Passan: Why the D-backs belong in the World Series

IN THE SEVENTH inning of the game in which the team he built clinched a World Series berth, Mike Hazen repaired to the visiting clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park and sequestered himself in the manager’s office. Hazen, the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ general manager for the last seven years, bebopped around the room — sitting in a chair, squatting on the toilet, standing in the shower of the bathroom with the lights turned off. His nerves were fricasseed; he couldn’t bear to watch the game play out on the field. Instead, he was watching the crowning moment of his career on a 5-inch cellphone screen.

Typically, Hazen’s neuroses don’t prompt him to forsake the live view for a delayed TV feed until the ninth inning. “Got a lot of ninth-inning scar tissue,” Hazen said, a nod at the Diamondbacks’ major league-high nine blown leads in the ninth inning this season. But the gravity of everything in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series overwhelmed him to the point that he needed to seclude himself two innings early — even wearing a pair of noise-canceling headphones to drown out the crowd noise that would spoil his streamed feed.

Yes, it had taken seven years of hard work, but it somehow still felt like it was all happening so fast. Over the last year, Hazen has adjusted to life without his wife, Nicole, who died in August 2022 after fighting glioblastoma for more than two years. His team spent most of the first half of the season atop the National League West division, then cratered in July and bottomed out after a nine-game losing streak left it at 57-59 on Aug. 11. All of this — backing into the playoffs as the final wild-card team with 84 wins, ousting Milwaukee in the wild-card round, sweeping the NL West champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series and now, as he witnessed from manager Torey Lovullo’s office, coming to Philadelphia down 3-2 in the NLCS and beating the Phillies in Games 6 and 7 — blindsided him.

“I didn’t really even anticipate us getting to this moment,” Hazen said after the clinch. “We’re not preparing for the offseason, we’re not having meetings. I am stressing and walking the streets of Philadelphia. It’s the end of October, and we’re still playing baseball. That’s what I think about every day when I wake up — and we have at least four more baseball games to go.”

The most improbable World Series ever starts Friday in Arlington, Texas, when the Diamondbacks face the American League champion Texas Rangers, who themselves snuck into the postseason at 90-72. Two years ago, Arizona tied for the worst record in baseball at 52-110, and the Rangers, with a 60-102 record, weren’t much better. This would be the Diamondbacks’ second title, after they won their only other appearance in 2001; Texas has never won a championship in its 63 years of existence. But put pedigree and record aside: This is a pair of teams that make up in quality what they lack in other areas.

Texas, at least, was acting like a team with World Series aspirations. General manager Chris Young arranged a squad of stars, complemented them with talent from Texas’ robust farm system and supplemented them with aggressive acquisitions at the trade deadline. Despite their roundabout journey to this week — backing into a wild-card round, dropping three straight games to the Astros at home in the American League Championship Series — the Rangers found their power stroke in the postseason and followed a tried-and-true October formula: ball go far, team go far. The Diamondbacks are the bigger surprise.

And yet they are not to be discounted. These are not the Diamondbacks of August, whose ninth-inning foibles brought out the irrational in Hazen. They stomped the Brewers, embarrassed the Dodgers and went toe-to-toe with the Phillies — then razed them, too. Arizona embraced a nobody-believes-in-us mantra because it’s true that nobody believed they could find themselves here. For all the consternation about the best regular-season teams missing from the 119th World Series, about this matchup of wild-card teams that happened to save their best baseball for October, it’s advisable to avoid falling into that trap.

So much of the attention paid to the Diamondbacks concerns what they aren’t. Maybe it’s time to focus on what they are.

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“WE PLAY THE right brand of baseball,” Diamondbacks outfielder Jake McCarthy said, and by the right brand, he means something very specific: Arizona plays like a team from the 1980s that has time traveled to 2023.

The Diamondbacks are not immune to some modern flourishes of the game — they regularly pull their starting pitchers around when the opposing lineup turns over for the third time — but otherwise, McCarthy is right. They do not rely on home runs. They value excellent defense. They steal bases and take extra ones at will. They bunt, for crying out loud. They operate with an attention to detail that forces opponents to make plays and punishes them if they don’t.

“We play old-school baseball,” Arizona setup man Kevin Ginkel said. “Everyone else wants to slug, everybody else wants to punch out tickets. We do it a little differently. We run the bases really well. Play really good defense. Focus on bunts, bunt defense. And everybody takes accountability for that. That’s a credit to our coaching. That’s a credit to the leadership. That’s a credit to everybody, because we take pride in it. And it’s just one of those things where everybody cares. It’s not what’s going to get you on the highlight reel, but when it comes to crunch time and winning baseball games, we do it.”

Stitching together a roster of 26 players who embrace this philosophy took efforts from all corners of the organization and came together over the course of years. Star rookie outfielder Corbin Carroll and rookie right-hander Brandon Pfaadt, who started Game 7, came via the draft in 2019 and 2020, respectively. NLCS MVP Ketel Marte (in 2016, Hazen’s first major acquisition), ace Zac Gallen (in 2019) and 23-year-old catcher Gabi Moreno (in 2022) arrived in trades. First baseman Christian Walker joined Arizona as a waiver claim after being dumped by three teams in spring training six years ago. Game 2 starter Merrill Kelly was signed in 2018 after playing in Korea for four years. Shortstop Geraldo Perdomo signed at 16 out of the Dominican Republic. The only free agent signings from last winter on Arizona’s roster are veteran Evan Longoria and reliever Miguel Castro.

Not until late August, however, did Arizona find the version of itself that’s been on display all October. On Aug. 27, Ryan Thompson, a 31-year-old sidearmer whose sinker lives around 91 mph — about 3 mph slower than the average big-league fastball, something common on a Diamondbacks team that ranked 28th of 30 teams in fastball velocity this year — pitched a scoreless inning less than a week after Arizona signed him to a minor league deal. He had gone through waivers unclaimed by every team before Tampa Bay released him and the Diamondbacks, desperate for bullpen help, took a flier.

He threw 5.2 sterling innings in the NLCS, paving the way for Paul Sewald, the indomitable closer Arizona acquired from Seattle at the trade deadline, who has allowed three baserunners in eight scoreless innings this postseason. Along with Ginkel’s nine shutout innings, the trio has transformed Arizona’s bullpen from Hazen’s recurring nightmare into a placid dream.

The bullpen saved the Diamondbacks’ season, as they eked out a pair of one-run victories in Games 3 and 4 to send the series back to Philadelphia, where they rediscovered an identity that had temporarily gone missing. Over the first five games of the series, the Diamondbacks stole only one base, a far cry from their serial thievery — 166 bases, the second most in MLB — during the regular season. Then they stole eight in the last two games of the NLCS, their desire to run a constant burr in the side of Phillies pitchers.

It speaks to adjustments that reveal Arizona’s game-planning expertise. While Phillies manager Rob Thomson stuck with the same lineup for all seven games and their starting pitchers did the same with their pitch arsenals, Arizona tweaked and tinkered, trying to exploit deficiencies in Philadelphia’s vaunted lineup.

Arizona’s pitching room is loaded with keen and curious minds, from pitching coach Brent Strom to Dan Haren, a three-time All-Star who serves as a pitching strategist. As the NLCS went on, Kelly and Pfaadt particularly relied far less on the four-seam fastballs that Phillies batters were hunting. Kelly’s six-pitch mix has always vexed hitters, and he used that to his advantage in his second appearance: The changeup he threw more than any pitch in Game 2 was his fourth most used offering in Game 6. Pfaadt went from 32 four-seamers in Game 3 to half that in Game 7, throwing as many sinkers as heaters and unfurling more sweepers than both.

That sort of attention to detail embodies the Diamondbacks’ approach. If their roster doesn’t suit the pervasive style of baseball played these days, they figure out how the information analytics offers can best suit them. It’s the sort of pragmatism perhaps best seen in something as simple as defense. When a team’s offense lacks the firepower to homer its way to wins, the little things matter exponentially more. So from the beginning of spring training, Lovullo preached the import of playing clean baseball. The message took.

Arizona committed just 56 errors, the second fewest of any team in baseball history.

Defense, bullpen, a focus on the little things: This is how a team that homers only five times in the LCS — one-third of the 15 Texas hit on the other side of the bracket — gets to the World Series.

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IN MID-AUGUST, smack in the middle of that second-half swoon, some Diamondbacks players gathered around Dave McKay, the team’s first-base coach, for story time. Toward the end of the 2006 season, when he was coaching in St. Louis, the Cardinals lost seven consecutive games. They finished the season 83-78. And over the next month, they beat one division champion (San Diego), conquered another in seven games (New York) and went on to win the World Series. The 2006 Cardinals are the only team with fewer than 84 wins to capture a championship.

“The beauty of a World Series and playoffs is it’s not always the best team that wins,” said McKay, in his 40th year as a coach. “I’ve been to six World Series. Two we should’ve won and lost. Two we should’ve lost and won. It’s just about whoever plays better.”

To be sure, the Rangers are a force. It’s not just their home run power. Game 1 starter Nathan Eovaldi and expected Game 2 starter Jordan Montgomery have owned October. During the regular season, Texas was extraordinary in the field, too, committing just one more error than Arizona. Like the Diamondbacks, the Rangers are far more formidable than their record would indicate.

Consider the Diamondbacks nonplussed. They respect the Rangers, of course — they, too, saw Adolis Garcia single-handedly mash as many home runs in the ALCS as all the Diamondbacks did in the NLCS. Knowing the depth of Texas’ lineup and that future Hall of Fame manager Bruce Bochy is at the helm, the Diamondbacks recognize they can’t rest on what they’ve done. All that matters in October is what you do next.

They also feel prepared for that challenge, in large part because of what this month has already given them. For Carroll and Moreno and Perdomo and Pfaadt, it’s an education. For Gallen and Kelly and Marte and Tommy Pham, the outfielder acquired at the trade deadline who radiates intensity, it’s validation. For Hazen, even with the agita of ninth innings, it’s comfort.

Before Game 7 started, Lovullo walked by his office and saw Hazen sitting with Mike Fitzgerald, a Diamondbacks assistant GM. A few minutes before the most important game of any of their lives, Lovullo poked his head in to speak with them.

“No matter what happens today,” Lovullo said, “I love you guys.”

Who are the Arizona Diamondbacks? They’re a team that knows how lucky it is to be in the World Series. And one that earned it, too.