The Rangers’ dugout emptied out, players and coaches sprinting to the joyous, incoherent rush of an infield championship pile. The Diamondbacks gradually filtered back to a quiet clubhouse. And 75-year-old Arizona pitching coach Brent Strom turned a question over in his mind.
What do you say to your ace when he has thrown the game of his life and lost?
“Nothing,” Strom says. “There’s nothing you can say. He should go home and sleep well tonight. He really should. … He put us on his back and he carried us. I’m so very proud of him.”
Diamondbacks starter Zac Gallen carried a perfect game into the fifth and a no-hitter into the seventh. He’d scuffled through most of the postseason, posting a 5.72 ERA in five starts to begin October, worn out after carrying a heavy workload for a battered staff all year. (“240-plus innings,” Strom says admiringly. “That’s old-school stuff. That’s 1970s stuff.”) But in Game 5 of the World Series, with the season on the brink, Gallen suddenly found what he needed. The 28-year-old delivered: His fastball command was impeccable. His curveball was a maddening, beautiful menace, repeatedly fooling the Rangers. His changeup worked in a way it had not in weeks. “He didn’t dance,” says Strom, using a term he likes to mean equivocating or nibbling. Gallen is a perfectionist who can be given to obsessive tinkering and tweaking. But Wednesday, he simplified his attack, and it worked.
Yet the Diamondbacks’ bats offered him no support. They stranded runners, missed chances, wasted outs against Rangers starter Nathan Eovaldi. Arizona was 0-for-9 with men in scoring position. Gallen kept on working.
“It was everything that he could possibly give us and then some,” Arizona manager Torey Lovullo said. “He kept us in the game.”
There was no thought of lifting Gallen in the seventh inning before he faced the top of the order a third time, Strom says. His pitch count was low and his stuff had not flagged. Strom felt that if Gallen could get through just a few more hitters—one last time with the meat of the lineup—he would have a serious chance to complete the no-hitter. (Gallen said that he, too, had let himself think no-hitter: “I wasn’t shying away from it,” he said.) But the first batter of the seventh was eventual World Series MVP Corey Seager. The shortstop fell behind in the count 1–2. And then he connected with a curveball off the very end of his bat for a single.
It was not a mistake by Gallen—not a bad pitch. But it was an inflection point, and the no-hitter, the game, the championship swung on that ball slicing through the left side of the infield.
“When that ball is hit, you’re at the whim of the baseball gods, so to speak,” Strom says, “And that was just unfortunate.”
Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated
Gallen worked to limit the damage. But Texas designated hitter Mitch Garver turned a fastball into a single to bring Seager home. It meant that Lovullo came to take the ball from Gallen with one out in the seventh, and the ace left the mound to a standing ovation, down 1–0.
Yet a win for the Diamondbacks was still eminently feasible against this Rangers bullpen. A comeback felt more than possible. It seemed almost warranted: Gallen’s performance felt so remarkable as to deserve some kind of salvation. But, of course, baseball has no internal sense of justice. And the Diamondbacks’ offense could not rustle up any redemption on its own.
The resulting slow burn of misery for Arizona finally exploded in the ninth inning. Diamondbacks closer Paul Sewald allowed four runs on five hits. A 1–0 deficit became 5–0; the oxygen was gone. Arizona’s hitters went quickly and quietly in the bottom of the inning to end the game and the season.
There was little to say afterward except the obvious: It felt terrible.
“I want to run away and hide for a few days. I want to go camping and just sit in the tent and suck my thumb and eat ice cream,” Lovullo told reporters when asked whether he could even contemplate thinking about next season. “Is that the weirdest answer you guys have ever had?”
This kind of loss would require time, Lovullo said. He’d told the players as much. “Let it burn,” Diamondbacks first baseman Christian Walker summarized Lovullo’s message to them. “Let it sting. Embrace that.” If they didn’t let themselves feel it now, they might never get over it.
Yet Lovullo told the Diamondbacks to be fair to themselves, too. This was a brutal way to go out. But what a ride it had been.
There are many playoff teams that make a habit of saying that no one ever believed in them—usually an exaggeration made in the name of motivation. But it was hard to argue that point with these Diamondbacks. Who had believed in them? They’d backed into the postseason on the final wild-card berth. They finished the season with a negative run differential. Just two years ago, they’d tied for the worst record in baseball, 52–110, with quite a few players still left from that grueling experience. The Diamondbacks were built in a fashion contrary to most successful modern clubs: They had more sacrifice bunts in the World Series than home runs. They required a bullpen day to get through each of the later rounds not because of any grand strategy but simply because they did not have a fourth starting pitcher. Perhaps it’s not quite right to say that no one believed in them. But it’s surely right enough to say that no one had any good reason to.
And they made it to the World Series all the same.
They would all be able to appreciate and contextualize that eventually, Lovullo said. Just not Wednesday. The clubhouse held a few scattered back claps and hugs and see you next years. But the group was largely quiet.
As Strom had put it: There was nothing to say.
