In a miserable July, slipping Diamondbacks' fundamentals as much to blame as leaky bullpen

Over the past month, as his team’s season has slipped off the rails, Torey Lovullo has issued a consistent refrain: The Diamondbacks are not playing Diamondbacks baseball.

With each passing day, though, Lovullo’s vision of ‘Diamondbacks baseball’ — smart baserunning, clean defense and quality at-bats — slips further into the rearview mirror. Those tenets were trademarks of the team’s 50-34 start. Over the past month, as the Diamondbacks have gone 5-15, they’ve been missing in action.

“We have not been fundamentally sound and we've been really lacking in the execution department,” Lovullo said.

That was Wednesday morning, before the Diamondbacks’ two most recent losses. It was also moments before General Manager Mike Hazen addressed the trade deadline, saying that he still intends to be a buyer. But even Hazen, in his role high above the team’s day-to-day performance, couldn’t avoid the sloppiness that has become persistent of late.

“I think things will settle down,” Hazen said. “We need to play a little cleaner offensively and defensively. I think that’s escaped us a little bit. The baserunning has escaped us a little bit over this last road trip.”

The primary causes for the Diamondbacks’ slump are, it should be noted, hitting and relief pitching. Prior to July, they had a team OPS of .767 and a bullpen ERA of 4.00. This month, those numbers are .727 and 7.08.

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But the fundamentals matter too. The Diamondbacks’ drop in runs per game (5.1 pre-July to 4.3 in July) is more drastic than their hitting would let on. That is, in part, because of a slew of baserunning miscues. The defense, meanwhile, has done no favors to a beleaguered pitching staff.

Take the latest example: Friday’s 5-2 loss to the Mariners. With no outs in the first inning, Ketel Marte dropped a would-be caught stealing at second base. Three batters later, that run came around to score on a double. On that double, Teoscar Hernández made an overly aggressive turn at third base and was in no man’s land for a relay to Emmanuel Rivera until Geraldo Perdomo’s relay throw sailed on him, taking Rivera out of position to make the tag. Hernández, too, would later score.

“When I talk about those little things inside of a game that we do really well — when they start showing up, those are two outs that we collect and we're out of the inning,” Lovullo said. “But we didn't get it done today. Those margins, I expect us to win.”

The miscues aren’t limited to Friday. On Tuesday, the Diamondbacks allowed a steal of home when the Cardinals baited them into a throw down to second base. On Sunday in Cincinnati, Marte was thrown out stretching a single into a double. In that series, there were multiple plays on which the Diamondbacks tried to turn improbable double plays and ended up getting zero outs. In a series against the Blue Jays a week earlier, they made five baserunning outs in three games.

For now, at least, the approach to correcting these mistakes has not been a drastic one.

Both baserunning coach Dave McKay and infield coach Tony Perezchica said they have not overhauled how they work with players before games. The Diamondbacks, after all, are still above average this month in outs above average and BsR, FanGraphs’ all-encompassing baserunning statistic. But they’re not where they want to be, nor where they were for much of the season.

So both McKay and Perezchica have taken aim at their units’ issues through conversations and film study, walking them through mistakes that they believe are more mental than physical.

“When you go through struggles, you try to make things happen,” McKay said. “… If you do that, you're gonna make mistakes. So I can probably blame a few of the mistakes we've made on the bases to something like that. Being overly aggressive and trying to make it happen.”

Perezchica also sees players pressing due to the team’s struggles.

“They're trying to do more than they should,” Perezchica said. “The game will give you what it's telling you to give you. Don't try to do more than you can. It's happened on the basepaths, it's happened to us defensively. You can't protect everything, but the balls that should be outs, we've gotta get them. On the bases, the bases that should be ours, we've gotta go take them. But don't try to do more than you can.”

Ultimately, though, both coaches echoed Lovullo’s mindset: That the Diamondbacks can’t deviate from the process that made them a first-place team for three months.

“You go through something and you start changing things, that's a sign of panic,” McKay said. “It's not just one week or two weeks where we played well. We played really well over a first half and so that's a pretty good indication of how good you are. And let's go back to just doing that. … We just have to be a smarter ballclub.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks' miserable July collapse product of unsound fundamentals