Diamondbacks 1, San Diego 5: Meaningless Baseball

We’re nearly at the end of our journey with the 2025 Arizona Diamondbacks. It’s been quite the ride, and while I’ve written a final recap each year that I’ve been on the staff of the Snake Pit, I felt a bit different as I’ve periodically been thinking about it since our season ended last night. Because there have been a number of seasons when we were long past being a part of the relevance conversation by the time my last turn came up, and last year, we were still hoping for a return to the postseason even after I recapped our final Saturday loss of 2024. But this one came upon me while I was still getting used to the idea that, no, we weren’t in it anymore, and we weren’t playing for much of anything tonight. It was weird, and kind of sad. I expect I wasn’t the only one who was feeling that way today.

To be fair, we did (and do) still have a bit to play for, though mainly it comes down to pride and some individual players’ baseball card numbers. That still matters, though, especially when you’ve been following a team day in and day out since the middle of March. Today it was whether we would be able to finish the season with a winning record (SPOILER: We will not), and perhaps more importantly, if Geraldo Perdomo could hit some rather remarkable statistical landmarks to put a few exclamation points on the truly extraordinary season that young man has put forth for our team this season.

Gerry entered game 161 sitting at 19 home runs on the season, 97 runs scored, and 98 RBIs. Also, fun fact, he came into tonight having played, in at least some capacity, in 159 of the 160 games we’d played up to that point. Sadly, though, the lineup card that was posted this afternoon, aside from Gabriel Moreno, Blaze Alexander, and Gerry himself, read like a who’s who of “Players Most Likely to Be Looking for a Job Come November”. Along with the three mentioned above, we had Connor Kaiser, Jorge Barrosa, Ildemaro Vargas, Adrian Del Castillo, Alek Thomas, and Jake McCarthy. Especially given Gerry was leading off, and the bottom three in the lineup were Jake, Barrosa and Kaiser, it didn’t seem like there were gonna be a whole lot of RBI opportunities on offer for Gerry tonight.

But anyway, there was still a baseball game, so I suppose we should talk about that. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. We put runners on first and second with two outs in the top of the first, but Alek Thomas flew out weakly to center on the first pitch he saw for the third out, so we got nothing. Eduardo Rodriguez took the mound, and sevcn pitches later, we were down by three runs, thanks to a Fernando Tatis Jr. leadoff homer, a Luis Arraez single, and a Xander Bogaerts two-run shot. 3-0 San Diego

In the bottom of the second, Ryan O’Hearn led off the inning with a single, and one out later, was driven home by the third dinger ERod had allowed during his first trip through the San Diego lineup. 5-0 San Diego

And that, simply put, was that.

Blaze Alexander got hit by a pitch and left the game, to be replaced by Tim Tawa, who’s likely also a name on that Who’s Who list. Morero, Del Castillo, and Tawa managed to walk the bases loaded in the third, but again there were two outs, and again Alek Thomas came to the plate, and again he swung at the first pitch he saw and this time grounded it to second for the final out.

We had other chances, too—Vargas hit a leadoff single against Kaz Matsui to start the fourth, who’d come on to relieve Padres starter Michael King when King started walking people in the third, but immediately TOOTBLANned himself into an out at second. Jake McCarthy hit a triple down into the right field corner, but was stranded there by Barrosa and Kaiser.

I think at this point I remarked in the Gameday Thread that, if Gerry wanted to make any of his milestones tonight, he was probably gonna have to take matters into his own hands. Somewhat hilariously, just after I hit send on that comment, he came to the plate to lead off the top of the fifth and did just that, launching a bomb over the wall in left field for his 20th home run of the season:

To underscore just how remarkable Geraldo Perdomo’s emergence has been this year, up to this point he’s never played in more than 148 games in a single season. He’s never hit more than 6 home runs. He’s never scored more than 71 runs. He’s never driven in more than 47 runs. This homer put him at 20 HRs, 98 runs scored, and 99 RBIs. As soon as I get done with this, I’m ordering myself a Perdomo jersey (not just the tee shirt with his name and number), and I will wear it proudly on game days going forward. I love this man. 5-1 San Diego

And that was entirely that, aside from some random side notes:

• Despite getting shelled in the first two innings, Eduardo Rodriguez did in fact settle down, and wound up pitching six innings total. Once he was through the second, he pitched three perfectly clean innings and a fourth where all he gave up was a one-out single. His pitch counts in the third through sixth innings were 12, 12, 12, and 13. ERod is such a weird cat….even when he has a trash outing, he still managed to eat innings and pitch really effectively for substantial stretches. I’m reminded of that game earlier in the season (or maybe it was last year) when he gave up six earned runs but also recorded something like 13 strikeouts in the same outing. He’s really baffling, and kind of maddening. I don’t even know what else to say.
• The two representatives tonight of our much- (and justifiably-) maligned bullpen kept that up, with Andrew Hoffman pitching a scoreless seventh in his return to the bigs, and Taylor Rashi pitching a perfectly clean bottom of the eighth. But it wasn’t nearly enough, given ERod’s bad performance in the first two innings and our offense’s failure to get any useful hits when they were needed. And so it goes.

Loss Probability Added, courtesy of FanGraphs

Biggest Loser: Eduardo Rodriguez (6 IP, 6 H, 6 ER, 3 HR, 1 BB, 6 K, -29.4% WPA)
Runner-Up: (4 AB, 0 H, 2 K, 11 total pitches seen, -10.8% WPA)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a sparsely-attended Gameday Thread tonight, with all of 140 comments at time of writing. Partly because the scarcity of comments, and also the scarcity of people to view the comments, there were only a couple that went Sedona Cantaloupe, so despite it not being exactly relevant to game action, I’m giving the penultimate Comment of the Game to 1AZFan1, who probably enjoyed the night much more than the rest of us did, which is well-deserved, especially given that he was tasked with writing up the obituary for the Diamondbacks 2025 season last night:

I hope it was a lovely evening at the ballpark, even if the results left something to be desired!

Anyway. It’s an early game tomorrow, as the last day of the regular season has every game scheduled for the same start time, adjusted for time zone. For our purposes, that means first pitch is scheduled for 12:10pm AZ time, with Brandon Pfaadt going for us and JP Sears, a very secondary piece of the trade deadline deal that brought Mason Miller from West Sacramento to San Diego, goes for them. Join us for what will likely be the bittersweet final game of this bittersweet 2025 season, as we try to avoid one last sweep and my sweetie TheRealRamona prepares to provide the final guest recap of the season.

Thanks to you all for another season of Diamondbacks baseball—it’s been a pleasure, as it is every year, of sharing the season with the baseball family here at the Pit. As always, thanks for reading, and as always, go Diamondbacks!