What The Hell Has Happened To The Arizona Diamondbacks?
Losing sucks, but losing in baseball is just the worst. It’s probably a mistake for me the equate the two but a bad football season is what, 10 bad days? That’s chump change compared to what baseball fans and players have had to endure. And endure is what the Diamondbacks and their fans are going to have to do following their 23rd consecutive road loss this season. You know you’ve messed up when you’re breaking records that were originally set back in 1943. Records get broken in baseball every year, so it’s not inconceivable that something like this was going to happen at some point, but the Diamondbacks? Where did their suckage come from? I would’ve expected this from the Pirates or the Rockies. Hell, I’ve seen my Tigers sink to some historically low depths over the last several years but 23 road losses in a row? You almost have to try to be that bad. It just goes to show home quickly ships can sink in Major League Baseball. Just two years ago the D-Backs were one of the biggest surprises in the sport. Despite committing to a rebuild and trading away two franchise cornerstones in Paul Goldschmidt and Zack Greinke, the D-Backs still won 85 games in 2019. Ketel Marte was a rising star, Nick Ahmed was the best defensive shortstop in baseball not named Andrelton Simmons, and Torey Luvullo was one of the most respected young managers in baseball. So what the hell happened? How could any team possibly lose 23 road games in a row? Well for starters, there is bad luck involved. A majority of the losses during this losing streak have come against good teams. The Mets, the Dodgers, the Brewers, and the A’s are all above .500 teams that have punished the Diamondbacks during this streak. But even with that, it’s 23 games in a row. A bad team will lose a series to a good team, that’s baseball, but I looked at the Diamondbacks offense numbers. This may surprise you, but they're actually quite bad, but they aren’t 23 road losses in a row bad. The reason the Arizona Diamondbacks have lost 23 road games in a row because they have, without a doubt, the worst pitching staff in baseball. This problem was no more apparent than it was on Wednesday night, when Arizona found a way to cough up a 7-0 lead in large part due to Mike Yastrzemski's 8th inning salami.
Diamondbacks pitching right now is dead last in baseball in all of the following categories- Wins, ERA, Saves, ERA+, FIP, WHIP, and Hits per 9 innings. That’s a level of historically awful pitching that we haven’t seen since the 2003 Detroit Tigers stumbled their way to a 119 loss season. Again though, I ask “How?” The truth is the season the Diamondbacks had in 2019 was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Instead of liquidating more assets, their fluky 85 win season gave them delusions of grandeur. That season made them believe they were close to competing, when in reality they were anywhere but close. They went out and splurged, signing Madison Bumgarner to maybe the worst pitching contract in baseball now that Jordan Zimmermann is off the books. I love MadBum, he’s an all-time badass and a World Series legend, but outside of a 7 inning no hitter that he threw earlier this season, he’s pitched the worst baseball of his career with Arizona and he was already trending downward before the D-Backs signed him. The 2018 Pirates suffered from the same problem. A random hot streak in the middle of the summer gave them the belief that they should be going for it. They ended up trading for Chris Archer. You know what happened next.
As bad as the MadBum contract is, you can’t put 23 straight road losses on one bad contract. Injuries have been a huge reason for their meltdown. Four of their top five pitchers, including Bumgarner, are currently on the IL. That’s a product of a lot of bad luck but it’s also the product of a very thin farm system. Six of the Diamondbacks top 10 prospects are pitchers, but only one of them (Corbin Martin) has pitched above Double A. Bad luck? Absolutely, but you make your own luck in baseball sometimes. The fact is had the Diamondbacks stayed the course following 2019 season, continued to rebuild and traded assets like Ahmed and Martel when their stock was highest, they’d probably be relatively close to competing. But as it is, they find themselves on the wrong end of a historical road losing streak. And the sad thing is that it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.