Gallen whiffs career-high 10, ends his season on solid note
At various points on Friday evening, Diamondbacks right-hander Zac Gallen elicited an awkward half-swing from the Colorado Rockies’ Kevin Pillar for a strikeout. He punched out Trevor Story, one of the better hitters in the game, by locking him up on a well-placed fastball. And he worked his trademark magic in the relatively few tight spots in which he found himself.
Gallen’s performance in the first game of a doubleheader at Chase Field seemed like a fitting end to what has been a marvelous season for the Diamondbacks’ young starter. He tossed six scoreless innings in a 4-0 victory, striking out10 and walking two. He lowered his ERA to 2.75.
After setting a major league record for consecutive starts to open a career without allowing more than three runs, Gallen struggled in back-to-back outings against the San Francisco Giants and Seattle Mariners. It was, in some ways, his first taste of adversity at the big-league level.
But Friday marked the second solid start in a row after that rough stretch. He said he was pleased to be able to end his season on that kind of note. He said he tries not to pay attention to stats during the year but finds it nearly impossible, particularly with stadium video boards broadcasting them in massive point size.
“Numbers don’t really matter,” Gallen said, “but I’m glad I have something to show for how I felt this year and the kind of groove I got into. It put a good stamp on the end of this season and feeling good heading into the offseason.”
The win was the Diamondbacks’ third in a row, giving them their first win streak of that length since mid-August. They were 23-34 as they began play in the nightcap of the doubleheader.
Gallen finished with numbers that were striking similar to those from his rookie season last year. But he said he saw many areas in which he improved. He cut back on his walks. He worked deeper into games. And he found a solution to his woes in terms of controlling the running game, adding a slide step to his delivery that made running on him far more difficult.
But perhaps the biggest improvement came in a sort of intangible realm: his delivery.
“I felt like I was in a better place,” Gallen said. “I talk about my delivery a lot. It was one of those things where I started to feel like I understood how things need to work, where things need to move in space, things like that. Just trying to make things more repeatable. Consistent shapes and movements out of certain pitches is usually a factor in that.”
If he is able to continue to build off the strides he made in that department, Gallen could be even better in the coming years. While that seems, in some ways, hard to imagine, Gallen noted that his season was basically undone by two bad innings against the Giants and Mariners. Take out the eight runs he allowed in those innings and Gallen’s ERA drops a full run to 1.75. And instead of talking about merely a great season, he could be talking about a Cy
Young-caliber season.
Gallen also noted that, though his walks were down overall, there were three starts in which he walked 14 combined. If he can have fewer bouts of wildness, the late innings ought to become the norm for his outings.
“That was something (pitching coach Matt Herges) had talked about,” Gallen said. “If you want to get to the elite of the elite, those guys are going seven, eight, nine innings almost every time they’re out there. That’s something I’ll take into the offseason and try to improve on.”