Late in the most improbable season any of them has ever experienced, as they stormed to the most unlikely pennant in the last decade, as they snatched a victory in the most unexpected place, something entirely foreseeable happened: The Diamondbacks’ best player started playing like it.
Foreseeable and foreseen: As they rode the hotel elevator on the way to Citizens Bank Park Tuesday afternoon, left fielder Tommy Pham turned to stud rookie right fielder Corbin Carroll. “It’s your turn today,” Pham said. A few hours later, as they crossed paths near the bat rack, ace Zac Gallen reminded Carroll, “Hey, man, we don’t need you to be anybody else. Just be yourself.”
And then Carroll, who was 3-for-23 through the National League Championship Series, took charge of Game 7, either scoring or driving in each of Arizona’s runs in a 4–2 victory that sent them to the World Series, which starts Friday against the Rangers.
“We won this game tonight because of Corbin,” says general manager Mike Hazen. “He’s the player we thought he was gonna be.”
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Carroll, 23, debuted last August and immediately rewrote the Diamondbacks’ rebuild timeline. His 134 OPS+ was eighth in the league this year, and he stole 54 bases and played a capable right field. He was an All-Star and will almost certainly win the National League Rookie of the Year award. When you watch him play, you can see why the Diamondbacks are in the World Series. But the most remarkable part is that for the last week, they’ve advanced this far largely without him. After batting .412 over the first two series, he entered the night with an OPS of .330.
“He’s a superstar,” Gallen says. “And you can only keep a superstar down for so long.”
After Game 2, Carroll says, he and the team’s four hitting coaches identified a mechanical issue with his hands. He declines to be more specific about what it was or about why he doesn’t want to talk about it, saying, “Please don’t ask the hitting coaches about it,” but he says he has felt “a little more freedom up there at the plate.” However it happened, Carroll became the second-youngest player with three hits and two steals in a playoff game, after a 21-year-old Ty Cobb did it in the 1908 World Series. Again and again, Carroll quieted the famously hostile Philadelphia crowd. This might have seemed impossible two days ago, when even manager Torey Lovullo conceded, “It seems like they’re just one step ahead of him. They pitch him in, and he’s looking away. He’s looking away, they pitch him in.” But Carroll knew he was not far away.
“Six games ago you would have said that I was the hottest hitter on the planet, right?” he says, shivering as the champagne soaking his body cools. “I think it’s easy to get caught up in the day and get caught up in just the minute. But just realizing that that’s all it is, right? It’s just a little hitch of things not going your way. That was kind of my mindset. That’s kind of just true in general of me, too. In the end I think everything evens out eventually.”
The Diamondbacks better hope that’s not quite true. These underdogs have been outplaying all common sense recently, and they will need to keep it up for at least four more games. Rookie Brandon Pfaadt, who had a 5.72 ERA in the regular season, spun four innings of two-run ball in Game 7 to raise his NLCS ERA to 1.86. Center fielder Alek Thomas, who had a .647 OPS this season, had a .937 OPS this series with two home runs in 17 plate appearances. A bullpen that had a 4.34 ERA in the regular season, good for 21st in baseball, did not allow a run in nine innings across Games 6 and 7.
If you had told most people in March—hell, if you had told them in September—the Diamondbacks would be here, they would have said, “Pfaadt chance.” (It’s pronounced “fought,” but there was no way I was giving up that line.) This team won only 84 games and would have missed the playoffs under the previous, 10-team format. It was outscored by 15 runs in the regular season. At the beginning of the season, FanGraphs gave the Diamondbacks better odds to finish last than it did to make it even to the Division Series. As late as Aug. 11, they were under .500.
But anything can happen in the postseason, and anything has. Arizona swept the Brewers, who won 92 games, then swept the Dodgers, who won 100. The 90-win Phillies took them to seven games. Then Carroll woke up, and somehow, the Diamondbacks are four wins away from a title, and they have their best player back.
No one saw this coming, including the Diamondbacks. But they can see it now.
