Diamondbacks Gameday Thread, #54: 5/29 vs. Rockies

Roster moves

The Arizona Diamondbacks made the following roster moves:

• Reinstated OF Kristian Robinson from the restricted list and optioned to Single-A Visalia.
• Designated RHP Peter Solomon for assignment.

It’s been a while, but Robinson is now back in “active” baseball. The last time he played in affiliated games was back in 2019. The following year, the minor-league season was wiped out by COVID-19, and while that was happening, Kristian was arrested for assaulting a police officer in April 2020. The legal ramifications of this have rumbled on for more than three years, leaving him in limbo while Robinson sought to get his life together. However, he is still only aged 22, so there remains a chance he can turn this around. Kristian was a top 100 prospect before... all that /gestures off-screen, ranked as high as #15 by Baseball Prospectus at one point. We’ll see what transpires, and wish him the best.

Ranking the power rankings (somewhat)

Presumably due to the holiday, we have a limited set of power rankings at the time of writing (11 am). MLB and CBS Sports have yet to publish anything this week, but here’s what the others have to say in regard to the Diamondbacks. I’ll circle back round to this tomorrow, when presumably the two missing ones have finished barbecuing. Our collated NL West ranking and graph of the teams’ progress will follow once we’ve got a full set of data with which to work. As usual, the ESPN rankings came out before the weekend, so will exclude the Red Sox series.

• FOX Sports: #8 (last week: #8) - “Speaking of early award front-runners, Zac Gallen leads all qualified major-league pitchers in Fangraphs’ version of WAR. The Gallen-Merrill Kelly combo is doing wonders for the D-backs’ rotation.”
• USA Today: #8 (last week: #7) - “Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s eight homers already surpass last year’s total.”
• ESPN: #9 (last week: #11) - “The Diamondbacks seemed to fall back down to Earth at the start of May but are red-hot once again, winning nine of their past 12 games to somehow put themselves within striking distance of the Dodgers in the National League West. Wednesday’s late loss aside, the best sign from that stretch might be coming from their bullpen. D-backs relievers had the sixth-highest ERA in the majors last year, but they sport a 3.83 ERA over the team’s past dozen games. Andrew Chafin, Miguel Castro and Scott McGough, who make up the back end of the bullpen, have combined to give up only one run in 19⅓ innings during that stretch. Small sample size, sure, but the D-backs will gladly take it.”