Snake Bytes, 4/26: Driving the bus edition

Recaps

[Arizona Sports] Segura, Owings lead D-backs' big 6th inning to beat Cardinals - "Swinging the bat well," Chip Hale said. "That was a quick home run. It was big. All the hits that led up — Greinke’s slash getting by the third baseman there — are just huge, especially after falling behind like we did. That was a big, big inning for us." Greinke showed bunt but pulled back to whack a hit past third baseman Matt Carpenter. "They’re charging and the third baseman was playing really close," Greinke said, adding that he felt he could pull a hit to the left side off starting pitcher Jaime Garcia. "Just thought all the things lined up it was the smart thing to do. Ended up helping us in a long inning."

[AZ Central] Bus-driving Zack Greinke hit hard in Diamondbacks win - He rattled off a couple of examples of ones he’d like back -- a pitch to Yadier Molina, his last one of the game to Hazelbaker -- then said, "Besides that, pretty decent." But Greinke seemed at least willing to consider the thought that good pitches in other parks might not be good pitches at Chase Field. Greinke managed one of the better pitching seasons in recent baseball history last year by relentlessly pounding the outer third of the plate. But, this season, Greinke has been burned a few times at Chase despite hitting his spot on the outside corner. It happened at least a couple of more times on Monday night.

[FOX Sports] Jean Segura, Diamondbacks pounce on Cardinals bullpen in 9-run inning - Siegrist in his career had held opposing right-handed hitters to a .179 batting average. But after Segura fouled off a couple two-strike pitches he clobbered a fastball and sent it into the left-field bleachers to give the D-backs the lead. They poured it on from there. "You don't expect to have that kind of offense after you play so many innings," said Segura, who is hitting .352 and already has four home runs after he hit six last season and five in 2014. "In this sport you have to have some talent but need some luck, too."

[dbacks.com] Zack Greinke wins despite allowing seven runs - "It was important," Hale said of Greinke managing to eat some innings. "Even when he fell behind, we felt real comfortable with leaving him out there at least to give us seven or maybe even eight if we were down, as much as his pitch count would allow to let the bullpen rest a little bit. So it was huge." Greinke almost made it through seven, but after retiring the first two hitters of the inning he allowed a home run, infield single and a triple. "I thought I did all right," Greinke said. "It's kind of embarrassing that I gave up seven runs thinking you did all right."

Team news

[AZ Central] Lamb continues to sit vs. lefties - Drury hasn’t disappointed in regular at-bats and while that depth is certainly valuable, it also creates the challenge of how best to disperse opportunity. "It has been tough," manager Chip Hale said. "That’s what I told Jake (Monday). I said, ‘This is just the way our roster is constructed right now with Dru here. We need to get him at-bats.’ This is the spot where it fits the best, and he understands. That’s the great thing about this group of guys. They understand. They don’t like to sit on the bench. They don’t like to be out for a game, but they know we have 12 position players that all could start."

[dbacks.com] D-backs' Josh Collmenter could be back May 3 - Collmenter's rehab has consisted primarily of rest and working on body-mechanics exercises to loosen up his core and shoulder. He did not have any surgical procedures. "Everything feels better, a lot better a lot more normal, so throwing off the mound a couple of times is nice," Collmenter said. "It was good that it wasn't anything where I had to take a lot of time off. I think I only took a couple of days off of throwing, and then I would throw and maybe give it a day's break, and two days of throwing and then off. Now, it's pretty much throwing every day, and it feels good."

[NumberFire] Shelby Miller Joins a Rare List of Pitchers Who Were Forced to Play Outfield - Miller actually had to make two plays during his brief time in the outfield. The first was that nicely played carom off the wall, the second was fielding a routing looping single to left by another pitcher, Jonathon Niese. Miller also had to bat in the bottom of the 13th inning as the tying run. He struck out. What happened with Miller is a pretty rare occurrence. According to Baseball Reference, a pitcher has played the outfield in a Major League game just 300 times since 1950.

[AZ Central] Diamondbacks forced to shuffle roster again - Hale said that when he informed Marshall and Wagner they were being sent down on Monday, he told them it had little to do with the way they pitched. It’s been like that with most of the moves the team has made. "I would say the majority of the send-downs have been, ‘Hey, you’re not available for two or three days and we need an arm tonight,’" Hale said. "… On a championship team, which we want to be and which we’re fighting to be, you’re going to need 50, 60 guys in the end."

[Inside the 'Zona] Smoothing Out the Seams: Fastball Woes Weighing Down the Rotation - Though hardly a predictive measure, looking at specific pitch values can help us understand just how bad these results have been. Coming into Sunday, Diamondbacks starters were a combined -14.2 fastball runs below average – this includes only the aforementioned two and four-seam fastballs. Put into a rate stat (wFB/100) for easier comparisons, for every 100 fastballs thrown, they have culminated into being -1.36 runs below average. How bad is that? It would tie the team’s worst month last year, September, in regards to wFB/100.

And, elsewhere...

[CBS] Baseball's "Magna Carta" sells for $3.3M, reveals new "father" - Documents that baseball historians have called the Magna Carta of the game have sold at auction for nearly $3.3 million. SCP auctions says the 1857 papers called the "Laws of Baseball" sold early Sunday to an anonymous buyer after more than two weeks of bidding. The documents thoroughly change the early history of baseball, making Daniel Lucius "Doc" Adams the proper father of the modern game, and putting its birth date three years earlier than had been expected.

[FiveThirtyEight] Statheads Are The Best Free Agent Bargains In Baseball - Of course, baseball’s broadcast bubble might eventually burst, reversing the rise in revenue and forcing teams to economize. In that event, some would likely decide that stats, video and tracking systems such as Statcast and Kinetrax make scouting positions expendable, although they would probably also slash the budgets and support for their R&D staffs. Barring that type of catastrophe, though, baseball’s front-office hiring boom is unlikely to slow any time soon.

[SBNatio] Generate your own minor league baseball franchise! - I got, I kid you note, "The Las Vegas Airport Centipedes", certainly a concept fitting the surreal environment for which that city is justly renowned.