PHILADELPHIA — The Diamondbacks won just 84 games this regular season, and they lost 78. But that doesn’t come close to telling the terrific tale of the D-backs.
This is a good team. This is also a tough team, a resilient team and young team, so young they may not know they aren’t supposed to still be standing.
“We’ve had some pretty car-crash losses this year. And this team always just brushes them off and bounces back,” Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen told The Post in the afterglow of the D-backs’ 5-1 win that forced a Game 7 in the NLCS against the favored Phillies on Tuesday night.
Forget the regular-season win total. Take a look at October, then judge.
They started their postseason run by traveling to Milwaukee to face the Brewers and their daunting pitching staff, and they swept them, becoming the fourth team to overcome multi-run deficits in their first two games of the postseason, joining the 1956 Dodgers, 2008 Rays and 2009 Yankees.
Then they played their forever-nemesis Dodgers, and they killed the Dodgers. There’s no other way to say it.
They destroyed Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher of this generation. Forget that Kershaw has had his playoff struggles. He’s been nails against the D-backs practically since he entered the league. And they treated him like a rookie. Six runs and one out, and he was gone.
So, too, were the Dodgers in yet another sweep.
The Dodgers won 100 games, and they were dispatched like a second-division club on its worst day. See ya.
Next up were the Phillies, and if the D-backs were dominant the first two rounds, the Phillies were uber-dominant, beating teams with near-historic margins. Then they beat the Diamondbacks 10-0 in Game 2 to go up two games to nothing, and everyone figured this series was over.
Everyone, that is, except for the D-backs, who may be too young and feisty to know better.
The Diamondbacks scored two one-run wins back home before a 6-1 loss and returned to a place facing elimination that’s been a house of horrors for visitors. It’s so loud the sound can be heard clear back in Center City.
“This is an extremely tough place to win a baseball game,” Hazen said.
But these young D-backs, they’re unfazed. Nothing bothers them. And nothing has derailed them yet.
Those 84 wins aren’t a true measure. They’re up to 92 now, heading into Game 7, but that doesn’t do them justice, either.
We knew they were a team on the rise, and sure, no one expected them to pop up this quickly. No one except maybe them.
Their time was supposed to be next year, or even later. They have two 23-year-olds who are leading them. Corbin Carroll and Gabriel Moreno are the Nos. 1 and 3 hitters (for reference, their counterparts with the Phillies are Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper). The D-Backs have 11 home runs this October from guys who are 23 or younger, tying the 2015 Cubs for most ever (hat tip to Sarah Langs of MLB).
Their $113M payroll isn’t a measure of their worth either. It’s less than half that of the Phillies, who were built through free agency. The one D-back with a lucrative, long-term deal is Ketel Marte. And the Phillies can’t get him out.
“We have a good, young team. And I think the young players have carried us in a lot of ways,” Hazen said, before noting that it was the veterans Merrill Kelly, Tommy Pham and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. who starred in Game 6.
This team doesn’t scare. They not only act confident, they are confident. They believe they can beat a team with a half-dozen mega-star veterans.
It starts with the manager Torey Lovullo. If he can’t believe where they are, he doesn’t let on.
“We didn’t come cross country to get our asses kicked,” Lovullo announced at the Game 6 pregame press conference.
And so they won their toughest assignment of the season. The Phillies were 28-11 all time at Citizens Bank Park in the playoffs, and their Game 6 pitcher, Aaron Nola had a 0.96 ERA in these playoffs.
Some will complain that a team that barely slid into the sixth spot in the 15-team league is advancing through the playoffs to within nine innings of the World Series. I say think again.
“We feel like we deserve to the be in the Big Dance,” Lovullo said. “We got to this point because we are a good baseball team, and that’s all we’re focused on. … The teams that get in deserve to be in, and anything can happen at that point in time.”
Some will say it’s unfair. Some will call the D-backs lucky.
But I say, that’s baseball. And I say hats off to the young D-backs, who killed Kershaw, more than matched Mookie, frustrated Freddie and beat back the bedlam at The Bank. If you think they don’t deserve to be here, you haven’t been paying attention.