The Arizona Diamondbacks squeezed into the playoffs in the wildcard spot at the very end of the regular season, and are now playing in the opening game of the NLCS this upcoming Monday. The Diamondbacks have not made the playoffs for six years now, and in their last appearance, they were swept in the first round by the Dodgers.
This young Arizona team has had a rough past couple of years in the MLB at one point in 2020 this team had only 25 wins in the entire season. However, GM Torey Lovullo has turned this young team around very quickly. The Diamondbacks have drafted many young stars in recent years. Some of these stars are Corbin Carrol, Druw Jones, Tommy Troy, and Jordan Lawlar. Corbin Carrol currently starts in the Diamondbacks outfield and is one of their best players as of right now. This is one of the youngest teams in the league currently as they’ve had so many draft picks in recent years due to their poor performance in the season. They faced off against the Brewers in the Wild Card round and won the two first games of the best-of-three series.
After this series was quickly wrapped up by the Diamondbacks they moved on to playing the number one seed in the NL. The L.A. Dodgers, this team has been dominant in the league for a long time now, this Dodgers and Diamondbacks have always kind of butted heads due to them being divisional rivals. This season the Diamondbacks were one of the streakiest teams in the MLB. What I mean by that is whenever they were on, they were ON. This team would go on 8 game-win streaks at a time. They are a very talented team but their pitching tends to hold them back. Their bullpen is ranked in the bottom 30% of the league meaning they are giving up more runs than the majority of teams in the league. They also had some pretty bad losing streaks this season, they’re a very on-and-off team. They came out of the Milwaukie series hot winning the first two games and carried that energy with them into this series. They swept the Dodgers in an upset in the first three games of this series. This was a shock to the sports world considering the Dodgers were supposed to win the series like it was nothing. The Diamondbacks scored a total of 19 runs in three games which is an average of around 6.3 runs per game. While it may not seem to be that much, in baseball a good amount of runs to score per game is around 4 or 5 so this was a very good performance by the Diamondbacks. They are now facing off against a strong Phillies team going into the NLC. This should be a really fun match-up to watch as the Phillies are a very strong team and with stars like Bryce Harper, and Kyle Schwarber this series should be exciting.
