Torey Lovullo's Speech After The Diamondbacks Beat The Brewers Has Me Wanting To Root For The Snakes

Being a manager in baseball is such a bizarre thing. They are extremely unimportant until they become very important. There are two things that I look for in a baseball manager. Number one is to understand the numbers. I don’t need you to overmanage, but throughout the season, just make decisions that make sense. Is there a hitter coming up that can’t hit lefties? OK, cool, go to the bullpen and bring in a lefty. It’s really not that hard. The second thing I look for in a manager is something that isn’t as quantifiable. Do the players love playing for them? Jim Leyland kind of lost his mind the last few years when he was with the Tigers, but it was undeniable that his players adored him. It appears like that’s the case of Torey Lovullo.

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Lovullo has been around for the Diamondbacks' good times and the bad times. He was their manager the last time they made the postseason in 2017, and he led the team through a brutal stretch in the late 2010s and early 20s. Now they find themselves back in the NLDS, where they will face the Dodgers once again, and if this celebration was any indication, the Diamondbacks team is hungry as shit.

What Lovullo said here does ring true. "A connected team is a fucking dangerous team." Ain't that the truth. I'm not claiming that I'm jumping on the Arizona Diamondbacks bandwagon. John Rich is in charge of all things Arizona going forward, but I hope they beat the Dodgers. 

The one advantage that Arizona will have in that series is that their starting pitching is better than the Dodgers. They got everything they could from their bullpen in that series against the Brewers, but the Dodgers will be a different animal. If Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly can hold that offense at bay, we could be talking about a team that makes a surprising run to the NLCS. They haven’t made it that far since 2007. This is probably their best shot since then.