Arizona Diamondbacks celebrate a comeback victory in the ninth inning to win their final home game of the regular season 4-3 over the San Francisco Giants.
It’s imperative D-Backs stay focused on task at hand
In the ninth inning, the PA system at Chase Field played the most recognizable section of the “Banana Boat Song (Day O)”: “Daylight come, and me wanna go home.”
The Diamondbacks, down 3-1 in the last half inning of their last regular-season home game of the year, with nothing left to play for having clinched home-field advantage in the National League wild-card game, weren’t content to shut it down early by closing their eyes and swinging at every pitch.
“That’s not us,” utility man Daniel Descalso said Wednesday. “We fight till the end.”
J.D. “Just Dingers” Martinez popped a home run. (Of course, he did.) A.J. Pollock and Descalso pulled off a double steal with one out. Pollock scored on a fielder’s choice. And David Peralta drew the walk for the game-winning RBI.
It’s exactly what you want to see from this team as it heads into the final series of the year before its Oct. 4 winner-takeall, do-or-die, loser-leaves-town, onegame playoff against an opponent that will have to emerge from a tight race that could go down to the final day.
Martinez has said “we can’t take our foot off the gas,” and he’s right. It’s one of a million paradoxes that make baseball so exhilarating and maddening at the same time.
Teams want to clinch early, but it’s good to scramble until the last day because it leads to a strong sense of focus.
Focus is what you want, unless players get too intense and try too hard. Baseball is one of the few sports where effort doesn’t equal success.
Players should be relaxed, but not so relaxed that they make errors that lead to losses.
See? Crazy.
How about some concrete examples from within the organization that show the importance of keeping sharp?
Tony La Russa, the Diamondbacks’ esteemed chief baseball analyst and one of the greatest managers to ever run a ball club, shared a couple memories from his career that we can consider ahead of the final three games of the regular season in Kansas City.
Let’s start in 1988, the Oakland A’s behind a roster of stars — Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dave Parker, Terry Steinbach, Walt Weiss, Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley — won 104 games, the best in their division by 13 and the best in baseball by four.
La Russa’s A’s swept the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, the only preliminary playoff round back when baseball didn’t try to manufacture excitement through gimmicky play-ins.
Oakland was ready for the World Series, but had to wait.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 94 games in the regular season, were scrapping through the National League Championship Series against a 100-win New York Mets team.
LA won in seven games behind pitcher Orel Hershiser, who started Games 1, 3 and 7 and picked up the save in Game 4. (He gave up just three runs for a 1.09 ERA in the series.)
The A’s ended up idle for six days before the Fall Classic started. La Russa said they came in cold and ended up losing to the Dodgers in five games.
The next season, however, Oakland had learned its lesson, and when the World Series against the San Francisco Giants was interrupted for two weeks by the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake, the A’s decided to stay sharp.
The front office, La Russa said, paid for the team to fly down to Arizona, where they worked out at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, and they won the next two games when they got back to the Bay Area to compete the sweep.
For their part, the Giants had stayed in California, where they answered questions about whether they should have followed the A’s out of town.
Flash forward a decade and a half to La Russa’s 2006 St. Louis Cardinals. The Cards that season squeaked into the postseason with an 83-78 record. And in the NCLS, they found themselves in a sevengame battle against the Mets.
The AL-champ Detroit Tigers, meanwhile, had won 95 games and easily qualified for the wild card. They swept the Oakland A’s in the ACLS and were off for a full week before the World Series began.
The competition-honed Cardinals defeated the out-of-rhythm Motown team four games to one.
Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo seems to know how important it is to keep his team ready. He gave a bunch of guys the day off immediately after clinching, then said he was going to try to do things as normally as possible. It showed on Wednesday.
“It was a just a really, really good ninth inning for me, for things that really don’t mean much outside of the win for things like staying on pitches, using the entire field, good approaches, running the bases aggressively … those are the signature things that this team has done all year long.”