PHOENIX -- Baseball is a tough game to make sense of. It’s a game that sometimes defies logic and leaves players, coaches, managers and front-office executives trying to explain the unexplainable.

Take the current struggles of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Sure, you can point to a bullpen meltdown in Monday night’s 10-6 loss to the Cardinals, but this troubling stretch of baseball for the D-backs has also included struggles by the offense. Even their usually reliable defense has let them down at times.

Since July 1, when they were 16 games above the .500 mark, the D-backs have gone 4-13. In that span, they went from being in first place in the National League West -- three games ahead of the Dodgers -- to tied for second, four games back.

Monday’s loss was their fifth in a row, and they have lost nine of their last 11.

If the season ended today, the D-backs would qualify for the playoffs, but they are reeling right now and they know it.

“Look, we're all frustrated,” D-backs manager Torey Lovullo said. “We know what's going on. Every single day we fight. The effort is there. We just haven't won baseball games at the rate that we want to. This is part of a baseball season. This is what happens inside of the baseball season. These days happen to good teams every single year, and every time you got to have some sort of response. And tomorrow is our opportunity to play our finest game. That's what I'm gonna look at.”

The D-backs showed a lot of fight against the Cardinals. After falling behind, 5-2, against Adam Wainwright through five innings, they managed to rally for two runs in the sixth and another two in the seventh to take a 6-5 lead.

They carried that into the ninth, when Andrew Chafin came on to close things out. Chafin is one of a trio of relievers that Lovullo has mixed and matched late in the game, with Scott McGough and Miguel Castro also getting opportunities.

It wasn’t Chafin’s night, though, as the Cardinals put up five runs -- all charged to Chafin -- against him and Kevin Ginkel.

“I wasn't executing pitches to the degree I was trying to,” Chafin said. “So I guess you just sum it up to poor execution in a nutshell. Going for too many punchouts, I think, and ended up walking guys, and we saw what happened. It's the [worst] possible time to implode like that. We had the team on the ropes and it was my job to shut it down, and I didn't get it done.”

Chafin’s frustration was evident, as was Lovullo’s. The clubhouse was silent in the aftermath, some players sitting and staring into their lockers, still processing the game.

“I think you can tell the mood is pretty somber,” veteran third baseman Evan Longoria said.

Longoria, who was signed as a free agent in the offseason, has become an important voice in the clubhouse, dispensing the wisdom that comes from 16 years in the big leagues.

“The challenge is, when things get bad like this, is not to blame others,” Longoria said. “Not to look at your teammates and start to single guys out or single groups out and say, you know, 'I'm doing my job, but so and so or these people are not doing their job.' That's kind of the death spiral of a team.

"And so that's the challenge right now, is to not do that. Continue to put faith and belief in the guys that are going to the plate in front [of] and behind you and the guys that are going out on the mound. That's really all you can do.”