TL;DR: A series of physical and mental errors wasted a solid start from Brandon Pfaadt in yet another debilitating loss.
On a night when the D-Backs absolutely needed to win, they looked like the poorer team on the field. They made mental and physical errors. And when given the opportunity, the better team pounced on those mistakes. My parents and I are fond of saying that, “good teams take advantage of mistakes while bad teams can’t overcome them.” It was an apt description of the series between these two, nominally playoff-contending, teams. The D-Backs failed to execute time and again on both sides of the ball in a critical moment for their season. We have now entered the part of the year when every game and every decision is placed under a microscope for analysis because of the seemingly outsized difference it might make in a
For the second night in a row, the Arizona starter kept a a dynamic Houston offense in check. That’s not to suggest that there was no trouble as Brandon Pfaadt worked around traffic in nearly every inning, but he was able to bear down when he needed to keep the Astros off the board.
One night after posting a miserable 2-for-12 with runners in scoring position, Ketel Marte decided to forgo the need for runners in scoring position entirely with a solo homer on the very first pitch he saw for a very early 1-0 Arizona lead. Sadly, despite numerous opportunities, including a pair of two-out singles in the second from Blaze Alexander and Geraldo Perdomo, a one-out double in the fifth by Geraldo Perdomo, and bases loaded with one out in the eighth, the D-Backs found seemingly every way to work themselves out of a scoring opportunity. Outside of Marte’s solo shot, the Arizona offense wouldn’t strike again until the bottom of the eighth when they finally built and sustained a rally that briefly tied the score.
The D-Backs opened the home half of the eighth with three consecutive hits from the top of the order with doubles from Perdomo and Corbin Carroll sandwiched around a Marte single that brought Arizona within one run at 3-2. Eugenio Suarez, on an unusually quiet night by his standards, worked a walk after an unproductive out from Lourdes Gurriel Jr that loaded the bases for Josh Naylor. Thankfully, Naylor’s only hit on the night was timely as he blooped a single into a Bermuda triangle that plated Marte to tie the score at three and kept the bases loaded. Of course, Randal Grichuk quickly extinguished the rally with an inning-ending double play.
I don’t mean to imply that the Astros were some kind of offensive behemoth in this game. They scored just four runs while going just 3-for-15 with runners in scoring position – a struggle both teams failed to overcome in the series. But in classic fashion, the Astros saw their opportunities and cashed them in as efficiently as they could. In the visiting half of the sixth, Christian Walker continued his revenge tour against his former teammates with a leadoff double and then came in to score on an embarrassing error from Perdomo after Yainer Diaz’s double moved Walker to third. Houston would add another run on a wild pitch from Andrew Saalfrank who was called into relief of Brandon Pfaadt for a 2-1 lead.
The Astros broke through again in the eighth and ninth on more iffy Arizona pitching. In the eighth, Diaz leadoff the inning with a double, advanced on rookie Brice Matthews’ sac bunt, and scored on Mauricio Dubon’s single through a drawn-in infield for Houston’s third run of the game. Meanwhile, in the ninth, Kevin Ginkel (of all people) was called in to hold the line in the ninth and failed in his assignment. He allowed three singles from the first four batters he faced by Zack Short, Taylor Trammell, and Walker again to plate the game-winning run.
This was an extremely 2025 Diamondbacks week. They swept a Cardinals team ahead of them in the Wild Card standings – just to follow it up with being swept by a good-not-great Astros team. In the Cardinals series, they scored 22 total runs while they scored just seven against the Astros. That includes going a combined 6-for-26 with runners in scoring position across the entire series. It was also a sloppy series, both in and out of the box score, with at least two separate baserunning mistakes by Perdomo and Grichuk on consecutive nights alongside three fielding errors that came back to haunt the D-Backs.
I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. This was one game and one series out of a very long season, but it also underscored the exact weaknesses that have kept the Diamondbacks from making any kind of concerted push across the season. They are middle of the pack when hitting with runners in scoring position, they’re in the bottom third of the National League for their defense, and their cumulative 4.93 ERA ranks near the bottom of relief staffs in the National League. We can point fingers at injuries all we want, but it’s difficult to believe in a team that struggles to perform on so many basic levels should be invested in when so many of its impending free agents are such strong trade targets.
