After his stellar debut season, at just twenty-two years of age, Edwin Diaz is well on his way to becoming the greatest Mariners closer in franchise history. He may even challenge the league’s all-time best closers if his game holds up against the tests of fitness and time.
Edwin Diaz is a powerful, gifted, young machine that is just starting his rampage on the league. In his debut season with the Mariners, Diaz awed us with his electrifying fastball.
When he was in the minor leagues, Diaz was known for his impressive fastball, but down there, it was only reaching the mid-to-high-nineties. He also hadn’t fully crafted effective off-speed pitches yet.
It seemed, though, that Diaz was waiting to show off his real potential to the Mariners faithful on the largest stage. In his debut, Diaz made nearly every Mariners fan in Safeco Field rise to their feet after he completed a perfect inning with his first strikeout of his career, all while hitting one hundred on the radar gun a couple of times.It was truly a special sight.
Over the years, the Mariners have had a handful of impressive closers like J.J Putz, Kazuhiro Sasaki or the original Mariners closing master, Mike Schooler, but, Diaz is cut from a different cloth.
Putz had his splitter, Sasaki had his split-fastball and Schooler had his stache. Each one of these Mariners closer greats had their signature style and methodology on the mound, but nothing quite matches Diaz’s fastball.
Since he’s been with the Mariners, Diaz’s consistent heat has put him only behind Aroldis Champman for the title of “fastest fastball” in the league. Yet, whether he’s throwing ninety-nine or topping off around one hundred and two, he’s still throwing almost six MPH faster than the average man in the league.
As his saves piled up in the summer months, his confidence grew. You could see his expressions and emotions change when he struck a guy out or got out of a jam. This was a stark contrast to the quiet, slender boy who first showed his face to the fans in the middle of the summer.
In all, Diaz collected eighteen saves with the help of his fastball. Because of the heat, Diaz fanned eighty-eight of two hundred and seventeen batters faced. That’s about a strikeout every 2.5 batters. To put that into perspective, Schooler struck out one out of every five batters faced and Sasaki and Putz sent batters packing via the K one of four times.
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Diaz saves total was also incredible for his age. In two months as the closer, he almost had twenty saves at the age of twenty-two. Schooler could only get fifteen saves in his first year, and he was already twenty-six. Putz couldn’t get more than eighteen saves until he was twenty-nine. And Sasaki, who was coming over from the Japanese league didn’t play in the MLB until he was in his thirties.
To boot, none of these men ever spent more than four years as the team’s permanent closer. That means that Diaz could be the Mariners longest tenured closer before his twenty-seventh birthday.
So, if we’re to adjust his numbers for a whole season, Diaz would have conservatively had forty saves and about one hundred strikeouts in 2016. With those numbers, he would only need about three more years to pass Sasaki’s current Mariners record of one hundred twenty-nine saves. He would also only need as many years to pass Schooler’s closer’s strikeout record of two hundred and one K’s.
With the adjustments Diaz is continuing to make on his mechanics including working on his slider and change, while of course, perfecting an almost perfect fastball, he will soon be atop all of the closer records in M’s history.
Barring a surprising injury, we are watching the greatest closer in Mariners history develop before our eyes.
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