The celebration never arrived: Arizona Diamondbacks watch postseason hopes flame out

( This story was updated to add new information. )

An auxiliary locker room at Chase Field was draped in plastic from floor to ceiling on Monday, prepped for a celebration that never took place. The Arizona Diamondbacks , whose 89 wins were one too few, instead were back in their own clubhouse, exchanging hugs and saying goodbyes.

The Diamondbacks finished with five wins more than they had last year, and they did it while weathering injuries and underperformance from several key players. They played meaningful baseball until the end. It was, objectively, a good year.

But it will not be remembered as such, not after the Atlanta Braves earned a split of their doubleheader with a win in Game 2 against the New York Mets and bumped the Diamondbacks out of the postseason picture.

Instead, this team will be remembered for authoring the worst late-season collapse in franchise history.

Previous Diamondbacks teams had been done in by poor second halves and bad Septembers. But they had never been wrecked by a miserable final week, not like this. Eight days ago, the Diamondbacks’ playoff chances sat at 93 percent, per FanGraphs’ models. And then they went out and lost five times in their final seven games.

“I think frustrated,” starting pitcher Merrill Kelly said when asked to describe his emotions. “I think we controlled our own destiny there for a little while and we let it slip away. We had a pretty sizable lead heading into the last little while of the season and there were a couple key games that (slipped away).”

The Diamondbacks spent north of $175 million this season, their largest payroll in franchise history. They were riding high off last year’s magical run to the World Series. They drew the most fans to Chase Field since 2008.

And they had, by almost all accounts, a better team on paper than last year. A deeper lineup. A rotation that should have featured five legitimate starters — six, even. And a bullpen that was fortified at the trade deadline and should have given manager Torey Lovullo as many as six solid options late in games.

“This is the best team I’ve played on,” Diamondbacks right-hander Zac Gallen said. “I think that’s what makes this disappointing is we had the talent in here to win 89 games and probably more, honestly. It’s a little unfortunate.”

The offense did its part, scoring the most runs in the majors — more, even, than the Shohei Ohtani-led Los Angeles Dodgers.

The pitching did not. The rotation was banged up for much of the year, but even when healthy it underperformed. And though the bullpen looked formidable after the acquisition of left-hander A.J. Puk, it never pitched up to the levels of last September and October, not after Paul Sewald’s collapse seemingly threw the group into disarray.

The Diamondbacks finished with a 4.62 ERA as a team. Adjusted for league average and ballpark factors, that comes out to a 91 ERA+, meaning it was 9 percent worse than average. No team with such bad pitching had ever reached the postseason.

Perhaps the group just overperformed last year. Or maybe the deep postseason run, combined with the shorter offseason, wreaked havoc on pitchers’ arms as it relates to health, stuff and consistency. Whatever the reason, it eventually caught up with them.

The Diamondbacks, Mets and Braves finished with 89 wins each. The Diamondbacks lost the season series to both teams, meaning they lost the tiebreaker. It came down to Monday, the day after the typical end of the regular season, because the Braves and Mets still had to make up the two games that Hurricane Helene washed out from earlier in the week.

The Diamondbacks did not complain, not about the situation nor the effort level put forth by the Mets. For the most part, they did not seem to think their play over the past week earned them that right.

Gallen said it would be “tone deaf” of him to complain about the doubleheader given the devastation wrought by the hurricane. Instead, he turned it back on his own team.

“We didn’t execute,” he said, and later added, “If we had executed it might be a little different story. We might have been sitting here waiting to see where we were going, not not going at all.”

A year ago, the Diamondbacks clinched a wild-card spot in Game No. 161. In Game No. 162, they rested five of their everyday players and went with a bullpen game. As such, the Diamondbacks did not call out the Mets for any of their decisions on Monday after they punched their own postseason ticket in Game 1.

“I think any team in that position is going to do the same thing,” Kelly said. “They’re looking forward to tomorrow. They know they’re in. They know they’re not going to play their main guys and they know they’re not going to try to get hurt.

“They’ll probably tell you that their effort was there, but I think if they can’t look in the mirror and say they weren’t trying as hard as possibly could today, I think they’d be lying. And I think that’s natural, right? Any team in that position would do the same thing. It’s just unfortunate that that’s the game that our fate was decided.”

Thinking back on the collapse, Kelly said he lamented a pair of losses to the Colorado Rockies and San Francisco Giants over the course of the past two weeks. But mostly he kept coming back to Sept. 22 in Milwaukee, when the Diamondbacks lost, 10-9, in a game they led, 8-0. That afternoon, he said, was on his mind as he was watching the doubleheader.

“It’s hard to not relive that,” he said, “just sitting here watching a game that’s out of your control when we had a game that’s in your control and let it slip through our fingers.”

Though the Diamondbacks might not have been anywhere near 89 wins were it not for second baseman Ketel Marte, he was at the center of the final week. He asked out of the lineup to rest his ankle in one of the losses to the Giants, and he made a key misplay in Friday’s loss to the Padres.

The Diamondbacks also lost a stunner on Saturday, when Puk served up back-to-back homers vs. the Padres after the offense could not score against call-up right-hander Randy Vasquez, and were blown out earlier in the week when the Giants crushed Brandon Pfaadt.

It will go down as the latest instance of the Diamondbacks failing to reach the postseason for a second consecutive year, something they have not done since 2001 and 2002, the fourth and fifth seasons in franchise history.

“This is going to be definitely more disappointing than years that we weren’t even in it,” Gallen said, “because of the talent we had in this room.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The celebration never arrived: Arizona Diamondbacks watch postseason hopes flame out