With spark plug Corbin Carroll thriving again, surging Diamondbacks firing on all cylinders (2024)

BOSTON — It was the middle of June when Arizona Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo had the latest of his “deep dive” conversations with Corbin Carroll. Things were not going well. Not for the D-Backs. Not for their budding superstar right fielder. Coming off a National League pennant, the team was in fourth place with a losing record, and Carroll was struggling for the first time in recorded history.

After batting .285 with 25 homers and 54 steals last season to win NL Rookie of the Year, Carroll was hitting .192 more than a third of the way through his sophom*ore season. Outwardly, Carroll was poised. He didn’t pout in the dugout or break bats. Teammates saw the 23-year-old working as hard as ever to get through the inevitable bumps of a big league career. But in the manager’s office, he admitted feeling responsible for the team’s struggles.

“He said, ‘If I do better, we win,’” Lovullo recalled. “And I said, ‘Don’t worry about that. Just be yourself.’”

For the past two months, that’s exactly who Carroll has been. He’s hitting walk-off homers, swiping bags and making game-saving snags while the Diamondbacks surge into contention. They have been one of the best teams in baseball this summer. They entered June with 20.5 percent playoff odds. After sweeping the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park over the weekend and extending their winning streak to six games, the Diamondbacks are a virtual lock to return to the postseason — 96.8 percent — and trail the Los Angeles Dodgers by three games for the NL’s best record.

The Snakes are alive again, and so is Carroll. Lovullo is careful not to put too much of his team’s success or failure on any player, but he won’t pretend it’s pure coincidence, either.

“I think it overlaps, for sure,” he said.

He paused for a beat and then repeated.

“For sure.”

To pin the Diamondbacks’ turnaround on Carroll’s at-bats alone, however, ignores a host of other factors. Arizona leads the majors in runs per game. Second baseman Ketel Marte, the team’s only All-Star in 2024, has 30 homers and a .930 OPS. Christian Walker is among baseball’s best all-around first basem*n. Joc Pederson is elite against right-handed pitching. Jake McCarthy is one of the fastest men in the sport. Adrian Del Castillo has excelled in the starting catching role while Gabriel Moreno — like Marte and Walker — is on the injured list.

The roadmap to victory varies from one game to the next.

“It comes in different shapes and sizes,” McCarthy said. “Different parts of the game, we seem to step up. We play good defense. We run the bases well. We don’t need to hit the ball 500 feet every night. You need a couple ground balls to go through. You take an extra base. A night when maybe the bats aren’t as loud, we can win in creative ways. It’s just been fun. I think it’s an old-school brand of baseball, but that’s kind of how they like it here.”

It’s hard to fire on all cylinders, though, without the spark plug.

A few hours before Friday’s game at Fenway Park, the spark plug trotted across the outfield grass and parked a few steps in front of the warning track in left field. Carroll looked toward home plate as Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo took high-stakes batting practice.

The Diamondbacks’ fantasy football league drafts this week, and the players involved asked Lovullo to help determine their draft order. He hit 12 baseballs. The draft order would depend on how far Lovullo — boasting 15 home runs on his resume over parts of eight big league seasons — hit each team’s ball. One banged off the Green Monster, awarding starter Merrill Kelly the first pick. Pederson, a fantasy owner of some renown, watched Lovullo pop up his ball on the infield. Pederson will draft last.

“He was so pissed at me,” Lovullo said, laughing.

Soon after, Pederson strolled through the clubhouse with yellow-tinted glasses and a smile. No one embodies the vibe of the 2024 Diamondbacks like Pederson. The 32-year-old designated hitter signed a one-year, $12.5 million contract (with a mutual option for 2025) with Arizona because he missed postseason ball. He played in the playoffs in each of his six full seasons with the Los Angelels Dodgers, won a World Series in Atlanta in 2021, joined San Francisco the Giants after their 107-win season but sat at home the past two Octobers.

“It’s not very fun watching from the sidelines,” he said.

Even as the Diamondbacks spun their tires early this season, Pederson felt they had all the ingredients to make another deep postseason run. The team’s never-say-die attitude reminded him of the 2017 Dodgers, who won 104 games before losing the World Series in seven games.

“You could see the potential,” Pederson said. “We’d score nine, 10 runs against a really good pitcher. The at-bat quality was there. Sometimes we’d hit and not throw well. Sometimes we’d throw well and not hit. We’d lose one-run games. Our offense has come around. Our bullpen has come around. Our defense. You put all that with belief. You start believing that you’re good, and I think that goes even farther.”

Pederson raking against righties — .953 OPS, seventh-best in baseball — is one reason the Diamondbacks didn’t fall apart when Carroll slumped and the pitching staff dealt with numerous issues. Kelly and free-agent addition Eduardo Rodríguez, both now healthy, have combined for only 10 starts this season. Jordan Montgomery, another offseason signee, has been moved into the bullpen. Paul Sewald was displaced from the closer role in the second half.

Through those challenges, starters Ryne Nelson and Brandon Pfaadt have emerged as stabilizers in the rotation. (Nelson won a starting job over Montgomery by posting a 2.76 ERA since the start of July.) Reliever Justin Martinez has used a 100 mph sinker to go 6-for-6 in August save opportunities, while GM Mike Hazen traded for A.J. Puk and Dylan Floro to strengthen a bullpen that returned Kevin Ginkel, Ryan Thompson, Joe Mantiply and Sewald. Puk has been nearly unhittable since his arrival.

In the lineup, eight of nine regulars are above league average by OPS+ (Carroll remains the lone exception, though at this rate he will be well above average by season’s end). First-round pick McCarthy has rebounded from a down 2023 season, trade acquisition Eugenio Suárez has 20 home runs, and Marte is fourth in the NL in fWAR. The Diamondbacks are second in the majors in batting average (.261) and on-base percentage (.335), and fifth in slugging (.433). They’re also second in outs above average and third in FanGraphs’ base running metric.

Grinding long at-bats. Relentless traffic on the bases. Slugging at the right times. Lovullo said this is the type of lineup he’s been trying to build for eight seasons as Diamondbacks skipper. “It’s exactly what our vision was and will continue to be in the future,” he said.

“I think we just developed an identity of relentlessness,” infielder Kevin Newman added. “We had, obviously, a lot of injuries — just kind of punched in the mouth in that regard — and really had no choice but to bear down, see who we were and dig deep. I think we became this just gritty team that wasn’t going to give away pitches, that wasn’t going to give up an at-bat, that wasn’t going to make anything easy on the other team.”

A year ago, the Diamondbacks surprised perhaps even themselves in making a run to the World Series. This time, it doesn’t feel so shocking. With Walker expected to return from the injured list soon, and Marte next, this is a good team that can see itself getting even better come October.

There was a noticeable Diamondbacks fan contingent at Fenway Park, and Lovullo said he’s seen the same in other road cities. The players aren’t the only ones starting to believe.

“It’s a credit to Torey and how he gets the guys to believe every night that he’s going to win, regardless of who’s in the lineup and where we’re at,” Hazen said. “That’s what we’ve seen, from start to finish.”

Carroll’s start, however, looked nothing like this finish.

“I think the first couple of months were atypical,” Hazen said. “This is typical.”

Carroll dominated the high school circuit, was a first round draft pick in 2019 and reached the majors in 2022, a week after his 22nd birthday, having never finished a full month in the minors with an OPS lower than .888. He’d been hindered before by injury, but never by his bat. “It’s tough when you really haven’t failed too much in your life,” teammate Pavin Smith said, “and all of a sudden it’s on the biggest stage.” When you finish fifth in NL MVP voting as a rookie, you hold the attention of the baseball world — even when you’d rather not. Carroll put in extra hours in the batting cages and worked to unwind the mechanical issues holding him back.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” Pederson said. “Expectation weighs on you. He’s young, and I think he felt some of that. He expects himself to be great. No one works harder than him. It just takes some time.”

It took a couple months of roughly replacement-level play, but Carroll bounced back.

“I’m doing my job,” Carroll said. “That’s the space the coaches have asked me to operate within. That’s what I ask of myself. I want to be a winning player, I want to help the team win, and to get back in a space where I’m doing that, that feels good.”

There was no mystery for Carroll to unlock. In fact, Lovullo said the biggest thing he noticed was how little Carroll changed. His work ethic. His demeanor. His input to the coaching staff. All of that has been steady. “I respect that a lot,” Lovullo said. “Because when you struggle for that first time, you start to feel sorry for yourself. You start to look inward. You start to retreat. There was no retreating. In fact, he started to work even harder and at a faster pace.” The effort was always there. Only the results changed.

Now that Carroll is on the other side, both Lovullo and Hazen said he’ll be better for the hurdles he faced this season.

“He got to the big leagues without struggling,” Hazen said. “So, I’m glad that he did. Honestly. I think it’s going to be great for his career.”

“It would be freak-like if he continued on this journey he was on without ever having to struggle,” Lovullo said. “He’s going to have something to go back to when there are future struggles.”

This weekend at Chase Field, the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers will face off for the last time this (regular) season. The Dodgers have won 10 of the past 11 division titles. The Diamondbacks haven’t won one since 2011.

When Carroll and Lovullo sat down back in June, no one had the Diamondbacks chasing down the Dodgers this season.

Carroll hasn’t done it alone. But he was right after all.

“If I do better, we win.”

(Top photo of Corbin Carroll: Jason Miller / Getty Images)