For many young baseball fans, the first glimpse into the mindset of an MLB front office comes trading baseball cards in the back yard. You run into all sorts of kids in this game – the rich kid who bought all the cards everyone wants, the kid who was always trying to rip you off, the kid who didn't like baseball anyway.
And then there was the X-Factor kid, whose priorities were so strange and unfathomable that trading with him felt weird even though you always got the cards you wanted for practically nothing - he'd trade his Pujols rookie card for Geoff Jenkins, or 30 copies of Alan Embree, or a bag of potato chips.
Kevin Towers is that kid, and the Arizona Diamondbacks are his weirdo trade binder. The more you look at the trades this front office has made, the less sense they make.
They've traded lefty one-out guys and players for worse players without objections from you and your "logic."
But while we may not grasp the heuristic, we gotta respect the zeal. Far from the horrifying strip mining in Miami or the white-collar apoplexy of heyday Steinbrenner, the Diamondbacks' short attention span and organizational covetousness feel kind of endearing. It helps that Towers is among MLB's most enthusiastic and least effective prognosticators, willingly predicting the outcome of the past three D-backs seasons and being off by an average of about 10 wins. It makes you feel like he goes to work dressed like Spaceman Spiff.
It also helps that, even though sometimes it seems like the organization's fundamental strategy is selling low on young talent, it kinda-sorta-if-you-squint works out for them an unusual percentage of the time. relative success of their bizarre front office, Arizona has put together a pretty likeable team. This is a pleasing, synergistic roster with lots of hidden value, some modest star power, strong reserves and no real holes. I think they're better-positioned than teams of similar talent level -- San Francisco, San Diego, Milwaukee -- to compete. And after other stuff too. It's all part of the plan.
The Antidote
Naturally, Kevin Towers figured that, since he liked the little contact-oriented defensive whiz profile so much, he should swap Always be closing.)
Jumbo Trumbo is a divisive player, a raw power monster with 34 home runs (a league-leading 13 of those the no-doubt variety) to go with a dizzying 27.1% K rate that quashes his batting average and on-base profile (just .294 last year).
I tend to be one of Trumb-Trumb's supporters. The '90s kids among us, who grew up when a dozen players would hit 40 home runs every year, might not be able to appreciate just how much power 34 home runs represents in baseball today, especially coming in power-suppressing Anaheim. Relative to the league, Trumblebee is more like Greg Vaughn or Cecil Fielder than Tony Clark in terms of power production.
Ol' Trumbly's walk rate has also been moving rapidly in the right direction, hitting a respectable 8% after coming into the league with serious selectivity issues three seasons ago. So I can't imagine Mr. Trumble being anything other than an offensive upgrade over Trambo could do that in one game if he were feeling frisky.
Goldschmidt was the (ahem) gold standard of D-backs baseball last season, blossoming from a solid lefty-mashing first baseman into a bona fide star. Goldy is basically what would happen if you asked a computer program to come up with the most typical star player ever. His slash stats were .302/.401/.551, which is basically a bloop single better than the platonic ideal of a star first baseman. He strikes out, but not too much. He plays outstanding defense (+4.4 runs in UZR, +3 runs in dWAR and a ridiculous +15.9 runs in FRAA) but not at a premium position. He's 26; young, but not too young.
He basically has no splits of any kind. He hits righties and lefties, grounders and fly balls, at home and on the road. His stats in high-leverage situations were completely absurd (.410/.520/.872 in a small sample size). He's a boy scout with the media. He has an insanely team-friendly contract. His BABIP was high (.343), but it always is (.340 career). He's perfect. But you know, whatever. So over that. I don't want him on my team anyway.
If Goldy maintains his production and Trumbo improves on Kubel/Eaton, the other place where Arizona has room to improve their offense next year is catcher. uncontrollable urge to obtain every marginal offensive shortstop in the professional baseball, leading him to swap former muse Trevor Bauer for Didi Gregorius. (Towers also managed nab Nick Ahmed and fetch falling asleep in his water bowl).
The starter last year and the Towers-anointed favorite to win the job, Gregorius is, amazingly, a third lefty batter whose ho-hum offensive stats (.252/.332/.373; .311 wOBA) would look a lot better if Gibson would just use a damn platoon. This guy was helpless against lefties. He batted .200/.267/.245. He was Alan Trammel against righties, a .275/.359/.425 hitter with very good selectivity stats (12.3 K% and 10.6 BB%). But he walked half as much and struck out twice as often against lefties. And yet, he faced lefties a third of the time. It's astonishing to me. It's a platoon. It's so simple. It was popularized by Casey Stengel, for Pete's sake.
Okay. Deep breath.
Gregorius competes this spring against five-tool prospect for some reason).
The Staff
Arizona has a neat, cohesive strategy when it comes to run prevention. Their oustanding defense allows them to skimp on pitcher strikeouts without getting burned too badly, shaving cheap hits away from the WHIPs of high-contact pitchers. To wit, Arizona was below average in K rate last season and their big offseason addition to the rotation was Brad Radke. Only problem is, that team had Johan Santana. This team has Randall Delgado.
In the absence of a true ace, Corbin is the top pitcher on the staff, and a wonderful young pitcher. He pounds the strike zone with a low-'90s heater and a monster slider, a legit out pitch which accounted for more than half of his strikeouts last season. He gets plenty of grounders (46.7 GB%) and he'll only be 24. He broke down a bit under a heavy workload last year (208 innings, with a 4.91 FIP in September), so be wary of signs of wear on his arm in the early season. But if he avoids injury his peripherals indicate he'll be well above-average for a long time. Miley, McCarthy, and Arroyo all profile rather like a poor man's Corbin, although Arroyo is about eleventy billion years older.
The 27-year-old Miley saw his walk rate spike last year, in large part because his extremely hittable 91-mph fastball got punished, yielding a Goldschmidtian .329/.402/.529 line. Happily, his groundball rate spiked too (especially against fellow lefties), which helped mitigate the damage and allowed him to finish with a FIP under 4.00. I like McCarthy a lot; the 30-year-old righty has shown the ability to completely reinvent himself since his fly balling rookie days in Chicago and Texas.
Last year marked the second massive spike in his groundball rate in his career, relying on an 89- to 90-mph fastball-cutter mix to generate 78% more groundballs than fly balls. He struck out a scant 5.09 batters per nine, but only walked 3.6% of batters (1.4 BB/9) and gave up very few home runs for a solid 3.72 FIP. Arroyo did get burned by homers, and didn't even crack 88 mph on his average fastball last year (those two facts are related), but he also didn't walk anybody and his curve remained as effective as always, despite the fact that he throws it at a visibly lower arm angle.
Randall Delgado will fight Trevor Cahill for the fifth spot in the rotation, and man is this a strange battle. Delgado had one of the weirdest seasons by a starting pitcher ever, transforming overnight from an extreme groundball pitcher who struggled with walks to an extreme control pitcher who struggled with home runs. His pitch rates (mostly fastballs and changeups with the occasional curve) and velocity (low-'90s fastball with 10 mph differential in the change and 12 in the curve) didn't change at all. Hitters just did completely different things with what they were given.
Cahill, meanwhile, has turned into one of the least successful pitchers ever to throw 197 innings of 2.97 ERA ball at age 22. His groundball rate is still outstanding, but his walk rate - never sparkling to begin with - has only gotten worse, until last year his K:BB ratio was 1.58. If I had to guess, I'd see Cahill winning the job (until somebody gets hurt, anyway), as Delgado's minor league numbers last year betrayed the same command problems he'd shown up until last year and Cahill really only got hit hard for a month last year, a 9.85-ERA June. Top prospect Archie Bradley is a beast, with a high-90s fastball and the best curve in the minors, but he's only 21 and he'll be spending the season working on his command. He's a difference-maker for 2015, but he'll probably only get a cup of coffee this year.
The bullpen has been a white whale for Towers and the D-backs, having devoted substantial financial and personnel resources to acquiring J.J. Putz, Heath Bell, Brad Ziegler, Addison Reed and Joe Thatcher. Bell is gone, but the rest of them form a core (along with Josh Collmenter) that should be among the better pens in baseball this year. Reed is the nominal closer, with mid-'90s heat and solid secondary offerings that situate him nicely among the game's middle tier of closers. Veteran submariner and groundball artist Brad Ziegler had another great year, his third in a row with a groundball rate over 68% (!). They can use Putz or David Hernandez if they need a K, Thatcher against a tough lefty and Collmenter if they need a couple of innings. I see no reason why it shouldn't be a solid group.
The Verdict
So will Arizona compete? I think they've got a shot. Between excellent defense, improved offense and bullpen, and a passable starting rotation that plays off the team's strengths, they should probably outscore their opponents this season. But they're an ace and a couple platoons short of being a legitimately scary team for the Nationals and Braves, let alone the Dodgers. They're probably around an 84-win team, and it sure seems that they'd be better with Justin Upton. But who am I to say? This is Kevin Towers we're talking about. Wolves don't lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.