Well, we had our first “home game” in Mexico City this afternoon, and here at the end of it I find myself in an absolutely filthy mood. A big part of that, I’m sure, is how the game ultimately turned out. Some portion is also that, like others have remarked over the last couple of days, it seems grossly unfair that, in a divisional series, one team—the Diamondbacks, in this instance—got the “honor” of being assigned as the home team despite the fact that we, like the San Diego Padres, are playing very far from home in fact, and in facilities and at an elevation that are both deeply unfamiliar and likely uncomfortable for both teams. And given that end-of-year tiebreakers, should they happen to come into play in September when postseason berths are being decided, have division records and whatnot pretty high up on the list, having two less actual home games, in our actual home park, against a divisional foe puts us at a distinct disadvantage, and makes these games much more high-stakes for us than they would be otherwise, and much more high-stakes than they should be. It seems distinctly unfair, and also pretty wildly unnecessary, at least if one’s primary interest is Major League Baseball. But more on that later, I suppose….I’m supposed to be a recapping a baseball game here. So I suppose I should get to it.
The Padres brought former Rockie German Marquez to play today, while we brought Zac Gallen. Since we were pitching “at home,” Gallen got to go first, and while he was hardly wowing with his control or his efficiency—of the seventeen pitches he threw in the top of the first, only eight of them landed for strikes—he did retire the top of the San Diego lineup in order, and put up a welcome zero. Marquez did the same to us, in the bottom of the first, but with rather more efficiency, needing only thirteen pitches to sit down Geraldo Perdomo, Ketel Marte, and Corbin Carroll in order with two looking punchouts and a grounder to short. Gallen was a bit better in the second, recording another clean inning with two strikeouts of his own, and only throwing fifteen pitches.
In the bottom of the second, meanwhile, we managed to make Marquez work a little bit harder, to say the least. Adrian Del Castillo flew out to center and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. rolled a grounder to second for two quick outs, but then the bottom half of our lineup showed that they, at least, had gotten their bats through customs. Ildemaro Vargas kept his hit streak going with a line-drive single to shallow center, Nolan Arenado hit a shot that glanced off Manny Machado’s glove and wound up in left field for another single. Jose Fernandez, today’s designated hitter, roped a line drive double into the gap in left center to drive in Vargas and Nolan. Then Alek Thomas stepped to the plate, and on the third pitch he saw from Marquez demonstrated what hitting a fly ball at 7,300 feet above sea level can do for your offensive production:
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Steve and Tom, who were our broadcasters today, kept describing the hit as “towering” and so on and so forth, but if you look closely, he kind of got under it and hit it pretty much off the end of the bat, and if you look at where it lands (in what I presume is a bullpen area just over the right field fence), I don’t think there’s any way that ball goes for a home run in any MLB ballpark. But what the heck? We’ll take it. 4-0 DBACKS
And that was the Diamondbacks One Big Inning on offense. You may have noted in the “dek” or the tagline for this post that One Big Inning laid Brandon Pfaadt and the Diamondbacks low, but this wasn’t it. You may not have noticed, but the Diamondbacks definitely seem to have OBI problems fairly frequently, not only in terms of our pitching but also in terms of our offense. For our offense, it manifests a bit differently—we score a chunk of runs in one inning of the ballgame, usually early, and after that it’s, well, nothing. Crickets. So it was today.
Maybe we should give that phenomenon a slightly different acronym, to distinguish the offense problem from the pitching problem. Maybe call the offense one Only One Big Inning, or OOBI. Yeah. I think that works.
Anyway. Gallen allowed his first bit of traffic in the top of the third, though to be fair it was hardly his fault. With out out already recorded, Zac threw a knuckle curve to Padres catcher Freddy Fermin, who hit it right back up the box. It hit Gallen in his right shoulder and then dribbled away onto the infield for a single. The trainers came out, they had Gallen throw a number of practice pitches off the mound, and when they were satisfied, they went back into the dugout and Gallen finished up the inning with a grounder to second and his third strikeout of the game. That was the end of his outing, however, as presumably the shoulder started to swell and stiffen up, and by the time to top of the fourth rolled around Brandon Pfaadt was warming up in the bullpen, and it was announced that Zac was out of the game due to a “right shoulder contusion.”
That didn’t seem like so bad a thing, really, because Pfaadt came out dealing. He struck out two in a nine-pitch top of the fourth, and pitched around a two-out solo dinger from San Diego first baseman Ty France in the top of the fifth. 4-1 DBACKS
The top of the sixth started off a bit rougher, with Jake Cronenworth drawing an eight-pitch leadoff walk from the nine hole. He struck out Ramon Laureano, though, and induced a very hard grounder from Fernando Tatis, Jr. that Perdomo scooped to start a very slick inning-ending double play.
You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the offense, but that’s because the offense wasn’t doing anything except swinging early at Marquez pitches and allowing him to cruise through the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth innings with only 38 pitches thrown. They scattered two singles, a walk, and a hit-by-pitch across those four frames, and yet Marquez wound up having to throw, on average, fewer than ten pitches in any one of those innings. It was uninspiring, to say the least.
Meanwhile, Pfaadt was only at 36 pitches through his three innings of work, so he came out to start the top of the seventh, and that was when the wheels came off. He walked Jackson Merrill on ten pitches to open up the action, then surrendered a single to Machado, and then stepped off the mound three different times to balk the runners to second and third before walking Zander Bogaerts on six pitches to load the bases with nobody out. That earned Pfaadt the hook, with Taylor Clarke coming on to try and get out of the mess. Long story stort: he failed, though not for lack of effort. Gavin Sheets greeted his first pitch with a two-run single to right, Ty France reached on a fielding error by Perdomo that led to Perdomo leaving the game with what was later diagnosed as a sprained ankle, and two sacrifice flies later, the Padres had the lead. 5-4 San Diego
And that was pretty much that. Ty France hit another solo dinger off Trevor Andrew Hoffman to lead off the ninth, the Diamondbacks managed a bit more traffic on the basepaths but couldn’t get anyone else home, and that gives us our disappointing final score of 6-4 San Diego
Loss Probability Added, courtesy of FanGraphs
Your Neighborhood Arizona Taco Shack: Zac Gallen (3 IP, 1 H, 3 K, 0 BB, +14% WPA), Jose Fernandez (4 AB, 2 H, 1 2B, 2 RBI, +13% WPA)
That Taco Bell Just Off the Interstate Outside Dubuque, Iowa: Adrian Del Castillo (4 AB, 0 H, 1 K, -14% WPA), Brandon Pfaadt (3 IP, 2 H, 4 ER, 3 BB, 1 HR, 5 K, -15% WPA)
Jack in the Box: Taylor Clarke (1 IP, 1 H, 0 ER, 1 IBB, 1 HBP, -31% WPA)
The Gameday Thread today was sparsely attended, at least, with only 137 comments at time of posting. Probably just as well, really, as this game was really pretty desultory and disappointing. By popular acclaim, Comment of the Game goes to MikeMono:
I don’t entirely agree with this one, though I do agree that this is another game that can and should be added to the 2026 list of games that we should have won but didn’t. Myself, I feel like this was a more unusual circumstance, and less of the same-old-same-old, which reminds me….
What’s Wrong with In-Season Junkets Like the “Mexico City Series”
Coming back to the point I gestured toward at the end of my intro paragraph, there seems to me that there is absolutely no reason for “events” like this to exist while the MLB regular season in going on, and it frankly offends me that things like this do happen. In hopefully succinct bullet-list form, here’s why:
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Nobody aside from the municipal authorities of Mexico City, the Mexico City Better Business Bureau, and the International-Market-Share-Growth Division of Major League Baseball give a crap about bringing in-season American baseball to other countries that don’t have MLB franchises of their own. It’s a cash grab by the league, and the owners who make up the league, pure and simple.
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A venue like Mexico City, which is maybe a good junket destination for baseball marketing execs and so forth, and seems like a perfectly lovely place to play or watch some baseball, nevertheless has some environmental and geographical aspects that make it a completely inappropriate place to force MLB teams to pick up and go and play for a couple of days before coming home again. To wit, the elevation at Estadio Alfredo Harp Helu in Mexico City is 7,350 feet above sea level, more than 2,000 feet higher than Coors Field, which as everyone already knows plays havoc with how the game functions in terms of, well, physics. Pitchers aren’t going to know how their pitches are going to behave in the very thin air at that elevation; hitters aren’t going to know how their swings and their approaches at the plate are going to be affected; position players aren’t going to know how their movement and their exertion and their physical conditioning are going to respond to playing at such elevations.
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As such, there are a whole bunch of potential health risks that come from throwing 54 professional baseball players who have trained and conditioned themselves with very particular parameters for playing environments in mind into an environment that is well outside those parameters, and giving them maybe 24 hours tops to acclimate themselves, and then making them go out and play ball for at least eighteen innings over a 48 hour period. You think it’s no big deal? Take your daily exercise routine—walking, jogging, working out, whatever—that you do down in Phoenix or Tucson or wherever, and drive up to Flagstaff (which has a comparable elevation to Mexico City), and try doing the same thing, and see how it goes and how you feel afterwards. I guarantee that, unless you’ve done years of high-altitude training, it won’t go smoothly.
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Do the teams, and the players, have a choice about whether or not to participate in this and other MLB international marketing stunts? I’m pretty sure they don’t. Do they get compensated for having to participate in these international junkets that disrupt the rhythm of the regular season just as they’re settling into that rhythm as we come up on the one-month mark in the season? Again, I‘m pretty sure they don’t.
So, yeah, that’s my rant. This sort of greedhead idiocy has no place in regular season MLB baseball. It should be abolished.
Anyway….
So join us tomorrow, if you feel so inclined, as we try to salvage a “series” split against the Padres. Michael King goes for San Diego, Ryne Nelson goes for us. Ulp. But I’m sure it will be fine. First pitch is scheduled for 1:05 Arizona time, so bring your lunch, your beverage of choice, and your external oxygen tank. Hope to see you!
As always, thanks for reading, and as always, go Diamondbacks!
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