Diamondbacks young players unbothered by World Series stage
Gabriel Moreno sat at a podium inside Chase Field on Monday afternoon, recounting a story. On Dec. 23, he was sitting at his home in Venezuela when his phone rang, with Blue Jays General Manager Ross Atkins on the other line.
Moreno, then just a 22-year old coming off his first big league season, thought Atkins was calling to wish him happy holidays. Quickly, he learned the reality that is the harsh business of professional baseball. Atkins was calling to inform Moreno that he was being traded away from the only organization he had ever known and shipped across the country to the Diamondbacks.
“It took a week or so to let it sink in that I had been traded,” Moreno said through team translator Alex Arpiza.
The story served to reveal Moreno’s youth, and his innocence on that December day nearly a year ago. It also showed how comfortable he is with this spotlight. The Diamondbacks are playing in the World Series and doing interviews in front of rooms packed with reporters and cameras. But Moreno sat at the podium, smiling and drawing laughs from the Spanish-speaking media. He joked about playing MLB The Show as a kid, maxing out the ratings on his created player so that he could hit .500 with 50 home runs.
A day earlier, Brandon Pfaadt occupied the same stage. Ahead of the Diamondbacks’ first playoff game in Milwaukee, Pfaadt said that speaking in a room full of cameras was more intimidating to him than pitching in Game 1 of the wild-card round. But on Sunday, a month into this playoff run, he played along. He laughed with reporters about being recognized in public and about his own lack of interest in watching sports.
“This is my first year of fantasy football so I just started watching football,” Pfaadt deadpanned. “I kind of like it.”
Behind the batting cages before Monday’s Game 3, Alek Thomas was equally relaxed, cracking jokes about the team’s musical tastes.
All of it seems to have translated onto the field. The Diamondbacks’ position players were the third-youngest group to reach the playoffs and their starting lineup features three 23-year olds — Moreno, Thomas and Corbin Carroll — and another in Geraldo Perdomo who only turned 24 last week. Pfaadt is 25 but only debuted in May.
None of the five appear overwhelmed by the moment. All have starred at various points in the postseason. Carroll is hitting .296 with an .844 OPS. Moreno has a .816 OPS and four homers. Thomas has an .871 OPS and delivered perhaps the biggest hit of this run, a game-tying homer off Craig Kimbrel in Game 4 of the NLCS. Perdomo has surprised with a .293 batting average and an .822 OPS. Pfaadt has a 2.70 ERA, guiding the Diamondbacks to wins in each of his four starts.
“The young players go out and play with an unbelievable amount of enthusiasm and focus, and that's very, very contagious,” manager Torey Lovullo said. “We have three — we used to have four — 23-year-olds starting in NLCS and now the World Series. To me, they need each other. The entire group needs one another and they feel their importance.”
From his four decades of experience in the professional baseball, Lovullo knows how unusual this is. Presumably, his players do too. If so, they aren’t bothered by it.
“We've had a few postseason starts now,” Pfaadt said. “So we've gotten that under our belt. I think the step gets higher and higher, but we're ready for it.”
Added Perdomo: “Not a lot of people were thinking that we were going to be this far along, and here we are. That kind of proves that we're ready for it.”
Carroll, for his part, acknowledged after winning the NLCS that making the World Series “in my first year makes me lose some of the perspective of how cool this is.”
On Monday, he clarified what he meant.
“I do really appreciate it, but maybe not as fully as some of the other guys who have had that experience,” Carroll said.
Perhaps that’s the secret to repeatedly delivering in the biggest moments baseball can offer.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks young players unbothered by World Series stage
