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Diamondbacks Lineup
- Ender Inciarte - CF
- Martin Prado - 3B
- Paul Goldschmidt - 1B
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Mark Trumbo - LF
- Aaron Hill - 2B
- Cody Ross - RF
- Tuffy Gosewisch - C
- Nick Ahmed - SS
- Vidal Nuno - P
It'll be our 96th game before the All-Star break, which is the most the team has played, edging past the mark of 95 in both 2008 and 2013. It's curious, we always talk about the "first half" but it's always more than that: in D-backs' team history, we've never played fewer than 85 times, in 2012, and the median is 89. I wonder why MLB doesn't have it a week earlier, at the true mid-point of the season? Our win tally to this point of 40 ranks 13th, and victory today won't alter that. The 55 first-half losses are tied with 2010 for third, trailing the 58 defeats suffered before the break in both 2004 and 1998.
Chase Anderson was scheduled to start this one, but the team are looking to reduce his innings worked a bit. Caution is understandable since, for one reason or another he has never pitched more than 127.1 innings in a single year. That was in 2012, when he worked 104 innings with Double-A Mobile, than another 23.1 in the Arizona Fall League. Between the minors and majors this season, he's already at 93.1 innings, so they may not want him to go much beyond 160, and with the off day on Thursday, they can give the start to the older Nuño without screwing up the scheduling too much.
Keen to see what Mr. Alt 0164 brings to the table, after working seven shutout innings in his D-backs debut, and being in line for the win, until a thoroughly unsatisfactory first encounter with the Addison Reed experience. AT&T Park is nicely pitcher-friendly, though the ball does fly better there during the day than at night. Hopefully, Nuño can continue to show he wasn't the worthless scrub some pundits proclaimed him to be when we traded for him.