'It's hard to do': D-backs drop 18th of last 20
Steve Gilbert
@SteveGilbertMLBWhen you’ve lost 18 of 20 games as the Arizona D-backs have done, it gets hard to explain the hows and the whys of it all.
“I don’t want to sit up here and sound like a broken record,” D-backs manager Torey Lovullo said after the D-backs fell to the Dodgers, 6-4, on Wednesday night at Chase Field.
It was the second straight night they lost in 10 innings to the Dodgers.
Over this 20-game stretch, the D-backs have had losing streaks of eight games, five games and their current streak, which also sits at five.
“Thinking back over the past several games, it’s hard to believe we’re on this type of streak over the past 20 days,” Lovullo said. “It’s something you never imagine, and it’s hard to do what we’ve done. Dissecting it, we’ve been in just about every ballgame. You would expect a team that has lost the way we have over the past 20 days, that you’d be getting blown out of some games. That’s not the case.”
Lovullo still believes the effort is there, as evidenced by their near come-from-behind win Tuesday night and the fact that they came back to tie Wednesday’s game and push it into extra innings.
But at 15-29, the results simply aren’t.
That the 20-game stretch came on the heels of a six-game winning streak that had pushed them two games above .500 and in the playoffs had the season ended at that moment makes the last three weeks even more frustrating.
“We’ve got to regroup the troops and find a way to get after it tomorrow,” Lovullo said. “These games are hard. Every game is hard. I just don’t want these guys to apply any more pressure on themselves than they have. I want them to execute and go out and play the best baseball game they can tomorrow.”
Execution, a hallmark in Lovullo’s three-plus years at the helm, has slipped this year. There have been more baserunning mistakes, missed cutoff men and errors.
“I think we have been battling a certain degree of frustration,” Lovullo said. “We had unbelievable expectations heading into the start of this season. We anticipated that we would be on a totally different route and, while we're sitting somewhere far away from that script, I think our frustration builds day by day. And we're victims of trying to do too much by winning 10 games in one day, and that's just not possible.”