ARLINGTON — At 23 years old, playing October baseball for the first time, Corbin Carroll’s list of memorable playoff moments is already impressive enough to make veteran ballplayers wonder where it all went wrong.
In his playoff debut, Carroll hit a two-run homer off Corbin Burnes in the Wild Card Series, a third-inning blast that cut Milwaukee’s lead to 3-2. Against Clayton Kershaw in the first inning of Game 1 of the NLDS, Carroll’s RBI single got his team on the board for what turned out to be a series-defining statement inning.
And with everything on the line in Game 7 the NLCS, playing in a hostile environment at Citizens Bank Park against the Phillies? “In Game 7, when we needed it the most, he was our best player and he showed out,” veteran Diamondbacks reliever Paul Sewald told me Thursday. “We’re here because of that.”
MORE: World Series prediction for Diamondbacks-Rangers
Despite that lofty praise, Carroll’s 3-for-4 performance, with two stolen bases, two runs scored and two RBIs isn’t the thing that sticks with Sewald the most. No, that moment happened a few months earlier, not long after Sewald was acquired in a trade with Seattle.
“For me, my moment was in Colorado. I’d been here about two weeks, and he had really struggled since I had been here,” Sewald said. “He had another bad day, and he went down in the batting cages, down there by the food room, and took off everything but a tank top and just got to work.”
Not covering the Diamondbacks on a daily basis, I wondered if that was something Carroll did often, so I asked.
“Not often at all,” Carroll said, then paused. “Actually, pretty rarely, to be quite honest. I try and keep my workload very consistent, ever since I had my shoulder surgery. That’s a rare occasion for me.”
Carroll needed something to change, though. In his previous 17 games, Carroll had just a .161 average and .493 OPS. In a rookie season where he was already the overwhelming NL Rookie of the Year favorite by that point in mid-August, it was a rare downturn.
SN MLB AWARDS: Ronald Acuña Player of the Year | All Awards, All-Stars
Even now, sitting through a media session before his Diamondbacks prepare to play Game 1 of the World Series on Friday, Carroll remembers the hitting session well.
“I was hitting off a velo machine,” he said, “just trying to find some consistency.”
His teammates, especially Sewald, noticed. A young team leader and budding superstar who had already earned his reputation as a hard worker was taking it up a notch.
“Young players taking a thousand swings after a game can go one of two ways, and it went the way that we’d hoped,” Sewald said. “He got two hits the next day and has not looked back. When I think of Corbin Carroll, that’ll be the day I think of, when his work ethic and talent just being better than the rest of us. We’re just glad he’s on our team.”
Carroll hit .329 for the rest of the season, a 40-game stretch that saw the Diamondbacks rattle off a 24-16 record that was enough to get them into the postseason as the sixth and final seed in the National League playoffs. For Sewald, who was teammates with budding young superstar Julio Rodriguez in Seattle, there was a strong sense of deja vu.
“I’m so lucky to get to see two of the top five players in the league,” Sewald said. “If you redrafted the league, you would probably take both of those guys in the top five. Just incredible similarities, to be 22 and 23 and be so mature, being able to handle something like this, but also being able to handle the grind of the major leagues.
“They didn’t get here at 22 because they struggled a lot on the way. I just think of those guys just really putting in the work. When things seem to go poorly, they just put in more work, and that’s a credit to their work ethic, and their talent levels, which are way better than the rest of us, that’s why they’re this good at 23."
But, yeah, Carroll’s Game 7. That, as they say, is the stuff of legends.
“Huge. Just huge,” Diamondbacks hitting coach Joe Mather said. “And he was facing some really good pitching, especially left-on-left. And that last sac fly, where he didn't get a hit, might have been the most impressive.”
All five of his plate appearances in Game 7 were against lefties. Carroll went 3-for-3 off starter Ranger Suarez — he’d held lefties to a .244 on-base percentage in 2023 — and then had a sacrifice fly off Jose Alvarado in the seventh. That one provided a huge insurance run, bumping Arizona’s lead to 4-2.
What about Carroll allowed him to have that type of success against such tough left-handers?
“I think it's his ability to stay in on tough breaking balls. He trusts his eyes, trusts that the ball is going to break over the plate,” he said. “Lefties can create some tough angles on left-handed hitters. That’s something that's been true in baseball since it's been played, right? But there's just a lot of trust in in himself in that, if they put it over the plate, he can put a strong swing on it. He’s just kind of waiting it out to hopefully get a pitch that’s in his zone.”
Moments like Game 7 — and like vs. Burnes and like vs. Kershaw and like the extra hitting session in Colorado — are why the Diamondbacks felt comfortable giving Carroll an eight-year, $111-million extension this spring, when he had just 32 big-league games under his belt. I was there that day this spring, when the signing was announced, and I asked around the clubhouse what his teammates thought about such a young player — he didn’t turn 23 until August — getting such a big, long-term deal.
There wasn’t a trace of jealousy in the clubhouse, with the young guys or the veterans.
“Well, you watch him play and he’s pretty damn special,” veteran Evan Longoria said on Thursday. “We've gotten really lucky in being able to to have him long term and so I think that was more of a sentiment and the excitement of being able to lock down a player like him for a long period of time and having him be your franchise guy.”
Signing that contract signified, to Carroll and to his teammates and the fans, that better days were ahead for a club that lost 110 games in 2021 and another 88 in 2022. I asked him if it was a surprise his Diamondbacks got to the World Series so early in his career.
“Yes, it is. It definitely is,” he said with a smile. “But I think you look at the regular season and we had 84 wins, right? There's room to grow. But in terms of the postseason, what we've been able to accomplish, I think it just shows that once you get in anything's possible. We’ve got a team that's very bought-in and really believes in each other. I think that's helped lend itself to us being able to do this a little earlier than maybe some people would have thought.”