Diamondbacks Gameday Thread, #44: 5/15 vs. Reds

Well, at least today is a fresh pitching match-up, rather than the previously used encounters we have seen for the first two games of this series. Indeed, Arizona has never seen Andrew Abbott, and Brandon Pfaadt has only two starts against Cincinnati. Both of those came last season, and he went 1-1 with a 3.97 ERA. Abbott has been pretty decent, but his two wins so far came against the Giants and the White Sox. On the other hand, he has allowed more than two earned runs only once in the eight starts (against Texas on April 28, when he gave up four over 5.1 innings), so he has certainly been keeping the Reds in those games.

Pfaadt, meanwhile, has not picked up a victory since his first outing of the season, against the Rockies. The results have been mixed overall, but there’s a worrying trend about not being able to pitch at Chase since that Colorado outing. Indeed, the D-backs are only 2-6 overall in Brandon’s appearances. But I also note that pitching at home has been an issue for the D-backs generally. At Chase the team has an ERA of 4.66, compared to 3.95 on the road. With about 190 innings in each bucket, that’s not a small sample, and is very different to last year, when the same ERA splits (with more or less the same pitching staff) were 4.18 and 4.81. BABIP might explain some of that, but probably not all.

Meanwhile, Kevin Newman has had four consecutive multi-hit games for the D-backs. The last 5-gamer was Pavin Smith in May 25-29, 2021. However, Newman is only half-way to the franchise record, which is an impressive eight. That was by Ketel Marte in June 2019, over which time Marte had 21 hits, and batted .636...