Diamondbacks can't recover from 9th-inning miscue, fall to Cubs in extra innings

Diamondbacks reliever Kevin Ginkel saw the ball the entire time. He saw it bounce in front of catcher Gabriel Moreno. He saw it carom off Moreno’s hand. He saw it roll in the direction of the visitor’s dugout. If there were one thing he wished he had done differently, Ginkel said later, it was to go and retrieve it himself.

Instead, as Moreno searched in vain to find the ball, the Chicago Cubs’ Nico Hoerner broke from second, rounded third and never stopped, racing home with the tying run in the ninth inning on Monday night.

Afterward, as the Diamondbacks tried to make sense of what ended up being a 3-2 loss in 11 innings, they kept coming back to that moment, when they were one out away from a win, when they watched a one-run lead vanish when a runner scored from second on a wild pitch.

“We were talking about it today: We could go through the whole rest of the season and literally never see that play come to fruition one more time this year,” Diamondbacks right-hander Merrill Kelly said. “The fact that that was where we derailed a little bit is a little bit tough to swallow.”

Kelly threw well but his pitch count drove him from the game after five innings. Jake McCarthy and Corbin Carroll delivered RBI singles. The bullpen fired six innings of one-run ball. In the end, it was not enough.

Ginkel blamed himself for the two singles that set the stage for Hoerner’s mad dash home. Manager Torey Lovullo noted to the missed scoring chances in both the 10th and 11th innings, in which the Diamondbacks could not push across their automatic runner. They also could have pointed to plain old bad luck: Through seven innings, they had hit nine balls 95 mph or harder, but when they looked up at the scoreboard they had only one hit.

“It’s a tough loss to absorb because of the way we lost,” Lovullo said. “But we’ve got to remember what we did. We put ourselves in a position where we were one out away. It was close. You don’t get credit for close in this game. We’ve got to find a way to be better tomorrow.”

In the eighth, the Diamondbacks got hits from Randal Grichuk (double) and Carroll (run-scoring single) to take a 2-1 lead. Ginkel retired the first batter in the ninth, but he missed his location on a pair of fastballs to Hoerner and Mike Tauchman. The two lined opposite-field singles in succession.

Ginkel struck out Miles Mastrobuoni, setting up the game-defining sequence. With the count 0-1 on Ian Happ, Ginkel bounced a slider that Moreno could neither smother nor locate.

“My first reaction was, 'Where is the ball?'” Moreno recalled. “I felt like I blocked it and I didn’t think the ball was going that way. I just felt it hit my hand, but I thought it was close or right around me. But the ball was over by the other team’s on-deck circle.”

As Moreno was searching, Ginkel was gesturing with his glove. He was drifting in the direction of the ball but never took off after it. He said later he wished he had, though replays made it hard to imagine him getting to it much faster than his catcher did given the distance he had to cover. As it turned out, Hoerner only barely beat Moreno's feed to Ginkel, who was covering home.

“I kind of got a read on it, I guess I could have called him off,” Ginkel said. “(But) for those kind of plays, I’m there to back up home. It sucks. I feel like that game was in our hands. I just need to make a couple better pitches. It would have probably gone our way.”

The play might have resulted in even more damage: After the game, Moreno’s right hand appeared swollen from where the wild pitch hit him. He said an initial X-ray came back negative but he didn’t know about his availability for Tuesday.

“It hurts,” he said. “It hurts a lot. We’ll see.”

After neither team scored in the 10th, the Cubs pushed across a run in the 11th thanks, once again, to Hoerner. With the bases loaded, Hoerner fell behind 1-2 to reliever Bryce Jarvis, then fouled off consecutive fastballs. Jarvis came back with another heater, this one at 95.1 mph and perhaps a foot above the strike zone, and somehow Hoerner lined it into right for a single. Jarvis could only shrug.

“It was a defensive swing and it wasn't a barrel,” he said. “I'd take that 10 times out of 10.”

The Diamondbacks couldn’t answer in the bottom half. With one out, Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s fly to right was too shallow for Ketel Marte to tag from third, and Christian Walker went down on strikes on a check swing to end the game.

“I feel terrible for not getting out of that spot,” Ginkel said. “It shouldn’t have come to that. That’s baseball. It was just kind of a weird play.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks drop opener to Cubs in extra innings