The Diamondbacks Have Suddenly Surged into the Wild Card Co-Lead

Josh Bell has only been a Diamondback for a little over a week, but in that short time, he’s made his presence felt. Acquired just ahead of the trade deadline in a deal with the Marlins, Bell stepped in for the injured Christian Walker and homered twice in his debut against the Pirates on August 2. On Wednesday he did it again, bashing two homers in the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Guardians in Cleveland. The Diamondbacks swept the pair of games, moving them into a tie for the National League Wild Card lead and into second in the rapidly tightening NL West race.

Indeed, the Padres aren’t the only NL West team that has gained traction in both races lately. With the sweep, the Diamondbacks have now won 18 of their last 23 games, a run that has rocketed them from two games below .500 to 11 games above while nearly tripling their odds of making the playoffs:

That 18-5 record is the majors’ best in that span, 2.5 games better than the Padres (14-6). The Diamondbacks have done it against a mix of good teams (the Braves, Guardians and Royals occupy playoff positions at this writing, and the Pirates have been right around .500) and not-so-good ones (the Blue Jays, Cubs, and Nationals). Not only are the Diamondbacks now tied with the Padres for the Wild Card lead, they’ve trimmed the Dodgers’ division lead to three games — as close as they’ve been since April 24 — which has really goosed their Playoff Odds.

Here’s a graph showing the Wild Card odds of the six NL contenders who aren’t currently leading their divisions.

Note the two red lines, which intersected on July 10, just as the Diamondbacks embarked upon this run; they’re the darker of those two, the one that has headed up sharply since then (with some starts and stops), converging with those of the Padres and Braves.

Bell, who has now been traded at the deadline three years in a row, has been on quite a tear himself. The 31-year-old switch-hitting first baseman was batting a dismal .224/.287/.349 (78 wRC+) with nine homers for the Marlins through July 21, but he turned himself into a trade candidate by going 11-for-24 with five homers over his next six games, all against the Mets, Orioles, and Brewers. Three days later, after Walker left a game due to a strained oblique, the Diamondbacks acquired Bell from the Marlins for a song (not one by Davy Andrews, alas), though they did also agree to take on $2.25 million of Bell’s $5.9 million remaining salary. Bell homered from both sides of the plate in his debut, took a couple of 0-fers, and on Monday opened the series against the team with whom he started last season by going 2-for-5 with a triple and a single. The latter hit led off the sixth inning, sparking a two-run rally that temporarily gave the Diamondbacks the lead in a seesaw game that they finally won in the 10th.

Both of Bell’s homers on Wednesday came while batting lefty against Guardians righty Carlos Carrasco, and both were estimated by Statcast at 375 feet, but he did provide variety by going oppo with a second-inning solo shot and then lining a two-run homer to right in the third:

Bell has generally been stronger against righties, both for his career (115 wRC+, compared to 108 vs. lefties) and in recent years (126 wRC+ from 2021–23, compared to 116 vs. lefties). Dialing back to the All-Star break, he’s improved more against righties — accounting for seven of his nine second-half homers — than against lefties, but he’s made gains against both:

We’re talking about small samples, particularly his post-All-Star plate appearances against southpaws, but that’s a 214-point gain in wOBA against righties and 159-point gain against lefties. The latter is held back by the fact that his average launch angle over that small slice is -6 degrees, compared to 12 degrees before, and 14 degrees on both sides of the break against righties. I’m not sure there’s a ton of meaning here, particularly when it comes to a very streaky player to begin with, but this hot streak has certainly worked out well for him and his teams.

The Diamondbacks’ surge has been driven by their offense, which has cranked out a major league-leading 6.26 runs per game since the games of July 10, and which has hit for an NL-high 137 wRC+ (.276/.353/.511) in that span. Ketel Marte has been, well, boiling, hitting .369/.439/.810 (234 wRC+) with 12 homers and a 94.9 mph average exit velocity in 23 games, which, holy smokes. That run has put him in the NL MVP conversation, as colleague Michael Baumann wrote earlier this week, which isn’t to say he’s going to snatch the award away from Shohei Ohtani, who despite not playing the field owns the NL’s highest WAR (5.7) and wRC+ (176), among other things. Marte’s 29 homers, .559 slugging percentage, and 5.3 WAR all rank third in the league, his 153 wRC+ is fourth.

Marte isn’t the only one who has put up videogame numbers during this run. Eugenio Suárez has hit .318/.365/.718 (189 wRC+) with nine of his season’s 16 homers in that span, which has pushed his wRC+ above 100. Corbin Carroll has hit .237/.355/.592 (155 wRC+) with six of his season’s nine homers, a reassuring jolt from a player whose follow-up to his NL Rookie of the Year-winning season has been an unsettling one, with a power outage that has more or less spanned a calendar year. Joc Pederson (.319/.4580/.723, 216 wRC+ with five homers) and Jake McCarthy (.352/.397/.482, 147 wRC+) have both been excellent in part-time roles. Gabriel Moreno (.304/.385/.411, 127 wRC+) was on the upswing as well, but he landed on the injured list on Tuesday due to a left groin strain, the severity of which isn’t yet clear. In Wednesday’s nightcap, 24-year-old prospect Adrian Del Castillo debuted by going 1-for-3 with a second-inning RBI double off Carrasco.

On the other side of the ball, the Diamondbacks have allowed 4.13 runs per game over this surge, an unremarkable rate but nonetheless well ahead of their pre-July 10 rate of 4.86 runs per game. Brandon Pfaadt (2.97 ERA and 2.74 FIP in 30.1 IP) and Ryne Nelson (3.52 ERA and 2.06 FIP in 30.1 IP) have been the team’s best starters during this span, while Zac Gallen (4.88 ERA, 3.64 FIP in 27.2 IP) has only been so-so, and Jordan Montgomery and Yilber Diaz have been bad. Gallen (3.75 ERA and 3.34 FIP overall) and Pfaadt (3.92 ERA and 3.55 FIP) have been their only regular starters with ERAs below 4.00 for the season, while the late-signing Montgomery has been a disaster (6.37 ERA, 4.85 FIP). To be fair, the six starters with at least 30 innings for the season (Nelson, Slade Cecconi, and Tommy Henry being the others) all have ERAs well ahead of their FIPs, with those of all but Pfaadt and Gallen at least 0.97 runs per nine ahead. In my team defense series last month — just before Arizona’s fun began — the Diamondbacks ranked 25th in my aggregation of various metrics, propped up by the solid framing work of Moreno, so it’s fair to suggest that the starters aren’t getting the kind of support they deserve.

Help is not only on the way, but some of it has arrived. Wednesday’s second game marked the long-awaited season debut for Eduardo Rodriguez, whom the Diamondbacks signed to a four-year, $80 million deal during the Winter Meetings after he oped to forgo the final three years of a five-year, $77 million deal with the Tigers. The 31-year-old lefty had been sidelined since departing his March 19 exhibition start due to what was soon diagnosed as a strained latissimus dorsi, and his initial rehab was shut down in mid-April when he reaggravated the injury. He didn’t go on a rehab assignment, instead building up his pitch count via bullpens and simulated games at Salt River Field, capped by a four-inning, 65-pitch simulated game on July 31.

While matching that pitch count on Wednesday, Rodriguez was hardly dominant, getting just two swings and misses all afternoon and striking out just one batter. He served up a solo homer to David Fry on his first pitch of the second inning, an 89-mph four-seamer on the outside corner. The Guardians scored against him again in the second via a one-out walk of Josh Naylor, who went first-to-third on a soft single by Jhonkensy Noel and scored on a sacrifice fly by Angel Martínez, then added a third run in the sixth when José Ramírez went deep against a cut fastball on the inner third. Rodríguez’s outing won’t win any awards, but going forward, it won’t be hard to improve upon alternatives with ERAs above 6.00.

Meanwhile, Merrill Kelly will soon return from a teres major strain that has limited him to four starts. In his first rehab start on Tuesday, he allowed three runs in four innings over the course of 62 pitches for the High-A Hillsboro Hops on Tuesday. If he recovers as expected, his next start could be for the Diamondbacks, though another rehab outing with a higher-level affiliate wouldn’t be a surprise.

As for the bullpen, which for the season ranks second-to-last in the NL in FIP (4.32) and 12th in ERA (4.26), it’s been much improved during this recent run (3.58 ERA, 3.41 FIP), though lately it’s in a state of flux. Paul Sewald blew four saves in July, including three in consecutive appearances from July 2–8; he bookended that with another rough stretch at the end of the month, and finished it with a 10.80 ERA and 5.67 FIP. That prompted manager Torey Lovullo to remove him from the closer role and go with a closer-by-committee arrangement. Since July 31, three different relievers have notched a total of five saves, namely righties Ryan Thompson and Justin Martinez and lefty A.J. Puk. Puk, who was acquired from the Marlins for a pair of prospects, infielder Deyvison De Los Santos and outfielder Andrew Pintar, has bolstered the bullpen by allowing just one run in five innings while striking out seven without a walk. Sewald, who allowed just one run in his first 18 appearances from May 7 (his season debut was delayed by an oblique strain) through the end of June, could eventually get his job back, but for the moment he’ll work in lower-leverage situations.

Like the Padres, the Diamondbacks have had difficulty escaping the pull of .500, but they heated up in time to merit reinforcement at the trade deadline, and so far the investment is paying off. The Wild Card race has evolved into a four-team dogfight involving those two NL West teams plus the Braves and Mets, and the door to the NL West’s top perch is ajar, at least for the moment. We’ll see whether the Diamondbacks can capitalize on the opportunity.