Diamondbacks Reacts Survey results: Zach Davies gets to stay

Last week we asked you about the Diamondbacks who might nor might not still be here after the trade deadline, early in August. The three options mentioned by Gambo as possibly on the way out were Zach Davies, Ian Kennedy and David Peralta, so we posed the question: which one is NOT going to be traded? The results are in, and...

By a fractional majority, Zach Davies is expected to be around at Chase Field after August 2. All three could leave Arizona at the end of the season anyway: Peralta and Kennedy are free agents, while Davies has a 2023 mutual option, so would require both him and the team to agree for it to be exercised. That’s always tricky: if a player performs too well, he may want to try the marketplace for more money. But if he doesn’t perform well enough, the team will have no interest in bringing him back. His current 105 ERA+ leans towards the former, given his 2022 option is $1.5 million, plus incentives I’ve not been able to pin down. Even including the incentives, it’d be cheap for an above-average (so far) starter.

I was a little surprised to see twice as many people thinking Peralta is more likely to stick around than Kennedy. The surfeit of left-handed hitting outfielders would seem to make Peralta superfluous, and current his OPS+ of 115 is the highest it has been for a season since 2018. He’ll turn 35 in August, so long-term value here in Arizona, in the sense of being part of the next contending team, seems negligible. Not that the 37-year-old Kennedy is either, of course, but there’s also not as much sense of fan affection for him as the Freight Train - even if Kennedy was, technically, a Diamondback back when Peralta had returned to Venezuela and was re-inventing himself as an outfielder.

We’ll see what happens over the next five weeks. Right now, an underwhelming June would appear to have pushed Arizona firmly into the “Sell” column. They currently sit eight games back of the last wild-card spot, with only the 10th-best record in the NL. It would probably not surprise me if the correct answer to the above question was d) None of the above.

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