PHOENIX -- By the fifth or sixth inning Sunday afternoon, D-backs manager Torey Lovullo had already begun processing what would become a 12-3 loss to the Guardians.
For Arizona starter Zach Davies, it will likely take another 24 hours before he’s ready to put it behind him.
The rest of the D-backs will likely find a way to turn the page by the time they board their charter flight to Milwaukee, where they will open a three-game series Monday night to begin a seven-game, three-city trip.
“This team has been doing a great job all year of flushing things and turning the page,” said first baseman Christian Walker, whose homer and RBI double were responsible for all three of Arizona’s runs. “We’ve been playing real well, not letting anything change and preparing every day the same way. We'll flush this and be ready tomorrow.”
It’s easier to get past a blowout loss when you’re a first-place team and have played well for the better part of three months now.
Even with the loss, the D-backs still hold a 3 1/2-game lead over the Giants in the National League West and a four-game advantage over the Dodgers. The Braves (46-26) are the only NL team with a better record than the D-backs (43-29).
This game seemed doomed from the start from Arizona’s side of things.
Steven Kwan led off the game for the Guardians with a routine grounder to short that took a little bit of a weird bounce. Nick Ahmed, who has a Gold Glove on his mantle at home, couldn’t handle it for an error.
Later in the inning, José Ramírez hit a grounder just inside the first-base line for an RBI triple, and Cleveland was off to the races, scoring twice in the first and three times in the second.
Things would completely unravel in the fourth, when the Guardians sent 10 men to the plate and chased Davies in a six-run inning.
That was when Lovullo changed what he was looking at on the field.
“I was already starting to digest and shift out of the frustration and the anger I was feeling for the first four or five innings,” Lovullo said. “I'm watching, you know, ‘Is everybody still hustling down the line? What is our temperature like?’ And I was proud of the way the guys got after it. So I just shift my focus from the outcome to more of the process.”
Unlike Lovullo, who will get to manage another game Monday, or one of the position players who will be back in the lineup 24 hours later, a starting pitcher like Davies has to sit with having allowed nine runs (eight earned) over 3 2/3 innings for five more days before he gets another chance.
“Today stinks,” Davies said. “I’ve played for a while, and I’ve seen it happen to a lot of guys -- even the best -- so a short memory is the key. I wish I could go back out there and right it tomorrow, but I’ll work with [the pitching coaches], and those are the things that will get me right.”
In addition to whatever mechanical adjustments Davies needs to make, a change in approach might be in order as well.
While studying opposing hitters and their weaknesses is important and something that Davies is extremely diligent about, he said it can’t just be about that. He also needs to focus on what he does well and pitch to that.
“Knowing the past [success] that I have, knowing that I can get guys out and going back to that, as opposed to worrying so much about, ‘This guy slugs, this guy hits this pitch.' You know the ballgame is going to tell you what you need to know. The numbers help me -- don’t get me wrong, I use them -- but I think if you focus on it too much, you take away from the person that you are, the player that you are. And I think that's happened in the last couple games.”