Arizona Diamondbacks: September Confidence Poll

I’d almost forgotten about this - the words "Diamondbacks" and "confidence" aren’t exactly commonly associated by my mind. It was only when I saw the spreadsheet tracking this, when I was updating the "Place Your Bets" stats [that report will be out tomorrow morning], that I realized the calendar had turned another page, meaning it was time to take a look at how we feel once more. Actually, August wasn’t too bad: we reached the final game with a shot at our first winning month of the year, although didn’t quite pull that off. We got Zack Greinke and A.J. Pollock back from injury, and Shelby Miller also returned, and... failed to suck, albeit in a small sample-size. But first, the results from the beginning of August.

• 76% - 1 (not confident in the slightest)
• 15% - 2
• 5% - 3
• 2% - 4
• 1% - 5
• 0% - 6
• 0% - 7
• 0% - 8
• 2% - 9 (very, very, VERY confident)

A further clustering of votes down at the bottom, with more than three-quarters awarding their confidence the lowest mark possible. At the other end, 2% bravely continued to believe everything was just dandy in the Diamondbacks world, which can surely only be ascribed to some pharmaceutical-grade drugs. Here’s how the numbers break down, month-by-month.

You can certainly see how dominant the 1’s have now become, exploding steadily. Amazing to think that only two people voted "1" or "2" in our first poll in January. At that point, those would appear to have been the ones on something, yet how right they turned out to be. Putting it all together, this gives us an overall confidence rating of 1.47 for the beginning of August, which is down 0.32 from the figure for the previous month. Below, you can see how the confidence ratings have changed over the course of the year.

It’ll be interesting to see if things get any worse this month. Personally, I feel a little better: the return of A.J. Pollock and the team’s apparent failure to exercise the option of Dave Stewart give me some cause to hope for change, and the team certainly played better in August than July, Do other people feel similarly? That’s what the poll below is for and, as ever, feel free to expand on the reasoning for your choice in the comments section.