Baseball won’t ignore the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2013
Apr 2, 2013, 4:23 AM | Updated: 5:14 am
The word Derrick Hall used was ignored. Or was it invisible?
I can’t quite remember. But the point the D-backs president was trying to make Monday was that his baseball team loves to be ignored; they thrive in an environment where they are given just a passing thought.
I agree that the expectations for 2013 are largely uninspiring. But no one is ignoring the Arizona Diamondbacks. Quite the opposite; I think all of baseball is paying quite a bit of attention to the D-backs.
They want to see if this grand experiment works.
Doug Franz calls it chemistry over calculators. Kevin Towers called it “playing to the scoreboard” in an interview with Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic.
“What do I need to do right now to help my ballclub win? I think we were missing that the last two years,” Towers said of the team’s attitude.”
NBC’s Hardballtalk.com picked that up and ran with it Monday morning.
The 2013 D-backs are playing their season in a Petri dish. Every groundball that moves a runner, every hustle play, all of that much talked about (and in some circles mocked) grit will all be tallied at the end of the year to see if it is greater than they talent they gave up.
The D-backs have done nothing to run from this image. Just the opposite; they tout it. That seems to have sharpened the focus of their critics and, in some circles, the knives. In reading some — not all but some — of the national perspective on the D-backs, it seems the I-told-you-so column has already been written.
It’s a long season and the narrative can change almost weekly. But one thing you can be sure of…baseball is not ignoring the Arizona Diamondbacks.
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