MLB report: The Diamondbacks are playing like one of the National League’s elite.
With every PHILADELPHIA passing day, more evidence seems to emerge suggesting the Arizona Diamondbacks are a cut above most teams in the National League. They often will roundly beat the opposition — outslugging them, outpitching them or merely playing better fundamentally, or by doing several or all of these things at once — and they will watch the gap grow in the standings between the teams that are good and those that are not.
The Diamondbacks are keeping pace with the Colorado Rockies and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West — the three clubs were within one game of each other in the division, with the Rockies leading the way — as the trio creep a bit farther from the rest of the pack in what might be a competitive wild-card race.
Entering the week, the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers had strangleholds on the two wildcard spots, leading by nine games over the next-closest team. Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen, however, wasn’t quite buying it.
“I still think it’s early enough that that’s all going to shift,” Hazen said. “We still need to continue to play good baseball. I think there’s a lot of really good teams that, over the course of 162, we’ll see who they really are. Looking at it, the competitiveness of it today, I think it’s probably a little misleading.”
He might be right, but there’s some reason to believe the NL is what it is. Look at every team’s run differential, which is generally a barometer of how good a club is. As of last weekend, the NL had one team with a nonwinning record that had a positive run differential, and that was the World Series champion Chicago Cubs, a club most think will eventually awaken and win the NL Central.
Every other club with a losing record had been outscored by its opponents, which suggests that their losing records were earned.
The NL West race, at least, figures to be a good one, and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts helped, in a way, to put it in context.
“We realize we’re the best team in the division,” he told reporters during the weekend.
The quote seemed to catch Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo off guard. He gave a diplomatic answer about the Dodgers and the fact that they’re the division’s defending champs — four-time defending champs, actually — but didn’t seem to want to say much else.
“If he believes that, then he needs to say what he feels,” Lovullo said of Roberts. “It’s obvi- ously something that he believes enough in his team to say.” Does that mean he disagrees? “We’ll leave it at that,” Lovullo said.
The Diamondbacks were playing a three-game series with the Rockies at Coors Field this week, their first look at one of the NL’s top teams since an early May series against the Washington Nationals.
In the meantime, they’ve been doing what good teams are supposed to do: hammering the bad ones. Their sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies during the weekend improved their record to 30-14 against clubs with under.500 records. Only the Houston Astros (29-12) and Dodgers (2711) have been better.
“We’ve been able to not play down to our competition, I guess,” Diamondbacks utility man Daniel Descalso said. “We’ve been able to beat those teams that we’re supposed to beat.
“Our division is tough. It’s three really good teams right now that we’re going to battle with and are going to be playing a lot down the stretch. We’re going to have to keep playing the way we are, keep grinding, because those two teams are playing really well right now, too. We’re right up there with them.”