Preview, #27: Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Colorado Rockies

Oh, great: we're trying to avoid getting swept, and Torey Lovullo runs his white flag line-up out there. An outfield of Descalso, Hazelbaker and Peralta is not what I want to see after the bed-crapping which was last night's ninth inning. Since his incredibly hot start, Hazelbaker has turned into liquid nitrogen, with one hit since April 8; Descalso had two hits in the last three weeks and is batting .128 for the season. Of course, you can't predict baseball, so they'll probably both have multi-hit games, with Descalso getting a walk-off hit. I guess we can only keep our fingers crossed that's the case, anyway.

Yeah, I'm still grumpy. That game last night was the worst one of the year, even though it wasn't Rodney's worst meltdown, with the first one having a bigger negative Win Probability. [Fun fact - for some loose definition of the word "fun": Rodney now has #1 and #15 of the worst WP figures by any Diamondback since the end of the 2008 season. He posted them in consecutive outings] I was looking forward to a nice night, watching a movie, but it took several hours before I was able to do much more apart from stomp around the house and rant on social media. Thank heavens for MST3K's rendition of Starcrash, or I probably wouldn't have been able to get to sleep.

But, having done so, and with last night's hysteria behind me, I can view things with a calmer and clearer head this morning. It's in that light, I say: Rodney must go. While his peripherals have not been so bad as to justify his ERA (his FIP is 5.40, his xFIP 4.46 - the latter is less than one-tenth higher than what he posted in 2016), they still aren't what you want to see from a closer. Among all the relievers used this year, his FIP is worse than everyone bar Randall Delgado and Silvino Bracho. His xFIP above everyone bar Bracho and Tom Wilhelmsen. So it's not as if the team lacks better options. Use them while we see if Rodney can be fixed (and I'm not optimistic about that...).