TL;DR: Brandon Pfaadt shoved, the bats blasted, and the D-Backs ensured a series split ahead of the All-Star Break
My trepidation was high coming into this game. I had little faith in the starting pitching matchup as Brandon Pfaadt has been astonishingly bad (6.21 ERA and 1.17 WHIP) over the past month or so while Dylan Cease has been merely mediocre (4.70 and 1.43 respectively). If you combine those two results with the inconsistency of the Arizona offense and playing on the road, it’s easy to see how this game could go sideways on the D-Backs in a hurry. Thankfully, the Snakes came to play tonight as the team looked much sharper in nearly every aspect of the game.
I was especially impressed with Pfaadt tonight. He set a career-high in innings pitched by completing the eighth inning and had his best performance of the year since a 6.1 IP shutout outing against the Dodgers back on May 8th. At one point tonight, the Kentuckian retired 13 Padres in a row until Xander Bogaerts poked a one-out single to right field in the home half of the fifth. It was one of just a handful of hiccups on the night for the righty as he otherwise manhandled the San Diego lineup. Ironically, Pfaadt didn’t particularly fool the batters as he collected just seven whiffs and four strikeouts on the night, but he was extremely proficient at hitting his locations and inducing plenty of weak contact for his fielders to handle.
Just one night after being shutout, including going 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position and stranding nine runners, the team was in no mood to play around. Instead, the D-Backs’ offense found their power stroke – even beyond the thieving hands of the Padres’ outfielders, scoring seven of their eight runs via a homer. James McCann, pressed into a starting role, got the party started with a solo shot in the third while Eugenio Suarez continued his assault on major league pitching with his 29th home run one inning later. The team broke the game open in the fifth by successfully building an inning and then finally cashing in on the opportunity – their only hit with runners in scoring position for the night.
Cease violated one of the cardinal rules of starting pitching in the fifth by allowing the number eight and nine hitters to get on base – in this case, a walk to McCann and a single to Alek Thomas. After dispatching Corbin Carroll on just three pitches, he issued a five-pitch walk to Ketel Marte to load the bases and Geraldo Perdomo took advantage with a frozen rope grand slam. It marks the team’s ninth grand slam of the season – good enough to lead the league and tie a franchise record for most in a single season with 69 games still remaining on the schedule. Their only non-homer run scored came in the eighth off a leadoff double from Lourdes Gurriel Jr was plated off a pair of groundouts from Jake McCarthy and Tristin English. Carroll topped off the fun with a solo jack in the ninth for his 21st home run of the season and his first since returning from the injured list.
It was an encouraging bounceback performance after the team was shutout and shutdown by San Diego pitching last night. At the same time, it’s difficult to find much encouragement on the macro level. We’ve seen this show before with this team: they’ll follow up impressive wins with head-scratching losses – and then do it again. Since bottoming out four games under .500 at the end of May, the team has never gotten more than three games below that mark and never more than two games above it. They’ve instead hovered somewhere in between those bands, which has been enough to keep them solidly in the running for the final wild card spot in the National League. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to provide much clarity for Mike Hazen and his team viz the Trade Deadline that is just three weeks away. They’ve shown what they’re capable of doing, but it’s hard to find much confidence they’ll be able to do it consistently. We can only hope that some of the lucky breaks start landing for them – until then, we’ll be here hoping they can break out of neutral gear.
