Arizona Diamondbacks
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Arizona Diamondbacks hen Kevin Towers assumed the position of but refrained when he couldn’t secure a suitable package; W Diamondbacks general manager in the final days of the right fielder would go on to cut his strikeout rate signifi- the 2010 season, the job seemed to promise a fair share of cantly in a resurgent 2011 campaign. But Towers did send impending punishment. Towers mentioned two goals: cut- main offender Mark Reynolds to Baltimore in December. ting down on the team’s his- As a result of those changes torically high strikeout rate in personnel and perfor- and rebuilding its historically DIAMONDBACKS PROSPECTUS mance, the Snakes slashed broken bullpen. If he also 2011 W-L: 94-68, 1st in NL West their strikeout rate by 17 per- aimed to finish first in the NL cent. To be sure, strikeouts West, he wisely left that inten- Pythag .546 8th Ballpark: Chase Field aren’t the disgrace they’re tion unstated. (3-yr. PF: 106). Forcing made out to be in Little RS/G 4.51 9th pitchers to learn desert Before Towers took over, League—in fact, they’re highly survival skills since 1998 the number of teams that had RA/G 4.09 11th correlated with patience and 2011: managed to follow a last-place TAv .256 18th A balanced young power, so one shouldn’t read finish with a first-place finish team with a mediocre too much into the fact that pen (at last!) climbs from in the following season dur- TAv-P .254 10th the two teams with the few- worst to fi rst ing the six-division era that FIP 3.99 16th est whiffs went to the World dawned in 1994 could have 2012: If Upton gets some Series last season. Still, as we been counted on Antonio DER .714 11th hitting help and the young observed in our Arizona essay pitchers come through, a Alfonseca’s six-fingered hand; in BP2011, stacking a lineup DL 571 6th repeat a standard complement of with strikeout-prone bats has B-Age 28.2 8th fingers could have accommo- Action Items: Lock up historically been an unsuc- dated them if you excluded the P-Age 27.0 5th Hudson and Kennedy, cessful strategy, producing 2006 D-Backs, who tied for last give younglings a shot, a compounding effect that Salary $55.9 25th pray Goldschmidt hits 30 in the West before their 2007 dingers contributes to volatile run- turnaround, and Mordecai M$/MW $.945 2nd scoring. By no means were the Brown could have handled the Diamondbacks adept at mak- trio that hadn’t finished last in ing contact in Towers’s first full four-team divisions. Only three additional teams pulled off season at the helm—they still struck out at the fourth-high- the single-season turnaround during the four-division pe- est rate in the NL—but their tendency toward strikeouts was riod of 1969-93, and none of those completed the feat before no longer a serious handicap. 1991. Not surprisingly, in light of theCOPYRIGHTED rarity of such reversals, MATERIAL the Diamondbacks weren’t a popular preseason pick to un- Table 1. Extreme Makeover, Baseball Edition: Single-Season Worst- seat the reigning World Series champion Giants and claim to-First Team Turnarounds the NL West title. Team Year 1 Year 1 Year 2 Year 2 With such lofty ambitions likely buried deep in the back Finish Finish of his mind, Towers set about improving the weaknesses he’d Braves 1990 6 1991 1 targeted after taking over. The 2010 club he’d inherited had Twins 1990 7 1991 1 struck out more frequently than any team had before, going Phillies 1992 6 1993 1 down swinging or looking in just under a quarter of its plate Giants 1996 4 1997 1 Padres 1997 4 1998 1 appearances. To some extent, the situation resolved itself. Diamondbacks 1998 5 1999 1 Chris Snyder had already been shipped to Pittsburgh at the Diamondbacks 2006 4 2007 1 trading deadline, and Towers allowed Adam LaRoche to leave Cubs 2006 6 2007 1 as a free agent, which subtracted two strikeout-prone bats Rays 2007 5 2008 1 from the roster. He toyed with selling low on Justin Upton Diamondbacks 2010 5 2011 1 1 1BaseBall_2012_ARI.indd 1 1/25/12 4:27 PM 2 ARIZON A D I A MON D B A CKS That left one liability lingering on Towers’s offseason corner, though it’s not clear whether his ceiling is high to-do list. The Diamondbacks bullpen posted an abysmal enough to admit him to the upper echelons of the position. 5.99 FRA in 2010, by far the worst in baseball and .79 runs Miguel Montero and Gerardo Parra are coming off ex- higher than the next-worst NL unit. Towers, who showed cellent seasons, and Chris Young and Stephen Drew can be a knack for assembling some of baseball’s best and most counted on to contribute if healthy, but aside from Upton, cost-efficient bullpens while in San Diego, seemed like the lineup features very little star power, and significant the perfect man to reengineer Arizona’s relief corps. The uncertainty remains on the infield corners and at second Reynolds trade helped to kill two team weaknesses with one base, where the Diamondbacks are desperately hoping to transaction, since the D-Backs’ bounty was hard-throwing get more of the good Aaron Hill they saw at the end of last right-hander David Hernandez, who became a consis- season. Instead of shoring up one of their weaker positions, tent setup man for the Snakes, earning the second-highest the Diamondbacks shot themselves in the foot in December Leverage Index among Arizona relievers. (Fellow righty re- by signing free-agent Jason Kubel to a two-year deal, which liever Kam Mickolio, who also came over in the deal, was less relegated the younger, cheaper, and more productive Parra successful, though he struck out nearly 10 batters per nine to a fourth-outfielder role. Aside from the erstwhile left innings at Triple-A Reno.) fielder, little assistance can be expected from the bench—it’s In a slight departure from his usual pattern of low-cost fair to wonder whether any team really needs Blum, John acquisitions, Towers gambled on often-injured free-agent McDonald, or Willie Bloomquist, let alone all three of them, reliever J.J. Putz, whose health mostly held up in his first but the Diamondbacks acted quickly to corner the market season as the club’s closer. Towers also successfully filled the on offensively inept utility men. pen’s lefty specialist slot with Rule 5 find Joe Paterson and In short, the Diamondbacks had a mediocre offense and a made another trade to reinforce his relief corps at the dead- run-of-the-mill rotation and relief corps, and unlike the 2008 line, sending extraneous pieces Brandon Allen and Jordan Rays, the last team to leapfrog their divisional opponents in Norberto to Oakland for Brad Ziegler, one of the most de- a single season, their defense also placed in the middle of pendable bullpen arms in baseball (albeit one somewhat the pack, ranking 11th with a 0.714 defensive efficiency. The limited by his susceptibility to southpaws). The net result of lone standout aspect of their attack, the third-best baser- Towers’s tinkering was an improvement in bullpen FRA of unning performance in the NL, was worth less than a win. nearly a run and a half, giving the D-Backs a 4.69 mark that So what made them so good? The uncomfortable truth for ranked 17th in baseball. The team’s starters were similarly Arizona fans is that despite their 94 wins, the Diamondbacks solid-but-unspectacular, ranking 17th overall at 4.41. Since weren’t particularly good—surprisingly successful, certainly, Towers’s bullpen investments paid off, he went back to the especially in light of their shedding a quarter of their payroll well over the winter, adding another off-brand former closer and spending less than all but two other NL teams, but still with injury issues in Takashi Saito and trading for another something well short of the dominant performers that their consistent Oakland reliever in Craig Breslow. record suggests they were. Still, despite Reynolds’ aversion to contact and the bullpen Arizona’s improbable playoff appearance was in part the help he brought back, there was a downside to running him product of a weak division and a large helping of luck. The out of town. In the process of striking out, walking, or hom- Diamondbacks outplayed their third-order winning percent- ering in nearly half of his plate appearances for the Orioles, age—a metric based on underlying statistics and adjusted Reynolds recorded a .286 True Average, which would have for quality of opponents—by 10 1/2 games, the biggest mar- been the best mark among non-Upton Diamondbacks with gin in baseball. The D-Backs finished with an eight-game at least 150 PA. The Snakes scored the fourth-most runs in cushion in the NL West, and that’s the only performance that the NL, but the hitter-friendly confines of Chase Field helped counts in determining which teams get tickets to October. camouflage some of their offensive inadequacies. Their .256 But in the third-order standings, they beat out the Giants by TAv revealed a slightly below-average offense that ranked in only one game and actually finished behind the Dodgers, the middle of the NL pack. Reynolds’ departure left the hot which should temper our expectations for this season.