The highest run producing offense in the National League is not the Dodgers nor the Nationals not even the any of the juggernauts of the NL Central but rather a team from one of the hottest, driest places in the country, the Arizona diamondbacks.
With 567 runs, the Diamondbacks have sneakily scored the most runs in the National League. Like snakes in the grass, the Diamondbacks have sneaked their way back into the NL West to only 6.5 games back from the Dodgers (well, used to be 5.5 before last night). That would be one hell of a story, and would easily propel one of the greatest players in the league right now into a well-deserved MVP award. The player’s name is Paul Goldschmidt or as I like to call him “The Destroyer of Worlds”. Goldschmidt has a .327/.442/.561 slash line with 24 home runs, 79 runs, 93 RBIs, and 20 SBs and yes, that is more than both Harper and Trout have combined. With these kinds of numbers it seems as if Paul Goldschmidt creates a run all by himself every time he comes to the plate. While those are certainly some nice personal statistics, you can’t expect Goldschmidt to be the reason for all 567 of those runs.
Well for starters let me throw one fact at you. The Diamondbacks have the highest percentage of hard hit contact in the league at 31.7%. For those of you who don’t understand the meaning of that number think about it this way: When you make good contact on the ball, hit hard long drives, hit hard fly balls, hit hard groundballs, there’s a better chance that you will get a quality hit from that type of contact. A hard hit groundball is much harder to field then a weak one while a hard hit fly ball has a better chance of leaving the yard. Paul “The Destroyer of Worlds” Goldschmidt is indeed a great contributor to this number with a 40.0% hard hit rate. However, even at 6’3” weighing in at 225 lbs, he does not have the highest on the team by a long shot. That title belongs to a player with the same name as a gourmet dish.
The cheeky fellow in the picture above is Welington Castillo who his fans and teammates like to call “BeefMode” because of the dish, Beef Wellington, that goes by the same name as him. And as you can tell from this picture, he has having the time of his life but not just because of that fancy meat. He might have finally locked up a starting job for the first time in his 5-year major league career. From 2010-2014, he played on a Cubs team that treated him as a backup or at best a stopgap for something better. He had stretches of greatness but was never really given the chance to lock down the starting job. This year didn’t seem like it was going to turn out to great as well because in fact, the Diamondbacks are his third team this year after going from the Cubs to the Mariners and finally in a deal that resulted in Mark Trumbo being sent to Seattle, Castillo ended up in Arizona. He has managed to become the starting catcher on a team that has already gone through 6 of them this year. So what could be causing this sudden burst of greatness?
Well for one thing, Castillo has a whopping hard hit rate of 47.2%! He has been squaring up the ball in a homer happy park like Chase Field, and this has lead to fantastic results: a .272/.349/.576 slash line along with 15 home runs, 28 runs, and 36 RBIs in 55 games, allowing him to amass a 1.8 WAR (an advanced statistic that judges a player against the standard at his/her position) over this small span. This puts him at around a 40 home run pace! You probably can’t expect him to become a 40 home run guy just like that but his fly ball rate has been up in his stint with the Diamondbacks (46.5%) compared to his career percentage (38.7%). Making hard contact on a large amount of fly balls in Chase Field will definitely help you produce the home run numbers of your career. So while this could just be a fluke, the Diamondbacks have essentially wasted nothing on a gamble with low risk (a struggling Mark Trumbo) and high reward. As of this moment, the Diamondbacks are only reaping the reward.
The next group of players I’d like to talk about is a group of outfielders that have silently amassed the second highest (Royals rate first) WAR in the league. The main perpetrators of this group are AJ Pollock, David Peralta, and Ender Inciarte who have hard hit rates of 34.2%, 36.6%, and 27.7% respectively. So while the first two contribute more so than the other, I’d like to highlight just how similar the first two players are. As mentioned earlier they both have hard hit rates of around the same but they also feature similar eerily similar slash lines with each other. Pollock with a .324/.376/.494 slash line and Peralta with a .303/.368/.520 slashline. Their home runs (13, both), BABIP (Peralta, .357 and Pollock, .355), and wOBA (Peralta, .377 and Pollock, .375) are nearly all the same. I can go on listing similarities forever but you can just look at them for yourself down below.
The point I’m getting across is that the Diamondbacks have been trying to develop the same type of player, a jack of all types player. A five tool player like Mike Trout who can not only play his position well but can also hit for power, average, has excellent speed, and has an arm. The Diamondbacks are essentially creating Mike Trout lites through their own version in Pollock. I always knew something was fishy…
Ender Inciarte fits this mold as well due to his speed (13 SB), average (.293), and defense as well. He has time develop his power as he gets stronger, and could very well eventually follow the mold that the Diamondbacks have tried to fashion their outfielders into. Two guys they traded before in Adam Eaton and Gerardo Parro fit into exactly the same idea:
Just a little power here, some stolen bases here, a decent average, and some fantastic defense has helped some of these players break out into capable outfielders. So I’d like to think their outfield coordinator, Joel Youngblood, who is also their base running coach is doing something pretty well. kudos to him and everybody else in the Diamondbacks’ scouting and development system for building some great outfielders.
While the Kevin Towers era will always be one of the most dysfunctional times in Diamondbacks’ history in that top pitching prospect Trevor Bauer was traded away, MarkTrumbo was brought into to do nothing, and Justin Upton was sent away for practically nothing due to a few disputes, the Diamondbacks have some nice offensive pieces to work with in a deep outfield and Paul “The Destroyer of Worlds” Goldschmidt”. Along with Welington Castillo who was brought as just a flyer this year, the Diamondbacks have created a deadly offense. We’ll see how the Diamondbacks do this year, and if they do manage taking the NL West maybe they will finally be able to take a dip in their own pool this year.
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