calhoun hit .458 with 6 home runs, 12 RBIs and a 1.250 slugging percentage during the week. His six homers over five games matched the team record held by Reggie Sanders, Jason Kubel and J.D. Martinez.