Elegy for ’18 – Arizona Diamondbacks
(Photo: Hayden Schiff)
The Phillies weren’t the only playoff contender to drop off the face of the earth in September. The land of the chimichanga fared no better in late-season play than the cheesesteak republic, leaving a foul aftertaste to what had been a solid season.
The Setup
Arizona went a new direction after 2016, replacing the general-managerial meanderings of Dave Stewart with the more modern approach of Mike Hazen, formerly under Dave Dombrowski and Ben Cherington with the Red Sox.
Hazen worked quickly, acquiring Ketel Marte and Taijuan Walker from the Seattle Mariners for Mitch Haniger, Jean Segura, and prospect Zac Curtis. But the 2017 season was largely based around the previous core, with Arizona signing several role players — but no big difference-makers — in free agency.
The inherited rotation combined for a 3.61 ERA and 18.8 WAR, that total ranking second in baseball behind only the Indians. Hazen did make one gigantic contribution in the form of J.D. Martinez, acquired from the Tigers in July.
As in-season trades go, the Martinez swap went just about as well as anyone could have expected. The primary starter in left field, Yasmany Tomas, had gone on the disabled list in June with a groin injurym and in truth, the team was already on the verge of giving up on him as a starter. The team’s lack of outfield depth was already glaring, with A.J. Pollock out and Arizona resorting to a Gregor Blanco/Rey Fuentes timeshare in center.
So correctly identifying the team’s biggest problem, Hazen closed a deal on the solution and Martinez paid off, hitting .302/.366/.741 for the team, with a ludicrous 29 home runs in 232 at-bats. The fact that the team’s OPS only improved by seven points in the second half of the season even with Martinez should be a fairly good indication as to the straits in which the offense would have found itself without the pickup. That Hazen managed to bring in Martinez without eviscerating the already suffering farm system was a coup.
The winter of 2017-18 presented the team with a significant problem in the form of contracts. With 16 players in their salary-arbitration years and five in arbitration for the first time, the roster was set to become more expensive without actually improving all that much.
In the end, the 2018 team would cost $40 million more than the 2017 version, and that’s with under $20 million of total spending in free agency, primarily in the form of Alex Avila and Jarrod Dyson.
Going into 2018, the primary questions about the team were whether the offense could survive J.D. Martinez’s departure with only Steven Souza added to the roster and how much 2017’s rotation would regress the following season.
The Projection
ZiPS didn’t see Arizona matching their 93 wins from 2017 but still saw them as the biggest threat to the Dodgers, with a projected 86-76 record and 13% chance of winning the division. The projections were generally optimistic about the rotation staying one of the top groups in baseball, but was much less sanguine about the offense, seeing it as a below-average unit despite Paul Goldschmidt’s best efforts.
The Results
In an abstract sense, Arizona had four seasons in 2018 rather than one, each with a different character and a grossly different set of results.
The Sprint (24-11)
The team started out absolutely blazing, not losing consecutive games until the back end of a four-game split with the Dodgers in May. The pitching went 20-8 with a 2.96 ERA and 280 strikeouts in 255.1 innings, almost looking like a Randy Johnson Cy Young campaign (though, technically, with fewer strikeouts).
There was one giant hiccup, though, in that the pitching was basically propping up the offense. The team won 24 of 35 because of that staff, but were hitting only .228/.311/.407 for the season, ranking 19th in OPS and 17th in runs scored. Those rankings were despite Goldschmidt’s .900 OPS and A.J. Pollock’s 1.021 OPS through the end of April.
What would happen to the offense without Goldschmidt and Pollock, even if they could maintain Cy Young-level pitching for an entire year? As you no doubt realize, I’m asking this question for a very specific reason.
The Wile E. Coyote (2-15)
One of the frequent gags in Wile E. Coyote cartoons features that same coyote — having just endured some mishap with an Acme-brand product — walking off a cliff into thin air and remaining aloft momentarily before realizing his predicament and plummeting to earth.
Pollock broke his thumb on the 15th, leaving the Diamondbacks again to scramble for a center-field replacement in-season. Fortunately, unlike past Diamondbacks teams, this one had prepared for such an event with the signing of Dyson the previous offseason.
It didn’t do the team any good in the end. Dyson didn’t hit at all, leaving a problem in center that wasn’t really resolved until Pollock’s return. But the larger problem was that nobody else hit, either. During these 17 games, the team slashed .182/.248/.291, and even Goldschmidt wasn’t much help.
Normally, there needs to be a lot of suck to go around when losing 15 of 17, but the pitching was absolutely fine. Not at April levels, but pretty good. The 2-15 record and 3.87 ERA they produced has a similar look to Jacob deGrom’s full-season line.
The Surprisingly Normal Period (48-35)
After a carnival-ride first two months came a decidedly normal stretch of the season. The rotation ranked 10th in ERA during this period, a little below where ZiPS pegged them, but amply compensated by the 3.44 ERA from the bullpen.
Even the offense showed a pulse. While Pollock struggled after his return from his thumb injury, hitting .234/.276/.318 through the end of August, the team had six players with at least 100 plate appearances and an .800 OPS in this mini-season: Goldschmidt (1.087), David Peralta (.978), Ketel Marte (.858), Steven Souza (.819), Daniel Descalso (.818), and Eduardo Escobar (.813). This was enough to rank Arizona eighth in runs scored, behind only the Dodgers, the Coors-inflated Rockies, and the Cardinals among NL teams.
The September Collapse (8-19)
On the morning of September 1st, Arizona was still leading the NL West by a single game. This was their last lead of the season, however — and, by the time they went to bed on the 2nd, they were in third place. On only one occasion did Arizona win consecutive games in September, helping the Rockies catch up to the Dodgers in the last week, but long past the point at which they could help themselves in any meaningful way.
Arizona hit .214/.287/.374 in September, Ketel Marte representing the team’s only bright spot at .301/.373/.562. The bullpen collapsed, allowing a .795 OPS en route to a 5.52 September ERA. As before, the starting rotation largely held up its end of the bargain — with the exception, at least, of Zack Godley, admittedly the rotation’s weak point most of the season.
What Comes Next?
The biggest problem the team faces is that the fundamental problems still remain. They still need to improve the offense while navigating significant payroll constraints. The farm system will take years to repair, so they can’t look for many quick fixes from that source.
Arizona already starts with a roster that’s somewhere around $140 million after the re-signing of Eduardo Escobar. This will come down somewhat with Shelby Miller almost certain to be non-tendered and Brad Boxberger a probability to follow Miller to free agency.
Even if we call it a $120 million payroll for the same team as last year but without Patrick Corbin and A.J. Pollock, that’s a dreadful place to begin an offseason.
The general feeling around baseball, one Arizona has done little to rebut, is that the team is headed for a rebuild. Goldschmidt is unsigned past 2019, and aging first basemen have a tendency to result in terrible contracts for the signing teams. Greinke’s survived the loss of velocity on his fastball, but he’s also a very expensive 35-year-old on a team without much payroll flexibility.
A lot of people are unhappy about the prospect of Arizona and Seattle entering rebuilding phases right now after their competitive 2018 campaigns, but they both share a similar set of problems: payrolls near their maximum willingness to spend combined with minor-league systems that can’t bridge the short-term gaps. Arizona can’t afford even to re-assemble the exact 2018 roster that finished barely above .500.
I don’t expect a full rebuild for the team to be as painful as these sometimes go. The club does have players that can be part of the future around which they build, including Marte, Walker, Robbie Ray, etc. Rebuilds like Houston’s are especially difficult because they weren’t started until after everything of value was gone.
Whether Arizona chooses to go the “let’s call a contractor” or the “cool, check out this WWI-era flamethrower we found!” path, the team is likely to finish 2019 with fewer wins than 2018.
Way-Too-Early Projection – Paul Goldschmidt
It’s not 2019 that’s possibly scary for Arizona and Goldschmidt; the short-term is not the question. What is scary, if Arizona did extend Goldy rather than trade him, is what his decline phase looks like. Age hasn’t been brutal to Joey Votto, but it’s taken a lot of star first basemen very quickly — and not just average guys, but legitimate mega-stars like Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera.
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | SB | CS | OPS+ | DR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | .276 | .385 | .512 | 547 | 94 | 151 | 30 | 3 | 31 | 94 | 93 | 158 | 12 | 4 | 132 | 4 | 3.7 |
| 2020 | .271 | .377 | .501 | 527 | 87 | 143 | 31 | 3 | 28 | 88 | 87 | 151 | 11 | 4 | 127 | 4 | 3.2 |
| 2021 | .268 | .371 | .483 | 507 | 80 | 136 | 28 | 3 | 25 | 81 | 80 | 141 | 10 | 3 | 121 | 4 | 2.6 |
| 2022 | .264 | .364 | .462 | 481 | 72 | 127 | 26 | 3 | 21 | 72 | 72 | 127 | 9 | 3 | 114 | 4 | 2.0 |
| 2023 | .260 | .354 | .443 | 454 | 64 | 118 | 23 | 3 | 18 | 63 | 63 | 112 | 8 | 3 | 107 | 3 | 1.4 |
| 2024 | .257 | .342 | .412 | 413 | 54 | 106 | 18 | 2 | 14 | 52 | 51 | 94 | 7 | 3 | 96 | 2 | 0.5 |
The projection highlights the quandary Arizona’s in. Goldschmidt has been — with the exception of a brief appearance from J.D. Martinez — the centerpiece of the D-backs offense. Losing him would be really tough. On the other hand, if Arizona’s internal projections are anything like ZiPS, they probably can’t sign him either — unless he’ll agree to a Carlos Santana-type deal rather than an Eric Hosmer one. So the idea of Goldschmidt starting 2019 wearing new threads is not far-fetched.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
They should probably look to either extend or trade David Peralta, and maybe think about what they’re going to do with Souza, Ray, Bradley, and Lamb in terms of extending/letting them rebuild value for a trade (each only has two years of team control). Aside from Goldschmidt and Greinke (who should be traded) and Marte and Godley (who are around for a little while) that represents the entire set of players with value at the moment or in the future. There seem like multiple roads to put the team back into contention, but it seems awfully unlikely that they’re going to bounce back before 2021.
I love Greinke, but that contract basically makes him untradeable.
He’s basically a $70K Mercedes financed with a loan that has a $90K balance.
They could put him on waivers and no one would claim him — no one will take over the payments.
Yeah, right now he has negative value. But perhaps not forever–you can always hold him in the hopes that he will turn in another 5-win season. If he starts out strong, he’s tradeable because elite starting pitching is so rare.
Or you pay down the contract.
The crowd seems pretty unanimous on the Greinke negative value train. I’m not entirely sure we’re right. If the DBacks made him available, he’d be the best pitcher on the market by a huge margin … and a lot of teams need pitching. Corbin, Keuchel, and Eovaldi have extremely short track records of being actually good, and they’re likely going to get paid extremely well. The fact that Greinke is still a good pitcher may even make his contract more palatable than when it was signed — paying him $100M now is probably more reasonable than paying him $200M three years ago was for a lot of teams.
The question is whether anyone would give him a $96M deal over any length of time (it’s actually less than that in actual value, since there are a lot of deferred payments, but that’s complicated). My guess is that no one would, which means he has negative value.
I also don’t think that it’s that far off. If he shows he’s a frontline starter again with a pace towards a 5-win season, I think someone would definitely trade for him, especially in-season where there aren’t a lot of other options. Last offseason Jake Arrieta got 3/$75M despite looking like Tanner Roark. Teams want to believe.
But there are several issues conspiring against a deal in the absence of a Greinke revival. The first is that teams don’t like the ops of looking like they gave away a productive player, but often don’t want to pay down the contract enough to get a good return. The second is the no-trade clause.
Time for Arizona to tear it down. They gave it a good shot this year, but came up short, and now they’re losing Pollock and Corbin. Souza should bounce back and Lamb can’t possibly be worse, but this team doesn’t have a realistic shot at the playoffs.
Goldschmidt really has to be traded (and coincidentally, the surplus value on his contract more or less offsets the negative value on Greinke’s, so if they could be packaged together…).
Greinke (negative $ value despite positive WAR due to his contract) combined with Goldy to the Yankees. Something like a Luke Voit or Bird + a young pitcher or two in return.
Something like that definitely works value-wise (you could argue the Yankees would be over overpaying, but they’ll likely have to because the DBacks would never give Goldy and Greinke away for free due to the perception of the deal), and in theory they’re both great fits.
But I believe Greinke has a no-trade clause and I’d be shocked if he wants to play in NY. Also he’d have to be near the top of the list of pitchers who’d be most likely to crumble under the pressure of playing in New York.
Finally, with so many good young players under control for the next 3-5 years, the financial “distribution” of the deal doesn’t really match what the Yankees want to do. By that I mean they’d be getting a huge bargain for one year in Goldschmidt, and then a player who’s likely to be overpaid for 3 years (perhaps drastically so later in his deal).
I’d argue that something like this would make sense for a team like Boston that is either going to lose many significant players (or have to pay huge market rates for them) in the next couple years. They should be going all-in on 2019, have the money to pay Greinke, and don’t have much in terms of a farm system to deal from – That’s the type of team that a Goldy/Greinke deal makes perfect sense for.
The problem there is that basically Boston doesn’t need a SP/1B package for 2019. And that’s assuming that Greinke would be under less pressure in Boston than in NY, which Is hard to believe.
I love both players, but it would be a shock.
Fascinating package, though. I just can’t figure out a destination. Maybe the Mets, in an alternate universe …
Point taken about the pressure in Boston (and I doubt he’d accept a trade there either).
But both Greinke and Goldy look like good fits in Boston to me. At 1B, Pearce is gone, and Moreland’s been worth a total of 1.5 wins over the past 3 years. No way he’s blocking Goldschmidt there.
In the rotation, I only see 4 guaranteed starters for 2019. Plus Sale has some question marks and Rodriguez always seems fragile. Greinke would slot in nicely there. And looking past 2019, both Sale and Porcello are free agents, so there’s likely to be even more of a need from 2020 on.
I’d go as far as saying that they should try for something like that and go for Realmuto as well. Go all-in for 2019 because after that it’s not looking good.
Who constitutes the WWI-era flamethrower, I want to know.
The German Army had two main types of flame throwers during the Great War: a small single person version called the Kleinflammenwerfer and a larger crew served configuration called the Grossflammenwerfer.
Add modest role players this offseason and try and go for it. If it doesn’t work, sell Goldy at the Trade Deadline for what would surely be a situation that’ll have lots of eager buyers for a game changing bat in the lineup.
They actually have the easiest decision for a pathway this offseason. Stand PAT and hope they make it. If it doesn’t work out, they can still find several eager buyers bidding for Goldy. The Royals were a ‘squint and you might see a contender’ team in 2014 and they won the damn pennant. So were the 2015 Astros. And the 2016 Indians. And the 2017 Yankees. And the 2018 Braves. Teams ‘caught in the middle’ make the playoffs all the time. For a ‘consensus’ to say to burn in down rather than live in the middle is far too extreme a measure. Remember, the ‘smart thing’ for the Dbacks to do at the end of 2016 was burn everything to the ground. Well lo and behold standing PAT lead to breaking a playoff drought and then contending well into September the following year. People need to realize that a complete tear down when you can ACTUALLY compete is senseless when there are already too many tanking teams atm. The Orioles, Marlins, Royals, White Sox, Rangers, Reds, and Padres are already horrible and will take the top draft picks anyway.
I disagree with all your comparisons between other teams that you could “squint and see a contender” that ended up doing well. In practically all those cases, you were talking about fairly young teams with a lot of talent that hadn’t proven itself fully yet, and there was a lot of upside for several players. I am a DBack fan, and I just don’t see that with this team. I actually see more potential for worse things happening in 2019 then in 2018. The only guys that may have some upside are Ray (the most potential), Sousa and Marte (to a lesser extent). Maybe throw in Taijuan Walker if they can get enough out of him next year, but that would be a total longshot. There isn’t much to be expected in reinforcements in the minor leagues that would help significantly this year. Peralta is a candidate to regress at least somewhat, Goldy’s age makes him another regression candidate (his higher strikeout rate this past year may be a sign of this regression).
Either they have to break the bank and really go all in this year with free agents, and if it doesn’t work out and the new players they acquired at market value can be moved in a salary dump, then they wouldn’t have lost anything. But the big risk is if any of those guys get hurt or way underperform, then they’re stuck with bad contracts that can hinder a rebuild for years. Plus, they’d probably have to pretty much break the bank just to be where they were at least year, by re-signing Corbin and Pollock.
I think they really need to break it down now, and not allow for bad things to happen to their best trade chips, and for those that had down years last year, just hold them and hope they rebound so they can sell higher during the season.