On Thursday night, the Arizona Diamondbacks were able to begin the weekend series against the Colorado Rockies with a walkoff win to push the team’s winning streak to a season-long 5 games. This team has now won 9 of their last 12 games.
This game was won due to the continued success of this Arizona pitching staff. Eduardo Rodriguez continued his run as the ace of this staff throwing 7 scoreless innings tonight. The 7 scoreless innings tonight drop his season ERA to a minuscule 2.24 as he continues to be the leader of this rotation. ERod continued his approach mixing up his pitches more this season vs previous seasons and getting lots of ground balls because of it. It has been such a massive development for this team continuing to get so much length from their starting rotation. Cant be overstated the importance of this.
Another equally enormous performance tonight came from Kevin Ginkel in the 8th inning getting out of a bases loaded 1 out jam and keeping it a tie game at 1-1. Juan Morillo began the inning, and after getting some planned rest and not throwing much the past week appeared very rusty. Morillo loaded the bases and then hit the batter walking in a run and putting this bullpen in a precarious position. Fortunately, Kevin Ginkel came in and completely overpowered the next 2 Rockies hitters keeping the score where it was and giving the team a chance to win the game. Kevin Ginkel regaining the dominant form we have seen from him in previous seasons has been such a massive development in the early going for this team.
The offense really was disappointing tonight. The Rockies threw a starter who had never even started a professional game in his career before, and he held the Dbacks offense scoreless through 5 innings while only allowing 2 baserunners. Definitely not what you would expect, but the Dbacks hitters continued to chase pitches outside of the zone playing right into the pitcher’s hands.
Dbacks hitters were able to draw 8 walks, mostly off the Rockies bullpen, but the Dbacks were still only able to score just 2 runs despite all of the free passes.
Good teams can win baseball games in multiple ways, and this team this season has shown the ability to win slugfests as well as the pitching duels like we saw tonight. This is definitely an encouraging development from my perspective as it has seemed like in year’s past this team could only win games by bludgeoning teams to death with offense. The Dbacks will look to keep the momentum going tomorrow night as they will give the ball to Michael Soroka.
The biggest negative for me of this game, was the reporting from Bob Nightengale during the game that this was the smallest crowd at Chase Field since May of 2023 at just 14,761 fans. C’mon guys! We have got to do better than that! Especially when this team is winning games! I would greatly encourage people to try and show up to the ballpark this holiday weekend and give these guys some energy at home! They deserve it! Especially with the big replica jersey giveaway this weekend. LFG!
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