This story was excerpted from Steve Gilbert's D-backs Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
As the season came to a close, I sat down with a number of D-backs players to get their take on their year. What did they think went well? What would they like to improve on? What changes were they planning on making during the offseason?
For lack of a better description, we'll call them exit interviews. Here was what Zac Gallen had to say about his outstanding 2022 season that saw him finish fifth in National League Cy Young Award voting:
MLB.com: What do you feel went well for you this year?
Gallen: I was healthy. Granted, I came into Spring Training with a stiff shoulder and had that little thumb thing, but other than that, I didn't miss a start throughout the year. So just coming off of last year, I think that was a huge step in the right direction for me. It's pretty much 50 percent of your job to make all your starts and be there when the team is counting on you to start every five or six days, whatever it is.
MLB.com: How about performance-wise?
Gallen: After the All-Star break, I kind of just told myself, "Let's go on a run." I wanted to see if I could string a few starts together and see what happened. Now, I always tell myself that no matter what, but for it to actually kind of come to fruition and actually happen was great. I think things just started to click at the All-Star break, really, just in terms of my delivery started to click. And I was feeling good with pitches, everything started to kind of come to shape. I don't necessarily know why everything decided to click then, but I just got into a good rhythm.
MLB.com: Anything in particular you want to work on this offseason? I know you're always tinkering with things between starts.
Gallen: I don't have anything in particular right now that I can think of. I think the biggest thing that I've thought about throughout this year is that I'm going to change my throwing program a little bit this offseason. In years past, I've taken off a good chunk of time, somewhere between nine and 11 weeks, somewhere around there. So this offseason, I'm not necessarily going to take off from throwing, just scale back a little from what I'm doing right now and try to kind of stay in this rhythm that I have.
I felt like … in previous years, I would pretty much start each year from scratch after I stopped throwing, and that could be good or bad. It felt like in terms of last year, like I was starting anew and kind of didn't have a great feel for everything. I feel like I was really behind the eight ball. So this year, I think just try to almost essentially not stop and just keep ascending on that trajectory.