I Was Wrong About the Pitching Staff. The Last Ten Games Made Me Admit It.
On September 3rd, I wrote that what was underneath Arizona's winning streak should terrify the organization. I was looking at a staff bleeding 4.7 runs a game against a rotation gutted down to two functional starters, and the math was ugly. I stand by the concern. I don't stand by applying it to the present, because the present has changed.
Over the last ten games, Arizona's pitching staff has surrendered 3.3 runs per game. Against a season baseline of 4.7, that's a drop of 1.4 runs nightly — not a rounding error, not a soft schedule artifact, but a genuine and sustained reversal. The 8-2 record in that span is the headline. This number is the explanation. You don't go 8-2 by outscoring everyone; you go 8-2 by stopping them often enough that your offense doesn't have to be perfect. Arizona has been doing exactly that.
The irony is thick. The story everyone accepted — rotation decimated, eight arms on the 60-day IL, Eduardo Rodriguez and Brandon Pfaadt holding a fraying rope — was true as a structural description and misleading as a predictive one. Rodriguez at 15-5 with a 2.55 ERA has been one of the better starting pitchers in the National League all year. Pfaadt at 7-2 with a 3.32 ERA has quietly become something real. What the injury narrative missed is that a short rotation can still be effective if the two arms at the top are genuinely good and the bullpen holds. Over these ten games, the combination has held.
The September 6 win over Houston, 3-2, is the template. That is the kind of game a staff allowing 3.3 runs per night wins. It is not the kind of game a staff allowing 4.7 runs per night wins reliably. The offense doesn't need to manufacture six runs when the pitching gives it a chance to win with three. The lineup — Moreno, Arenado, Carroll, a suddenly scalding LuJames Groover — is capable of producing three runs. It has been doing it.
What I want to avoid is the overcorrection. The eight pitchers on the 60-day IL haven't healed. Merrill Kelly's season ERA remains north of five. Geraldo Perdomo is day-to-day after taking a line drive to the helmet, and losing him would put real pressure on the middle infield that Ketel Marte's return only partially relieved. The vulnerabilities are structural; the recent run prevention is behavioral. Behavioral improvements are real, but they are also more fragile than structural ones. Arizona has 47 games left and a magic number of 47, sitting in the sixth NL wild-card seed. The margin is still thin.
But the honest accounting demands this: the pitching staff is not the liability it was. For a team that has been playing survival baseball since June, that is not a minor development. It is the reason the season is still alive.