Diamondbacks 8, Minnesota 16: Gallen Saved the Bullpen

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The musk oxen are getting peckish.

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God, what an utterly stupid game. Zac Gallen was going for us. Turns out it didn’t matter who was going for the Twins, though for the record it was Taj Bradley. Our Mr. Gallen really outdid himself tonight, though. His ERA was was sitting at a cool 5.35 at the start of the game; it was 6.10 by the time he checked out with no outs in the fifth. Yilber Diaz made his debut in relief, and recorded two outs, and by the time he hit the showers, his ERA had reached 94.50 for the season so far. So yeah. It was like that.

Basically, it was garbage time the whole way through. Okay, maybe not through the first three innings—Gallen gave up two in the first, to make it 2-0 Minnesota, but then actually recorded two quick, clean innings in which he only threw 17 pitches total. But he got nickel-and-dimed in the bottom of the fourth, as the Twins started the inning with a strikeout followed by five straight singles before Gallen recorded the second out, and then there was a sixth single and a walk before the frame finally ended with four more runs having crossed the plate and the Twins batting around to bring the score to 6-0 Minnesota.

For whatever it was worth, Gallen was only at 72 pitches at that point, and most of us in the Gameday Thread had come into the game simply hoping that Gallen would eat some innings since last night we wound up using eight relievers. But Gallen came out for the fifth, gave up a triple and two singles on nine pitches, and Torey Lovullo made the choice to pull him. In came Yilber Diaz, fresh off the bus from Reno, and things really didn’t get any better. Diaz surrendered a single, a walk, and a Byron Buxton grand slam before recording the first out of the inning, and then three more singles, a double, and yet another triple before finally being pulled after only recording two outs total and allowing Minnesota to bat around on him alone. His seatmate on the bus up from Reno this morning, Philip Abner, took over and finally recorded the third out of the inning, but not before ten more runs had crossed the plate. 16-0 Minnesota

Then it really was garbage time, of course, with both teams swapping out their starters to give their bench players some at bats. Our boys made the most of ours and made the box score look a little bit respectable at least if you didn’t drill into the details. Adrian Del Castillo led off the fifth with a single, and scored two pitches later on Jorge Barrosa’s second home run of the season to narrow the gap to 16-2 Minnesota. We got five more back in the seventh thanks to Twins reliever Justin Lawrence, who walked four batters and then gave up a double and a single to get us to 16-7 Minnesota. Barrosa doubled to lead off the eighth and was driven in by Tommy Troy’s RBI single to cap the scoring at 16-8 Minnesota.

On the upside, at least, Abner pitched three scoreless innings in total, before giving way to Ildemaro Vargas—who wasn’t even in the lineup to start the game—and Ildemaro pitched the last five outs in a deeply silly relief appearance that saw his velocity range from a 71 mph fastball to a bunch of submarine eephus pitches that barely hit 31 mph on the radar gun. But hey, it meant that Gallen (and Diaz, to be fair, who threw 44 pitches in his 2/3 of an inning, and is surely going to boarding the next bus back to Nevada) did their jobs in saving the bullpen. So there’s that.

Loss Probability Added, courtesy of FanGraphs​

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No Cows Were Harmed In the Manufacture of this Product: Zac Gallen (4 IP, 12 H, 9 ER, 2 BB, 2 K, -31% WPA)

Nobody but Tommy Tory and Ketel Marte added even a couple of percentage points in the positive. But let’s face it with Gallen at this point….it’s no longer a question of sour milk or chunky milk. There’s simply no milk left in the carton anymore. Just an empty cardboard carton with a sad “Have You Seen Me” picture on the back of a curly-haired guy with glasses that, if your memory is long enough, you might just recall.

Somewhat hilariously, however, for such a wretched game, we had a stunning turnout in the Gameday Thread, with a whopping 396 comments at time of writing. Also, because I was curious and also because I may have been putting off getting started on writing up this utter sh**show, I scrolled down through the whole thread and counted up the comments that had turned Sedona Red. It turns out there were 95 of them that made the cut, which I guess tells you that Snakepitters’ generosity with recs truly comes out when things are at their darkest (or stupidest, or whatever). I mean, that’s nearly 25% of all posted comments, which is nuts. To be fair, our gallows humor game was necessarily mighty tonight, and there were many, many hilarious comments, because we are an awesome community and I love us.

Anyway, the Comment of the Game needs to go to someone, I suppose, especially with so many eligible comments to choose from. I did kinda promise it to Snake_Bitten, provided it went Red, which it did. It didn’t get nearly the most popular acclaim, but the sentiment captured so perfectly my feeling, and I suspect that of many others, when LuJames Groover finally grounded out to third for the final out in the bottom of the ninth, that I feel perfectly good about this choice:

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Myself, I think I might have wanted to kill somebody if this ordeal had dragged out any longer. So.

Anyway, join us tomorrow if you have the stomach for it, as we go for the series win tomorrow. It’s, somewhat enragingly, the second streaming-service-gated “national broadcast” of the weekend, so if you actually want to watch it you’re gonna have to have or get a Peacock subscription*. Rghthander Mike Parades takes the mound for the Twins, while we are rolling out another rookie tomorrow—AA prospect Jose Cabrera is on a bus from Amarillo as we speak so that he can come to Chase and take the mound for us tomorrow. Because….um….okay? It’s gonna be an earlier start than usual, because Peacock, so first pitch is scheduled for 12:15pm AZ time. Hope to see you in the Gameday Thread.

As always, thanks for reading, and as always, go Diamondbacks!

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