FanPost

First Home Stand Takeaway

One of the advantages of low expectations is we are easy to please. Playing the defending world champs, as depleted as they are, and then the mega bucks favorites to a "draw' on the first home stand is a won loss result we can't be too unhappy with. Sure, if we expect the team to seriously contend for the division then we should expect to go 4-2 instead of 3-3 in this situation. But as stated, with dialed down expectations, we can't be unhappy with the result.

The inability of the rotation to get past 5 innings, save for the guy making his major league debut is a problem of course. As is the consistency of the offense. When this team doesn't homer, they really struggle to score runs.

Although we actually ended up with +1 run differential for the week, make no mistake, the D Backs were seriously out hit on their home turf

Team BA OBP SLG OPS BAbip AB R H 2B 3B HR SB CS BB SO
Opponent .293 .346 .474 .820 .327 215 26 63 16 1 7 1 1 18 40
D Backs .245 .314 .360 .674 .304 200 27 49 7 2 4 2 3 17 48

Not only did our pitchers allow 14 more hits, but 9 of those were doubles and 3 of them were homers. So we can't just bemoan "The BABIP Gods". Our pitchers gave up far more hard hit balls.

And now we go on the road where we can't be expected to hit as well as we do at home.

You really need to see about 40 games, with a roughly even split of home and away games, before you have a real sense of how good the offense will be. They faced 3 really good , "ACE" level starters and 3 meh pitchers. Going forward the ACE to Meh ratio will improve somewhat. So that should help.

Still.......my advice is to keep those expectations in check and for the most part enjoy the opportunity to develop young players for the future, and take joy in whatever good baseball we get to witness. There has already been a lot of fun the first week. This is not a hard team to root for....so far. Lets see how the rotation goes.