We actually hit them better than aces. This is my unsurprised face
“Its in our DNA, we always make poor or struggling pitchers look like world beaters.”
— GameDay Thread, 7/6
You are virtually guaranteed to hear it, every time the D-backs’ offense struggles against a back-end starter from the opponent’s rotation. After a few innings, wails of “Why do we always make scrubs look like Cy Young candidates?” will go up in the Gameday Thread. However, the reality is that any such belief has no basis in fact. It’s simply a result of selective memory: we don’t remember the times the D-backs took such pitchers to the wood-shed, or the times they made Cy Young candidates look like scrubs. For example, fans conveniently forget the game in May where Arizona took Philadelphia’s Ranger Suarez – currently 7-2 with a 1.99 ERA – for seven earned runs in less than four innings.
As further proof, I looked at all 90 starts against the Diamondbacks this season. That took us through the finale of the Royals’ series on Sunday, which was another supposed example of such a contest. Michael Lorenzen held Arizona scoreless for seven innings – never mind that he has a career ERA+ of 105 across eleven years in the majors, was an All-Star less than two years ago, and went on later that season to pitch a no-hitter. The reality is that any pitcher can do anything on any given day. Just ask Tyler Gilbert about that, a man who has made just sixteen MLB starts, but has a no-hitter on his resume. It’s the volatility of bullpen arms, reduced down to performance on a single night.
But to get a meaningful sample, I went through all ninety games and pulled the 2025 ERA+ for each starter against Arizona to that point (also through ninety games). The best game by Game Score pitched against Arizona was from the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has an ERA+ of 160, and tossed seven innings of one-hit ball versus the D-backs. That would be an ace, doing ace things. The worst was Austin Gomber of the Rockies: nine earned run in 4.2 innings. He has a 2025 ERA+ of 85 (career 95), so is an example of us certainly NOT making a struggling pitcher look like a world beater. Indeed, in his next start he held the Dodgers to one run over five innings at Coors Field, so…
I ranked the pitchers by their 2025 ERA+ and divided them into five categories of 18 games apiece, basically representing the five slots in an average rotation. We’ll call the top slot aces, slots 2-5 journeymen, and the last slot scrubs. I could have used career ERA+ to get a better measure of overall ability, but let’s give the argument we can’t hit scrubs the benefit of the doubt, and just use this year, to include “struggling” pitchers as well as “poor” ones. How did the Diamondbacks do against each group of starters? My belief, before doing the analysis, is that the D-backs would do better against back-end starters than average, while if the argument has validity, is should show that there’s no particular difference.
- Aces (ERA+ > 135) – 110 IP, 3.03 ERA
- Journeymen (ERA+ 81-135) – 285 IP, 5.27 ERA
- Scrubs (ERA <= 80) – 91.2 IP, 5.60 ERA
That’s more or less what I would have expected. There is no real evidence at all that “we always make poor or struggling starters look like world-beaters”. For comparison, all pitchers against the D-backs this year have a 4.87 ERA. That’s a good offense: only the Cubs and Dodgers’ hitters have a higher ERA against them. But indeed, the D-backs do a better than average job, with an ERA above five, against all pitchers in groups 3 through 5 – those with an ERA+ of 110 or below. So, as well as knocking the scrubs around, Arizona tends to do well against pitchers at or even somewhat better than league average. The only group they really struggle against are aces, and… Well, they’re aces for a reason.
Of course, there are always going to be outliers. We faced Yamamoto twice this year, in a space of twelve days. The first time, the D-backs had great success, tagging him with the loss, on five runs in five innings. Later in May, he delivered the best-pitched game of the year against Arizona noted above. Pitchers will adjust, and so will hitters. But the results are clear, that the pitchers the D-backs struggle against most are good ones, not scrubs. The next time I hear “Why do we always make scrubs look like Cy Young candidates?”, I’m posting a sarcastic GIF, and a link to this article. You have been warned. 🙂