Ray dominates for impressive road win
MILWAUKEE – The Diamondbacks’ apparent weakness through the season’s first seven weeks has not been hard to spot: They have struggled to hit, and thus win, on the road. But while it might have provided fodder for skepticism, the Diamondbacks still began their 11-game road trip this week as one of the better teams in the major leagues.
Imagine where they’ll be if what happened on Thursday night is more the new normal. The Diamondbacks launched a pair of homers; their aggressive baserun-
ning led to two more runs; and their pitching dominated in a 4-0 win over the Milwaukee Brewers at Miller Park.
The win was their third in their past four on the road. And while two of those victories came against the sad-sack San Diego Padres, this one was against a Milwaukee Brewers team that entered the day as a first-place team.
Granted, the Brewers are slumping – Thursday’s loss was their fourth in a row – and no one expected them to be legit contenders, not given where they are in their rebuild.
But no one expected the Diamondbacks to be this good, either, and here they are. They’ve won four in a row and nine out of 10. At 30-19, they’re off to the third-best start in franchise history.
“We’re just going out every day with the same approach,” said left-hander Robbie Ray, who throttled the Brewers over seven scoreless innings. “That’s baseball – it’s a long season, so you’ve got to understand that you’re going to lose sometimes on the road. You’ve got to bounce back from it.”
Ray’s right, but thus far losing on the road has hardly applied to him. In five starts away from Chase Field, Ray owns a 0.81 ERA. And while technically he did lose one of those starts – on May 3 against the Nationals – he was about as dominant that night as he’s been all year.
On Thursday, he gave up just two hits, walked none and struck out nine. It was his first zero-walk start of the year and just his third since the start of last season. He had his customary mid-90s fastball, but he also was mixing in both of his breaking balls – his slider and his slightly slower curve – which he said gave him the ability to be even more aggressive with his heater.
“It just keeps them off of my fastball,” he said. “So sometimes I’m able to just reach back and find that extra number and, you know, when you throw a little harder, you can kind of get away with it up in the zone, so I just took advantage of that.”
He made a challenging Brewers lineup look feeble, despite them entering the night averaging the second-most runs per game in the National League. To his benefit, however, the Brewers lost slugger Ryan Braun in the fourth, when he departed with recurring calf issues that are expected to land him back on the 10day disabled list.
“Really when he needed to stand on his fastball, I think he was saying, ‘Here it comes, and do your best to catch up to it,’” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said of Ray. “He’s beaten some very capable hitters with an aggressive fastball, and, for me, when things like that are swing-and-miss, you know he’s having a special night.”
The Diamondbacks jumped to an early lead when Gregor Blanco lined the second pitch of the game for a leadoff homer. Chris Owings led off the second with an opposite-field, solo shot of his own.
They added two more runs courtesy of their legs: Blanco aggressively scored from first on a David Peralta double into right-center, and Paul Goldschmidt doubled, stole third and scored on a wild pitch in the eighth.
The Diamondbacks looked more like the offensive team that has run rampant at Chase Field this season, not the one that’s been mostly stagnant offensively on the road.
“I would say it’s just a long season,” Blanco said, when asked about the slow start on the road. “You’re going to have ups and downs during the season. … We kind of started slow on the road, but now we can put it together and say, ‘We can do this.’ We definitely showed it tonight, and now we’ve got to come back tomorrow and do it again.”