Well, that was disappointing. Not only did we lose another game to the Doyers at Uniqlo Park at Dodger Stadium at Chavez Latrine at the City of Smog and Angels, we also managed to be on the business end of our first sweep of the year. And we’re only three games in. So that sucks.
Honestly, though, it’s not all that much of a shock, at least to me. And, somewhat to my surprise, I’m not even all that upset. The Diamondbacks are a team that enters 2026 with a bit more than $133M of player contracts on the books. We’re going up against a team that, if you factor in all the deferred money and so forth that MLB has let them get away with, has more financial obligations than at least several small nation states. It was always going to be an uphill battle, especially for the first series of the regular season, when everyone’s still kind of shaking off the rust from the long off-season.
Eduardo Rodriguez, the pitching hero of the Venezuelan national team in the World Baseball Classic, took the mound for us, facing off against Tyler Glasnow, who has pitched more than 100 innings only three times in his major league career and who is earning $32.5M to pitch for Los Angeles this year. And while Glasnow did all right for the Doyers today, holding the Diamondbacks to two runs over six full innings of work, E-Rod pitched better, pitching five shutout innings, striking out five while allowing only three singles and two walks. He faced one batter to start the sixth—Kyle Tucker, who is earning $56M this year—and was pulled after Tucker reached on an infield squib shot to Carlos Santana that he bobbled a bit. E-Rod was maybe a bit late covering the bag at first, and Tucker reached, and he eventually came around to score, but the run was unearned as Santana was charged with an error.
Anyway. Let’s start from the beginning. Our Snakes got on the board in the top of the first, thanks to a one-out infield single by Corbin Carroll that was initially ruled a force-out at first, but which was overturned when video review showed that Corbin, who was busting it right out of the batter’s box, clearly beat the throw. Geraldo Perdomo then grounded to first, moving Carroll along, and then Pavin Smith singled to left to drive him in from second:
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Nolan Arenado then continued his fruitless run with the bat, though at least he didn’t strike out. 1-0 D-BACKS
We did some more damage against Glasnow in the third, thanks to a leadoff Jorge Barrosa double down the left field line, followed by another productive groundout, this one by Ketel Marte, that allowed Barrosa to reach third with less than two outs. Corbin Carroll lifted a fly ball to center that turned out to be deep enough for Barrosa to tag and score. 2-0 D-BACKS
And that was your score until the Dodgers got one run back in the bottom of the sixth, thanks to the aforementioned Santana error (which is a scoring decision I’m not sure he deserved) and a subsequent Freddy Freeman double off reliever Jonathan Loaisiga that brought him home. 2-1 D-BACKS
But we still had the lead, and we held it through the bottom of the seventh, as new Diamondback and indicator of the state of our bullpen Joe Ross pitched a kind of ugly but ultimately successful 1-2-3 inning. Meanwhile, we were doing basically nothing further on offense, as Glasnow gave way to Alex Vesia, who in turn gave way to some dude named Will Klein.
Juan Morillo took the ball for us to start the bottom of the eighth, I guess because he’s the closest thing we have in terms of splits to a left-handed reliever, and sure enough he made short(ish) work of Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Tucker to record the first two outs. Then he drilled the home plate umpire right in the middle of his forehead with a high fastball on his first pitch to Mookie Betts, after which there was a brief interruption of play that seemed to leave Juan rather discombobulated. He proceeded to walk Betts on four pitches, which brought 2025 World Series hero Will Smith (earning nearly $13M to catch for the Dodgers in 2026) to the plate. Smith hung a decent at bat on Morillo, and finally drilled the seventh pitch he saw out and over the fence just left of the batter’s eye in center field. Morillo was pulled for Paul Sewald, who recorded the last out, but it was too late. The damage was done. 3-2 Los Angeles
We still has a chance, I suppose, with Pavin Smith, Nolan Arenado, and Alek Thomas coming to the plate in the top of the ninth. Of course, they were going up against new FTD closer Edwin Diaz, who is earning $18.5M this year at the back end of the Los Angeles bullpen. Ten pitches and three flyouts later, this one was in the books.
Some Reasons for Optimism
This was a disappointing result, and a disappointing series, to be sure. That said, the Diamondbacks led each game, and in the latter two we carried that lead into the late innings. We all knew our bullpen was going to be a weakness this year, like it is just about every year, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are as complete a team from top to bottom as one can imagine. And we hung tough with them, and we made them work, and despite Ryne Nelson coughing up four in that unfortunate third inning last night, we were still in line to win the last two games. Kevin Ginkel was last night’s disappointment, and tonight that “honor” fell to Juan Morillo. But we played pretty well for the most part, all the way through. Facing a less stupidly funded team, we would likely have won at least two of these games, even with the flaws the Diamondbacks have. And, as someone pointed out early in tonight’s Gameday Thread, we won’t face the Dodgers again until the beginning of June, so we will by definition be facing less stupidly funded teams for the next two months. It’s rough to start the season getting swept and going down 0-3, but this certainly isn’t a sign that the sky is falling. It’s more a confirmation that, as we might have suspected, water is wet.
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All Doyers player salary information courtesy of Spotrac.
Loss Probability Added, courtesy of FanGraphs
Robin Hood: Eduardo Rodriguez (5 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 2 BB, 5 K, 79 pitches, +23.0% WPA)
Little John: Joe Ross (1 IP 0 H, 0 ER, +10.8% WPA)
Hapless Country Bumpkin: Juan Morillo (2/3 IP, 1 H, 1 HR, 1 BB, 2 ER, -54.1% WPA)
The Gameday Thread saw some more inevitable falloff from the first two games, in part I suspect because the University of Arizona was punching their ticket to the NCAA March Madness Final Four (BEAR DOWN!), and also because, well, it’s really not a lot of fun to watch the Billionaire Boys Club play baseball on television if you’re not particularly a fan of billionaires. That said, we racked up 182 comments at time of writing. Comment of the game goes by popular acclaim to this one from gzimmerm, who saw the meatball that Snake_Bitten left in the middle of the plate, and didn’t miss it:
Anyway, because opening weekend is often weird in terms of scheduling, we have our only scheduled Sunday off day tomorrow, so I hope you can join us for the Diamondbacks home opener at Chase Field on Monday, when we take on the Detroit Tigers. First pitch is scheduled for 7:10pm AZ time, with Justin Verlander going for the striped cats and Michael Soroka going for us. I don’t feel great about Soroka occupying a spot in our rotation, but despite that I think could be a winnable game. If nothing else, it’s always nice to see the entire team get introduced during the extended pregame festivities.
As always, thanks for reading. And as always, go Diamondbacks!
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