From out of retirement, Brent Strom has helped guide Diamondbacks to NLCS

PHILADELPHIA — Brent Strom allowed his retirement to last all of one week. On the fourth day, he was at a wedding outside of Houston when Torey Lovullo called. Strom didn’t want to talk yet, choosing to savor what would be his first and only taste of life after baseball. By the seventh day, he was fully engaged in Zoom calls with Diamondbacks staffers, from Lovullo and General Manager Mike Hazen down to team trainers.

Each wanted to convince Strom, seen throughout the game as a guru of a pitching coach, to join the staff of a team that had just lost 110 games. Days earlier, he had announced his decision to retire rather than continue on with the Astros, the reigning American League champions and perhaps the best-run organization in the sport. It seemed, on the surface, like an impossible hire. As it turns out, Strom didn’t need much convincing.

“It wasn’t a huge pitch,” Hazen admitted Sunday, leaning over a dais inside Citizens Bank Park. Across the country in Texas, the Astros were minutes away from beginning their seventh consecutive American League Championship Series. Now, the ascendant Diamondbacks have joined them in those heights. On Monday, their own League Championship Series will begin. It’s a stunning achievement for a team that so recently epitomized woe and misery. And it’s at least partially explainable by the presence of their pitching coach.

Coaches, of course, do not have box scores or baseball cards. There is no perfect way to quantify Strom’s impact. Perhaps the Diamondbacks would be in Philadelphia this week without him.

Consider, though, the trajectory of their top two starting pitchers. In 2021, Zac Gallen had a 4.30 ERA. Over the past two years, that number is 3.04. For Merrill Kelly, the drop is 4.44 to 3.33.

Gallen was an ascendant pitcher for whom 2021 was always likely to be an aberration, but even he has made notable changes under Strom. He throws his curveball nearly twice as often and has flipped his heat map with his fastball, peppering the top of the zone and turning it from an above-average pitch to an elite one. Kelly has added a slider, leaned more heavily on his changeup and begun to pitch outside the strike zone with more regularity. His strikeout rate, which once ranked in the bottom quarter of the league, is now in the top third.

Then there’s the Diamondbacks cadre of rookies. None have been consistent, but Brandon Pfaadt has developed into a viable third starter, a growth for which he credits Strom. Ryne Nelson, Tommy Henry and Drey Jameson have all contributed as well, though none has flashed the same peaks as Pfaadt has.

“Given the fact that I handed him three rookie starters for the majority of the season,” Hazen said, “to see our pitching getting us to this point, I feel pretty good about where our pitching is.”

Altogether, the Diamondbacks’ staff has put together a 2.20 ERA in its five playoff games, guiding an improbable path to the NLCS. It begs the question of whether Strom is some sort of soothsayer who predicted all of this two years ago, when he eschewed retirement to join the team with the worst ERA in the National League.

Except even he admits he never saw this coming. Not like this and not this quickly.

Really, that was what appealed to him. “Quite frankly,” Strom said, “I was kind of relishing a new challenge. Things were pretty well in order over there in Houston.”

There was also a burden to the level of success the Astros had established. In 2015, Strom’s second season there, merely reaching the playoffs was a success. In 2017, they won the World Series. Anything short of a repeat became a failure.

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” Strom said. “We had a lot of pressure in Houston. We had good teams. I always fretted about us losing our status.”

They never did, but they also never won another World Series. Success became defined not by their work over 162 games, but by the moments that swayed their Octobers. Years later, Strom’s mind still wanders to the individual plays — Howie Kendrick’s home run for the Nationals in 2019, Jorge Soler’s home run for the Braves in 2021 — that ended their bids at a repeat.

The Diamondbacks existed on the other end of baseball’s spectrum, reminding Strom of the Astros team he inherited, one which had lost 111 games. So that October, after deciding he wanted to walk away from the Astros, he confided with a Diamondbacks’ scout that he might be interested in joining them, a move made possible because of the club’s proximity to his home in Tucson. In Houston, his wife's visits required a two-day drive. To Phoenix, the trip would be under two hours.

He admits now that when Lovullo and Hazen called, he didn’t know quite what he was working with, other than Gallen, “who I'd heard about quite a bit cause our analysts kept telling me how freaking good how he was.” In those meetings, there was no promise of a loaded farm system or an organization that had it all figured out.

“Nothing like that,” Strom said. “They were very realistic about who they are, that they're making improvements.”

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Instead, the deal was sealed by the connection Strom felt himself forging on those Zoom calls, over everything from baseball to his and Hazen’s shared fandom of the Boston Celtics. Strom grew up in Southern California, but as a 10-year-old, he found himself obsessed with an oddity in the sports section. The Celtics were in first place, but had no scorers in the top 10. Even as a pre-teen, he fell in love with that shared approach to winning.

Sixty-five years later, that’s the lens through which he views this Diamondbacks team. Gallen and Kelly may be his aces, but Strom doesn’t want credit to rest solely with them. He points out that the Diamondbacks only snuck into the playoffs by two games, rattling off the list of players whose contributions may be forgotten — the injured Henry and Jameson; the released Zach Davies and José Ruiz.

“All of them had a little piece of this thing,” Strom said. “So they should be very proud and I think they should be recognized for that, that it's a whole thing, that they all had a little piece. If one of them falls, we're not even here right now.”

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Thanks to those players — and the performances Strom helped squeeze out of them — the Diamondbacks are here. The most stressful experience of his season, Strom says, was scoreboard-watching during the final series of the regular season. “I didn't want to come that close and lose a tiebreaker and not get in,” he said. After the Diamondbacks clinched, he was too relieved to celebrate. Everything since then has been pure excitement.

Sometimes, in those moments, Strom thinks about how close he came to never experiencing this at all, to sitting at his house in Mexico, away from the game. Mostly, though, he thinks of his players. He wants you to know they’re the ones who got him here.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Brent Strom has helped guide Diamondbacks to NLCS vs. Phillies