The D-backs came home from Los Angeles on Wednesday night feeling pretty good about themselves, having taken two of three games from the Dodgers, including a dominant win in the finale.
Maybe the early-season funk they’d been in really was dissipating and the defending National League champs were finding their rhythm.
The D-backs had Thursday off and when they reconvened to open a three-game series with the Marlins on Friday, manager Torey Lovullo shared a message with his hitters. Arizona has dropped five of six games following an off-day, a fact that bench coach Jeff Banister had pointed out to Lovullo, so the manager wanted to try to get in front of it.
“I wanted to let them know, hey, you guys have done a lot right, and it’s still go-time,” Lovullo said. “It doesn’t mean stop today. It means get up on the horse and ride it.”
The D-backs may have received that message, but Braxton Garrett, the Marlins starter, didn’t let them heed it as he out-dueled Zac Gallen and tossed a four-hit shutout as the Marlins won 3-0 at Chase Field.
On paper, it looked like a good matchup for the D-backs, with the Marlins sporting the third-worst record in baseball. However, they’ve been hot lately. Friday was their seventh win in their last 10 games, and the shutout was their fifth in the previous nine games.
Meanwhile, the D-backs will have to figure out how to play better after off-days, having now fallen to 1-6 in games following them.
“I’m not going to say I don’t like off-days, but sometimes they do throw a wrench into things,” first baseman Christian Walker said. “You just get into such a routine of playing every day and seeing a certain amount of live stuff, and seeing pitches coming at you. I try to go out of my way coming back from an off-day to get back into the mix. I try to do like early, on-field velocity stuff just to get the eyes and the body back up to speed. It’s something that everybody handles differently. But it does feel like maybe it can mess up the flow sometimes. Everybody’s got to do it, but we’ve got to figure out a way to be better.”
Garrett deserves his share of credit for how the D-backs played Friday. The left-hander threw strike after strike and kept his two-seamer low in the strike zone or just below it.
The D-backs wanted to be patient with him and make him get the ball up, “but also it felt like everybody was starting out 0-1, 0-2, so when he’s filling up the zone like that, we’ve got to swing,” Walker said.
And when they started swinging, Garrett used that to his advantage and kept the ball out of areas where the D-backs could do damage.
“Their pitcher [Garrett] threw the ball really good today,” Lovullo said. “It’s hard to throw 92 pitches in a complete game and get around the lineup four times, so he had good stuff, and I think that’s part of the equation too.”
Another factor was that the balls the D-backs did hit hard were hit right at someone. They hit seven balls on a line or in the air at 95 mph or harder and yet came away with nothing to show for it in the run department.
The lack of offense wasted Gallen’s good start. While he didn’t feel at his best, Gallen still managed to get through seven innings with just three runs allowed.
Gallen retired the Marlins on six pitches in the first inning and did not allow a hit in innings six and seven. In between, he felt like his mechanics got a little out of whack.
“The second through the fifth, I felt like I was kind of grinding out there,” Gallen said. “I just didn’t feel particularly sharp. It kind of clicked in the sixth and the seventh a little bit. I felt like I started to get back to what had been working the last few starts. Just being able to recognize that maybe a little bit quicker. It’s definitely a grind, but I just tried to do my job, keep us in it, give us a chance to win.”
