Arizona Diamondbacks Exit Interview: Patrick Corbin

It’s time to decompress the 2018 season for each of the Arizona Diamondbacks in turn, to place their season in the proper context of their career whole and to reduce their season efforts to a single letter grade. Today’s player: Patrick Corbin.

We began exit interviews for the 2018 Arizona Diamondbacks last week with Clay Buchholz, today we look at star lefty Patrick Corbin.

Origin Story

Patrick Corbin came to the Dbacks via the Dan Haren trade in 2010 after the Angels made him a second round pick in the 2009 draft. He made his ML debut for the Diamondbacks two years later as a 22-year-old – but it was the next season when Corbin arrived.

Corbin made the All-Star team in 2013 en route to 14 wins, 113 ERA+ for a .500 Diamondbacks team. His star was on the rise. Sadly, Corbin would spend all of the next season on the shelf due to Tommy John. In essence, he was the Sean Manaea of 2013.

Corbin’s 2017 was a classic showcase of the importance of context in player statistics. On the surface, Corbin had a decent, but unspectacular year – he took the ball every five days and showed glimpses of his former All-Star self whilst accumulating 3.0 fWAR. He wasn’t quite back to his old self, but the signs were there if he could only do a better job of keeping the ball in the ballpark.

Part of his homer proneness can be attributed to playing in Chase Field – but the number of flyballs leaving the yard off Corbin (15.3% HR/FB) was both atrocious, and thankfully, unsustainable.