Arizona Diamondbacks fans are looking for a scapegoat for the team’s abysmal second half of the MLB season.
A growing number of them seem to be placing a good portion of the blame for the team’s woes on manager Torey Lovullo.
Many fans have taken to social media amid the team’s struggles, calling for the team to fire Lovullo amid the team’s nine-game losing skid (the Diamondbacks are also just 5-20 since the MLB All-Star break and have won just eight games since July 1).
After looking like a legitimate playoff contender during the first half of the season (the team was 16 games over .500 on July 1), Arizona is now three games out of a playoff spot with three teams ahead of them for the final Wild Card playoff berth.
Fans are increasingly frustrated, and have been venting their frustrations about the team’s performance, and Lovullo’s managing, on social media.
At the end of the 2020 season, Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen said his team needed to improve offensively. That did not mean a wholesale change of the roster, as the Diamondbacks added just one hitter over the winter. Nor, despite Hazen’s issues with his slump-prone team’s plate approach in recent seasons, did it mean a change on the coaching staff.
The band may have been kept together, but the results haven’t improved. The Diamondbacks have played nearly as many games in 2021 as they did a year ago, and they’ve managed to lose even more of them this time around. They are 20-43 and have dropped 30 of their last 35 games. That means a reckoning is coming for the roster at the trade deadline. For the coaching staff, that reckoning came sooner.
On Thursday, the Diamondbacks dismissed hitting coach Darnell Coles and assistant hitting coach Eric Hinske, both of whom were in the last year of their contracts. The decision belonged to manager Torey Lovullo, who is also in the final year of his deal. Coles and Hinske were hired before the 2019 season, taking the place of the last hitting coaches — Dave Magadan and Tim Laker — fired by the Diamondbacks due to poor results.
“We’ve seen that trend before,” Lovullo said, “and I felt like I needed to address that trend.”
During their first year with the organization, Coles and Hinske presided over a surprisingly potent offense despite the team having traded away its center of gravity in Paul Goldschmidt. But the last two years have been defined by prolonged struggles at the plate. Last season, the Diamondbacks ranked in the bottom half of the league in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging. At year’s end, Lovullo declined to make a move, citing the unfair circumstances for an evaluation caused by the pandemic.
But the Diamondbacks once again are among the game’s offensive stragglers in 2021. Some of that is due to several important hitters — Ketel Marte, Kole Calhoun, Christian Walker, Asdrúbal Cabrera, Carson Kelly — missing significant time with injury. But most of those players have been back for weeks. Yet, since Arizona’s slide began May 4, the Diamondbacks still rank poorly in walk rate and strikeout rate. They have the third-worst on-base percentage in the majors in that span (.290) and the worst slugging percentage (.341).
Lovullo — who stressed that Coles and Hinske were no more to blame than anyone else for those numbers as much as they were casualties of the team’s search for a solution — said he waited to make a change until his roster was healthier. Healthier it got, but the team’s issues at the plate persisted.
“I wanted to see if those healthy players getting back into the fold would have this thing turn around,” Lovullo said. “But obviously, that hasn’t happened.”
Arizona’s bats indeed have been a problem. But a failure to produce runs — or to work counts or hit with runners in scoring position or hit for power — hardly is the Diamondbacks’ only problem as they’ve sunk to the worst record in the big leagues. So, why did the hammer come down on the hitting coaches and not their pitching counterparts — the Diamondbacks’ 4.97 ERA is the worst in the majors — or even Lovullo himself?
Lovullo and Hazen answered that question by pointing out that most of the team’s established hitters like Walker, David Peralta, Eduardo Escobar and Nick Ahmed all have struggled to perform up to expectations. The offense was its own problem — part of a larger problem, yes, but also one unto itself — that couldn’t be explained away by short-season funkiness or injuries. The pitching staff is different, they said. Arizona is missing four starters: Zac Gallen, Madison Bumgarner, Luke Weaver and Taylor Widener. Hazen said pitching coach Matt Herges isn’t playing with a full deck of cards.
“I don’t think those situations were necessarily analogous,” Hazen said of his offense and pitching.
Arguably neither Arizona’s hitting or pitching woes have been the most frustrating aspect of their downward spiral. For much of the season, and especially in recent weeks, the Diamondbacks have made mistake after mistake on the bases and in the field. They have let fly balls drop between fielders, failed to advance bases in obvious situations and kicked the ball around.
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