One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

“Dr. Neal ElAttrache” is up there on the list of three-word phrases you don’t want to see near a pitcher’s name. Not quite as bad as “Federal grand jury,” “Devoured by wolverines,” or “Drafted by Colorado,” but up there. Tampa Bay Rays ace Shane McClanahan visited the estimable orthopedic surgeon on Monday to get a tight left forearm checked out, and the results were not to his liking. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Tuesday afternoon that McClanahan is “highly unlikely” to return this season, in the words of Rays manager Kevin Cash.

Over Tampa Bay’s most recent run of success, the Rays have set great store by their pitching, and more recently by their rotation, which ranks third in the majors in WAR. But that success has come amidst a sweeps-week Grey’s Anatomy special in the medical department. McClanahan will be the biggest loss yet, as he leads Rays starters in innings and was one of the team’s All-Star representatives last month. The question, as always, is whether Tampa Bay can hang on, and what “hanging on” looks like for a club that’s already headed backwards. Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s something about his swing that looks odd and unnatural, but DeLauter otherwise looks like a middle-of-the-order bat from a tools perspective.”

Eric Longenhagen shared that scouting perspective when describing Chase DeLauter back in January. Ranking him No. 9 on our Cleveland Guardians Top Prospects list as a 45 FV prospect, our lead prospect analyst also opined that the 2022 first rounder was “a fascinating draft case,” in part because he played just 66 games over three seasons at James Madison University. Moreover, the broken foot that prematurely ended his final collegiate season delayed DeLauter’s professional debut until this past June. Initially assigned to the Arizona Complex League, the 21-year-old outfielder has slashed .356/.373/.548 with one home run in 75 plate appearances since being promoted to the High-A Lake County Captains.

DeLauter discussed his swing, and the approach that goes with it, prior to a recent game. Read the rest of this entry »

Things didn’t look so hot for Triston Casas in the first few months of the season. From the beginning of the year through the end of May, he had a 95 wRC+ and a .195/.326/.376 slash line. He wasn’t doing enough damage in the heart of the zone and had a suboptimal launch angle distribution. That’s a fancy way of saying he wasn’t consistently making pitchers’ mistakes hurt because his batted balls were all over the place. His promising future as a masher had a bit of a cloud over it, but after an explosive July, there is good reason to be more confident in him.

Casas’ turnaround has multiple layers to it. Along with a slight mechanical tweak, he has taken on a more aggressive approach while focusing on contact towards the middle of the field. With a solid combination of power and natural lift, he is able to play with the big parts of Fenway Park. He isn’t utilizing the approach we’ve seen many lefty Red Sox hitters adopt over the years of peppering line drives and fly balls off the Green Monster. In fact, he’s 134th out of 143 qualified hitters in Oppo%. Instead, he sticks to where his bat path plays – the middle of the field. Well, that was his approach in July, anyway. Below is a table showing Casas’ horizontal and vertical batted ball profile by month this season:

He had a good June, but in terms of his batted ball profile, it didn’t look like his breakout July. In July, he stayed off the ground at an extreme rate while hitting half of his batted balls up the middle. There are only three qualified hitters in baseball with a groundball rate below 30% for the entire year: Jack Suwinski (26.1%), Nolan Gorman (27.8%), and Mookie Betts (28.0%). This isn’t in the table, but Casas’ July HR/FB ratio was 29.2%, which would put him behind only Shohei Ohtani if he were to sustain it over the full season. To see Casas hit at rates similar to elite guys like Betts and Ohtani is both good and bad. He doesn’t have the raw power or hit tool to live in outlier territory on a consistent basis, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate his success. Rather, it shows us what Casas needs to do to be a consistent power hitter. If his swing tweak and new approach enable him to more consistently hit the ball in the air, we should have greater confidence in his ability to sustain success, even as his stats become less extreme.

Before looking at the mechanical tweak, I want to focus on where and when the Red Sox first baseman has been more aggressive. The data below details his swing rates on pitches in the upper and lower third of the zone:

When the calendar flipped to June, Casas got significantly more aggressive at the top and bottom of the zone. As July rolled around, he doubled down on that aggression while adding more early count swings. There is an old school mantra that the best pitch you’ll see in an at-bat is the first one. Pitchers want to get ahead and take advantage of the hitter trying to find their timing. Still, if a pitcher lays in a cookie, the hitter should attack it. It’s always a sound approach to hunt the heart of the zone, and if you’re a struggling rookie, it makes even more sense to simplify things. When Casas implemented that strategy in July, it paid off.

He had success in the first two months of the season on 0-0 pitches in the zone, with a .424 and .681 xwOBA, respectively. In June, he ran a .026 xwOBA on these pitches across 18 total swings, though the results on those swings seem like a small sample blip; 11 of them were foul balls and three were whiffs. Something was off there, but the trend didn’t continue into July. Casas flipped the script and bumped up his swing rate by over 20 percentage points while running a .476 xwOBA. If a pitcher attacked him in the zone to start the at-bat, he put on an A swing. Now that he seems to have a better feel for his swing, he’ll have to strike the right balance of patience and aggression depending on how pitchers approach him.

Let’s look at the adjustment that helped things click mechanically. Here are a few swings from May and June before Casas made the change:

And here are a few during his stellar month:

Every hitter has a different feel for how to turn their barrel over and enter the zone. Some are more handsy, like Marcus Semien, while others aren’t handsy at all, like Casas. My use of two different angles from before his tweak is intentional. One shows his hands relative to his body on a straight angle, and the other shows how far he tucked them behind his ear. There was a good bit of movement that was triggered by his hands. But after his tweak, his barrel was almost perpendicular to the ground, with his hands working according to the movement of his entire upper body load rather than on their own. This brings me to the idea of connection. Before explaining what that means, take a look at this video posted by Alex Speier from a few days ago:

Triston Casas does not step in the bucket. He steps with a bucket. pic.twitter.com/z7TFNtM3EA

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) August 4, 2023

This is a drill that hones the feeling of early connection between your upper body and barrel. By holding the bucket between his arms and chest throughout his swing, Casas establishes where his barrel is in space relative to his arms and torso. The result is his hands being along for the ride, rather than being the driver of the swing. In other words, his barrel placement is the result of how his upper body moves in space. While the swing in this video isn’t what it looks like in game, it helps give Casas the feel he needs to have an efficiently sequenced load and plane of rotation. You’ll notice that his hands are hardly moving during this practice swing. That ties directly to what we saw him change in July. His hands aren’t tipping until his shoulders do, and he’s not letting them guide his swing path. The result is improved barrel control stemming from better feel for where his barrel is in space. The data backs that up too. July was the first month Casas had a SweetSpot% above 37% on the season, and he blew that mark away, with 49% of his batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.

Usually, we don’t get a look into drill work like we did here. Connection drills are very common but can look confusing to the casual viewer. Luckily for us, a logical story can be told here. There is a direct line between Casas’ batted ball data and swing tweak, and the connection drill swings. I often talk about players finding their blueprint for success. A lot of the time, a particular drill can help a hitter get back in line with that blueprint. Casas now appears to have a better idea of idea of what that looks like for him, and specific cues for how he can stay there.

All this said, it doesn’t necessarily mean Casas has figured out hitting. Like most hitters, he has holes that can be exposed. As he finds success, pitchers will adjust their mix or location. Since August began, Casas has faced a career-high rate of breaking balls. He hadn’t seen more than 34% breakers in any month, but after 73 pitches this month, that rate is up to 50.7%. It’s working too – his whiff rate on that pitch group is 41.7% and he has yet to barrel a breaking ball. It’s a cat and mouse game that he will have to continuously adjust to while trying to find stability.

How Casas progresses versus his opponents’ changing approach will be crucial to our understanding of where his floor and ceiling will ultimately settle. At the very least, though, we’ve seen what the best version of Casas might look like, even if it hasn’t lasted a full season. A 122 wRC+ in your first full season ain’t too shabby.

Monday night, my wife posed a baseball question I couldn’t immediately answer. As the Angels and Giants went to the eighth inning with the Halos up by a run, she had a simple question: How often does a team that’s losing after seven innings come back and win? I guess I could have gone to our wonderful WPA Inquirer, a fun little tool for hypotheticals. That tells me that the Giants had around a 25% chance to win heading into the eighth. But I took her question as a broader one, concerned not just with that specific game, but with all games. How likely is a comeback?

I didn’t know the answer offhand, and I couldn’t find it on Google either (secret professional writer tip: use Google). So I did what anyone in my situation would do: I said “I don’t know, but now I’m going to write an article about this.” Two days later, here we are.

I’m hardly the first person to do research on comebacks. Russell Carleton has been looking into comebacks for a while. Rob Mains has too. Chet Gutwein investigated comeback wins and blown saves here at FanGraphs in 2021. Everyone loves to write about comebacks. Baseball Reference even keeps a list of the biggest comeback wins. They’re memorable games, and fertile ground for investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading away veteran pieces and restocking the farm system at the deadline, the Mets have pivoted and are now focusing on the future. That being the case, it both was and wasn’t a curious time for the team to option Brett Baty, seemingly their third baseman of the future, to Triple-A Syracuse on Monday. Now is the time to let the kids play and figure things out at the big-league level, but Baty has been struggling so mightily that he might need a change of scenery. He’s running a 77 wRC+ on the season, and since the start of July, he’s at a measly 39. He hasn’t recorded a hit since July 23, a stretch of 25 plate appearances. That’s the second-longest active streak in baseball, behind the also recently demoted Corey Julks with 42. Combine that with poor defense, and Baty certainly sounds like someone who could use a little time away from the spotlight to figure things out.

The Mets have said the same. “We think this is what’s best for Brett, which is what’s best for the Mets, for the time being,” Buck Showalter told reporters. “Just because something’s delayed doesn’t mean it’s denied.” He added, “I’d be surprised if he doesn’t take a little time – two or three days – and then all of a sudden kind of get back to who he is and who he’s capable of being.”

What complicates the issue is Baty’s service time. It’s a tricky situation because, to borrow a phrase, the timing is nothing short of predominant. Between this year and last, Baty has accrued 162 days of major league service time, just short of the 172 that constitute a full year. When the Mets started the season with him at Triple-A Syracuse, it seemed like they might be deliberately gaming the system. He was 23rd overall in our prospect rankings and, along with Mark Vientos, had torn up the Grapefruit League. The Mets did call Baty up in mid-April, early enough that he’d have a chance to accrue a full year of service time, but once he arrived in Flushing, they still seemed to be on the fence about him, even though he had raked in Syracuse and continued raking for his first month in the big leagues. He was kept in a loose platoon with Eduardo Escobar, starting against righties and sitting about half the time against lefties — not necessarily how you handle your third baseman of the future. Read the rest of this entry »

For a team with a losing record, the Padres were aggressive in advance of the August 1 trade deadline, swinging three trades in order to patch holes on the major league roster without fretting about the impact of further increasing their payroll. Yet their first week since upgrading their roster hasn’t gone well. Not only did they lose Joe Musgrove to the injured list on Friday, but they also followed that by losing three of four to the Dodgers this weekend at Petco Park, missing a golden opportunity to get to .500 for the first time in nearly two months and gain ground on the NL West leaders.

The 30-year-old Musgrove was scratched from his start last Wednesday in Colorado due to what was initially termed “minor” shoulder soreness. The thinking at the time was that he would just miss one turn and be able to start against the Mariners in a two-game series starting on Tuesday. But when Musgrove flew home to San Diego to be examined, an MRI revealed that he had inflammation in his right shoulder capsule. Surgery is not yet a consideration, but he’ll be shut down from throwing for at least three weeks, meaning that at best he’ll return sometime in September. The Padres won’t have much clarity until he is examined after his rest period, and then he’ll need at least a couple of weeks to rebuild his pitch count.

The injury caught Musgrove by surprise. “I honestly thought we were going in for a pretty routine checkup… but they went in and found some injury to the capsule,” he told reporters. “Every part of me wants to go out there and throw. But everything’s telling us that we needed to step back and give it some rest.”

The injury caught the Padres by surprise as well. Said general manager A.J. Preller, “At the time of the deadline, we honestly were not looking at Joe as missing a few weeks or extended time or anything like that.” Preller did reinforce the pitching staff by acquiring starter Rich Hill from the Pirates in one deadline-day trade and reliever Scott Barlow from the Royals in another, but they don’t add up to a healthy Musgrove. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone likes an inspiring story. They don’t call it a Hollywood ending for nothing; people love it when the hero wins before the credits roll. Over in near near-ish the center of American film-making, it looked like the Angels were setting up for another iteration of that classic arc. They were down and out, deciding whether they could stomach trading the best player in the game before losing him forever. The previous best player in the game was out with injury, and the ship was taking on water. Then, a classic mid-story twist: they ripped off an 8-1 run in the latter half of July and decided to go for it one last time.

Yeah, about that. Since trading for Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo López to lean fully into this year, they’ve gone 2-9, slipping back below .500. After their playoff odds reached 22.7% on July 27, the Halos have crashed down to 1.3% in short order. That’s a seasonal low for their chances of making the postseason. Things are decidedly non-magical in the land of Disney these days.

What’s gone wrong for the Angels? Well, one thing’s for sure: it’s not Shohei Ohtani. He’s started at DH for all 11 games of the stretch and has hit a ludicrous .405/.542/.649, even better than his seasonal line. He left his lone start in that span early with hand cramps, but pitched four scoreless innings before departing. To the extent that one player can power a team, Ohtani is doing his best. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves.

And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.

As with any model, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and there are always some people that question the value of data such as these. So for this run, I’m pitting zStats against the last two months and all new data that obviously could not have been used in the model without a time machine to see how the zStats did compared to reality. I’m not going to do a whole post for this every time, but this is something that, based on the feedback from the last post in June, people really wanted to see the results for.

Starting with zBABIP, let’s look at how the numbers have shaken out for the leaders and trailers from back in June. I didn’t include players with fewer than 100 plate appearances over the last two months. Read the rest of this entry »

In an attempt to arrest a slide that began in early July, the Diamondbacks were busy in the run-up to the August 1 trade deadline, but so far, their moves haven’t been enough to turn things around. In fact, they have yet to win a game in August, having finished a seven-game road trip by losing six in a row to the Giants and Twins. On Sunday, their highest-profile deadline addition, former Mariners closer Paul Sewald, failed to retire a batter in his first save opportunity since the trade. Instead, he served up a game-tying homer to Max Kepler on his first pitch and then, after a walk, a two-run walk-off homer to Matt Wallner. Ouch.

After spending the majority of the first half leading the NL West, the Diamondbacks have slipped to sixth in the NL Wild Card race, 1.5 games behind the Cubs and Reds, who are tied for the third spot. Their trend is actually worse than that. Since winning on July 1 to lift their record to 50-34 and restore their NL West lead to three games, the Snakes have gone 7-22 (.241). That’s worse than the A’s (9-19, .321) or any other team in the majors. It’s not as though they’ve been particularly jobbed in the process; their Pythagenpat record is the majors’ worst in that span as well:

To be fair, the Diamondbacks weren’t expected to be a powerhouse this year; after going 74-88 last year, they projected for 78.4 wins via our preseason Playoff Odds. In a slow-starting NL West, they took over a share of first place for the first time on April 8, when they were 5-4, and finished the month 16-13, which was good enough to tie for first. Despite going 17-10 in May, they didn’t get a share of first place again until June 1, but they spent that entire month atop the division — most of it with sole possession of first place — while going 16-11.

It was around that time that Corbin Carroll’s season started taking an unfortunate turn. On June 29 — the same day he was named as a starter for the National League in the upcoming All-Star Game — the 22-year-old outfielder left a 6-1 loss to the Rays after four innings, having experienced soreness in his right shoulder during a third-inning plate appearance. It was the same shoulder on which he’d undergone surgery to repair a torn labrum in 2021, which cost him nearly the entire season. In the wake of his removal from the game, he underwent strength testing, which showed that his shoulder was strong and stable, but the Diamondbacks gave him a breather, limiting him to a single pitch-hitting appearance over the next three days. After returning to the lineup, he played just three more games before leaving the team’s July 6 tilt against the Mets in the seventh inning, once again in pain. “I took a swing, and I felt a shift in my shoulder, shocking, tingling sensation go down my arm and then my hand go numb,” he told reporters. “I was just holding it thinking it came out of the socket, pretty much thought that the season was over.”

Despite his initial concerns, Carroll had not experienced a dislocation, and his MRI came back clean. He was back in the lineup the next day, and while he’s certainly had his moments since then — and hasn’t missed a game — his production and quality of contact are down considerably since the first incident:

Note that with two hits and two walks on Sunday, Carroll raised his post-July 1 wRC+ nine points; he was at 96 previously. Along the way, his swinging strike rate has spiked from 8.4% to 12.4%, and his chase rate from 28.8% to 32.6%, though his strikeout rate has barely budged, from 19.8% to 20.1%.

Maybe Carroll’s downturn in production is related to his shoulder woes, maybe it’s just the league adjusting to a player who looked like an MVP candidate early in the season, or maybe it’s just regression, more on which below. One way or another, it’s been poorly timed, in part because he’s not the only Diamondback who has tailed off in recent weeks:

Just four Diamondbacks have a 100 wRC+ or better since the start of July, one of them a catcher (Moreno) who has been limited to 11 of the team’s first 29 games in that span and is now sidelined by left shoulder inflammation. Moreno, Thomas, and McCarthy are the only three players with a higher wRC+ since the start of July than before, and they’re still below average offensively overall. Deadline additions Tommy Pham (from the Mets) and Jace Peterson (from the A’s) have yet to make an impact, going a combined 4-for-30, all singles.

Meanwhile, note that not only has Carroll fallen off steeply but so have Gurriel and Perdomo, both of whom joined him on the NL All-Star squad but might as well be on the side of a milk carton these days. Setting the narrative of Carroll’s shoulder injury to the side for a moment, this is striking:

All three players hit well above their Statcast expected stats through the end of June, particularly Perdomo, a slappy switch-hitter who doesn’t hit the ball hard at all; his season barrel rate is 1.2%, his hard-hit rate 19.9%. Then it’s as though the Regression Monster showed up and took a bite — each of these three players has seen about a 75-point swing in their wOBA-xwOBA differential.

Overall, the Diamondbacks hit .263/.330/.437 through the end of June, ranking fifth in the majors in scoring (5.11 runs per game) and seventh in wRC+ (106). Since then, they’ve hit just .227/.302/.373 while ranking 29th in scoring (3.44 runs per game) and 26th in wRC+ (83). Their performance against every major pitch type except changeups has fallen off by at least 50 points of SLG and 25 points of wOBA:

Yikes. They were punishing four-seam fastballs earlier in the season, but that’s stopped, and they’ve particularly gotten eaten alive by sliders and sweepers lately. What’s especially strange is the general downward trend of their more recent numbers despite the weather getting even warmer, which tends to increase offense. Of course, it’s as hot as the surface of Mercury in Arizona, so maybe the Diamondbacks have just wilted in the heat.

That does seem to be true with the team’s pitching, particularly the bullpen:

Good gravy. In writing about the Sewald trade — which sent Rojas and prospects Dominic Canzone and Ryan Bliss to Seattle — I noted that manager Torey Lovullo had been working with a matchup-based closer-by-committee system involving righties Miguel Castro, Kevin Ginkel and Scott McGough and lefty Andrew Chafin. However, I did not drill down to see just how bad things had gotten for them in the recent past. Using the July 1 cutoff again, with full awareness of the small samples in play, Ginkel has pitched well (0.75 ERA, 2.35 FIP in 12 innings), but the other three had been torched, with Castro (6.00 ERA and 6.60 FIP in 12 IP) the “best” of them, though he had stopped getting ninth-inning save chances, and Chafin (9.95 ERA and 5.63 FIP in 6.1 IP) and McGough (8.76 ERA and 6.91 FIP in 12.1 IP) utterly terrible. Chafin had two blown ninth-inning saves that led to losses in that span; he’s now a Brewer.

As for the rotation, it’s been pretty unstable, with Zac Gallen and rookie Ryne Nelson the only real constants, and both of them experiencing fall-offs since the start of July. Gallen pitched to a 3.02 ERA and 2.73 FIP in 104.1 innings through June, making his first All-Star team, but has yielded a 4.17 ERA and 4.12 FIP in 45.1 innings since, with his home run rate increasing from 0.6 per nine to 1.6. Nelson went from a 4.97 ERA and 4.44 FIP to a 5.59 ERA and 6.19 FIP, not that it should have been too surprising given his double-digit barrel rate even in the “good” times. Merrill Kelly, the team’s second-best starter, missed four weeks (most of July) due to a blood clot in his right calf but has been solid when available. Tommy Henry showed some improvement before being sidelined last week due to elbow inflammation. Brandon Pfaadt has been getting better results since being recalled on July 22 than prior, though his overall ERA of 7.11 in 44.1 innings is pretty damning. Also sporting an unsightly ERA (7.38) is Zach Davies, who has been dreadful on both sides of the divide while missing time with oblique and back injuries. Slade Cecconi, the team’s 2020 first-round pick, just made his major league debut on August 2 in place of Henry and acquitted himself reasonably well in a losing cause against the Giants, though his catcher (Herrera) had a rough time on the rookie’s first strikeout.

Given their current injury situation, the Diamondbacks now find themselves trying to stay afloat with just two starters who have demonstrated the ability to be league average or better, plus three rookies who have combined for a 5.63 ERA and 5.31 FIP. It’s not like the cavalry is on the horizon, either. The team’s playoff odds, which stood at 76.4% through the end of June (24.9% division, 51.5% Wild Card), are down to 21% at this writing, including just a 0.7% chance of overcoming their 8.5-game deficit to win the division. Considering that they lost 110 games just two seasons ago, they’ve certainly made progress to get to this point, but it seems quite apparent given their performance over the past five-plus weeks that they’re not quite ready for prime time.