For the second year in a row, any promise of a Diamondbacks dynasty ran by the guys that made a World Series in 2023 has been quietly extinguished by a rotten luck year in a tough division. I'm beginning to worry that Corbin Carroll in Arizona and Joe Burrow in Cincinnati are gonna be feeling very similar things soon.
It's not without a lack of effort, of course, and this D-Backs team still has Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo, Blaze Alexander, Gabriel Moreno and Ryne Nelson playing very well for them. But a ton of the backing pieces aren't even at replacement level. The depth just wasn't there this year, and having a bunch of the stars get injured didn't help very much either. It sucks to say, but Corbin Burnes getting hurt 2 months in definitely destroyed most of this team's postseason chances, because then they all started going down like dominoes. They signed Burnes, Rodriguez and Montgomery to properly arm this rotation, and none of them really did what they were supposed to. If Montgomery has a comeback year for the Brewers next year it'll be the funniest thing ever.
It makes it even sadder that Zac Gallen, for the second year in a row, just hasn't been as consistent as he was when the D-Backs were up-and-coming. He's made all his starts, but he's currently 11-14 with a 4.84 ERA, far from the level-headed dominance of the early part of the decade. He does lead the team in strikeouts with 157, but that wasn't gonna be the issue. Gallen and Pfaadt have had strong fundamentals but this team has not been better than its adversaries, and thus even great pitchers who make all their starts are getting left out to dry and coming back with 5 ERAs. Pfaadt is 13-8, and he still has an ERA over 5.
This team is currently looking at a .250 collective average, which isn't bad, and a 4.50 collective ERA. Any attempt to make this team stronger did not work because the people that were put in position to aid this team just couldn't commit. And thus, it now looks even more difficult for the D-Backs to compete again in the future with all this progress set back. It could always turn around, and it very well might, but this year did nothing to ease the worries of fans caught off guard by last year's eleventh-hour missed opportunity.
Coming Tonight: A guy who's spent 4 years with the Rays, which, for the Rays is like 12.
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