In a fitting end, Corbin Carroll plays the hero as Diamondbacks win pennant

PHILADELPHIA — Corbin Carroll was too late to react. He tried to shimmy and duck, but here, his athleticism was of no use. A silver bucket, filled high with Budweiser by Jordan Lawlar and Bryce Jarvis, was already being emptied on his head. Once the beer had washed over him, seeping into another one of these wet October floors, Carroll could only smile.

In a quieter corner of the room, beneath a National League champions banner, he was asked how this all felt. “Pretty f-----g good,” Carroll said. For eight months, Carroll has answered these queries with care. He’d pause for seconds before answering, placing thought onto each word. Here, he opted for raw emotion.

“This,” Carroll said, “is what you dream about.”

Even Carroll might not have been able to dream of it coming this quickly. Fourteen months ago, he had never played a major league game. He is still, somehow, just 23.

But on Tuesday night, when the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies, 4-2, he became the preeminent star of the National League champions. There are a number of ways to define how improbable their story is. They trailed in this series, two games to none. They were under .500 in August. Perhaps most remarkably, they lost 110 games just two years ago. No team has ever won a pennant so soon after such a season.

In those days, even the central figures of the Diamondbacks’ organization did not realize this was possible, not this quickly. “It blows my mind,” general manager Mike Hazen said. Last summer, as a wave of talent reached the major leagues, that thinking began to change. The focal point of that wave, then and now, was Carroll.

“He's our best player,” Hazen said. “And we have so many good players but he's a superstar. And you can't win without superstars.”

For the first two series of this playoff run, Carroll matched that billing. He provided the first momentum-swinging boost with a two-run home run in Game 1 against the Brewers and didn’t stop, hitting .412 by the end of the division series. The Phillies, though, flummoxed him in a way the Brewers and Dodgers couldn’t. In the first four games of the NLCS, Carroll was 1 for 15, stifled by a game plan to attack him up and inside.

After Game 4, two Diamondbacks hitting coaches, Rick Short and Drew Hedman, sat down to uncover why Carroll hadn’t been able to reach those pitches. In comparing video of Carroll during the playoffs to earlier in the season, they conjured the smallest of tweaks. In his batting stance, they wanted Carroll to lift his barrel a few degrees. With the adjustment, they hoped he would be a fraction of a second quicker getting to the top corner of the strike zone. “Felt like he was losing time,” Short said.

These are the types of changes players work on weekly throughout the season, unnoticed without the magnified pressure of the playoffs. They aren’t, though, always so easy to implement. But when the hitting coaches sat Carroll down inside the Chase Field batting cages, showing him what they wanted to alter and asking whether it was worth addressing, he was all in. Ten minutes later, the tweak had taken hold.

“That's a credit to him,” Short said. “He can do whatever he wants.”

Over the final three games, Carroll mostly did just that. After 14 straight at-bats without a hit, he recorded singles in Games 5 and 6. His contact was more sound. And by Game 7, he was Corbin Carroll.

In his first at-bat, Carroll bounced a single to second base, using his speed to end any chance Bryson Stott had of making the play. After a single and a groundout, the Diamondbacks were on top, 1-0.

“This atmosphere is very difficult to play in when you're playing from behind,” Evan Longoria said. “… We knew that getting out to a quick start was gonna be huge for us.”

Carroll enabled that start. And when the Diamondbacks fell behind, he provided the next lift, too. His third-inning single and stolen base proved fruitless, but in the fifth, he smashed a third straight single, this one up the middle to score Emmanuel Rivera. After stealing second again, he scored on a hit from Gabriel Moreno, giving Arizona a lead it would never relinquish.

But even then, Carroll’s day wasn’t done. In the seventh inning, he drove a sacrifice fly to deep right field. That was the Diamondbacks’ fourth and final run. All four were either driven home or scored by Carroll. And all four of Carroll’s offensive contributions were on pitches on the inside half of the plate, where the Phillies had spent seven games attacking him.

“Incredible,” hitting coach Joe Mather said. “So proud of him.”

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Someday, Carroll will join Mather in realizing how unusual his achievements are. He’s just not quite there yet.

“Doing it in my first year makes me lose some of the perspective of how cool this is,” Carroll said.

He knows one thing, though. It feels pretty good.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Corbin Carroll plays hero in Game 7 as Diamondbacks win pennant