Strikeouts mounting as Diamondbacks’ slump continues

HOUSTON – Ketel Marte swung so hard his helmet came off in the seventh inning on Wednesday night, and after he picked it up, he banged his bat against it on his slow walk back to the dugout. The strikeout was Marte’s second of the night and the 10th of 13 the Diamondbacks would record in a 9-5 loss to the Houston Astros.

As the losses have piled up for the Diamondbacks in recent weeks, so, too, have the strikeouts. Well, in reality, the strikeouts have always been there; it’s just that their recent shortage of runs caused by an inability to hit with runners in scoring position have made the swings and misses harder to overlook.

The single-game totals also have been especially glaring lately. On Tuesday, the Diamondbacks struck out 17 times, and twice in the past three weeks they have punched out 15 times. Wednesday was the 10th time they’ve reached 13 strikeouts since July 4.

Entering the day, they had 1,099 strikeouts as a team, the fifth-most in the majors. Jake Lamb had a team-high 118, followed by Paul Goldschmidt’s 111. Goldschmidt and Lamb, both All-Stars, have been the club’s most productive hitters.

For the Diamondbacks, the strikeouts seem to register somewhere between zero and minimal on the concern scale. Manager Torey Lovullo said he was “uncomfortable” watching his team punch out 17 times on Tuesday, but while he said he’d like to see improvement in their two-strike approaches, he didn’t seem to view the season totals as a major concern.

As he noted, the Diamondbacks entered Wednesday averaging 4.9 runs per game, the fourth-best mark in the NL. Of course, since June 28, when the Diamondbacks’ prolonged slump began, they rank just 12th in the league in runs.

“The last couple of weeks,” Lovullo said, “I know that things haven’t been going as great as they have been previously. Maybe that’s a sign that we need to square up our pitches or grind out pitches with two strikes.”

The players seem even less concerned. For them, strikeouts are harmful in certain situations. Otherwise, they seem to view them as just another out. And while they acknowledge that a ball in play can sometimes lead to good things, there’s an argument that it might not be worth the cost.

“There’s definitely times I can look back and say I wish I would have put that ball in play,” Lamb said. “There’s also times where you’re trying to put a ball in play and a ball is right down the middle, and if I would have taken my ‘A’ swing, that ball is a double or a homer. You can always go back and forth with it.”

It’s somewhat of a hot-button topic for a fan base that watched the Diamondbacks strike out 1,529 times during the 2010 season, setting what was then a major-league record. That total has since been eclipsed by two clubs – the 2016 Milwaukee Brewers (1,543) and the 2013 Astros (1,535) – and two clubs this season, the Brewers (again) and the Tampa Bay Rays, are on pace to set new all-time records.

“It’s not something that we’re talking about or worried about,” infielder Daniel Descalso said. “I think strikeouts are up all across the board.”

Descalso noted that the harm caused by a strikeout depends on the situation, but, like Lamb, he doesn’t think hitters are best served selling out for contact. He thinks strikeouts are partly a byproduct of deep counts, and he rattled off a list of opposing starters whose high pitch counts led them to early exits.

“Do you want to go up and just put the first thing in play that comes near or over the plate?” he said. “Maybe not. I think a lot of times we have a good approach and the pitcher is trying to counter that approach, and you don’t want to just go up there and swing at whatever comes over the plate. …

“I’m just trying to focus on getting a good pitch to hit. Sometimes a guy makes a couple of good pitches and you find yourself in a hole and you may strike out.”

The Diamondbacks struck out six times in their first eight trips to the plate on Wednesday against the Astros’ Charlie Morton, who limited them to one run in 6 1/3 innings. Trailing 5-1, they got back in the game on the strength of back-to-back homers by Paul Goldschmidt and J.D. Martinez in the eighth, but a bullpen implosion led to four Astros runs in the next half-inning.

The loss, their eighth in the past 11, cost them another game in the wild-card standings. They hold just a four-game advantage over the Milwaukee Brewers for the second wild card, and the Colorado Rockies lead by a game for the first one.

“We have so long to go and we have a lot of the story that we’ve yet to tell,” Lovullo said. “I know that we aren’t playing our best baseball, and I know that seasons have their ups and downs and we’re not winning games right now. It’s very obvious. But I think our guys are going to turn this thing around.”

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Reach Piecoro at (602) 444-8680 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @nickpiecoro.