The State of the Diamondbacks. Literally.

Jan 30, 2023 - 8:00 PM

This kinda started with the recent international draft, when I started looking at the best players to have appeared for the Diamondbacks, from each of the Latin American countries. From there, came the idea of a Sporcle, to have you guess the best D-back player from every foreign country. But before going there, I thought we might as well start at home, and look at the players born in the United States of America. For the purposes of this, we are defining that as the fifty states, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico. All told, that gives us a sample pool of 439 players for the domestic phase.

To start with the non-entries, we find six states which still have to provide an Arizona player born there. The team seems to have something against New England, as three of the six are up in the north-east corner: Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are all Diamondback-free. Wyoming probably isn’t much of a surprise, considering it’s the least populated of the states, with a number of inhabitants roughly the same as that as Mesa, Arizona. Arkansas is also mostly forest, I believe. :) However, I would have expected Minnesota, with it’s 5.7 million people, to have generated somebody. There were 11 Minnesotans all told in the majors last year, the most famous probably Brad Hand. Just none in Arizona.

Hardly any more represented are our neighbors in Colorado. Indeed, up until last April, they were no better off than Minnesota, there having been no CO-Diamondbacks to that point. However, the first showed up for 2022, in the form of Wheat Ridge native, Mark Melancon. The town was also home to Bill and Dorothy Harmsen, the founders of Jolly Rancher. It still gives Colorado only half as many Arizona players as Alaska has produced, despite a population almost eight times as much. Indeed, in terms of average bWAR per player, Alaska may be the most productive state for the D-backs, averaging 12.8 bWAR per player. It helps that one of the pair is Anchorage’s Curt Schilling. The other... isn’t. *

No real surprises at the other end of the table, where the three states with the largest population - California, Texas and Florida - are the three states to have produced the highest number of Diamondbacks. However, that trio have all also produced a greater percentage that you’d expect. Together, they represent just shy of 27% of the country’s population, but have provided half as much again (40.5%) of our players. The prize for biggest over-achievers though, goes to Puerto Rico, who have less than one percent of the population, yet have still had 14 D-backs: 325% of the expected number. Alex Cintron is likely the best known, with Emmanuel Rivera representing the PR on last year’s roster.

Finally, there’s the home-grown players, who now number 11 - slightly more than you’d expect from the population, by about 17 percent. Only three of those have appeared in more than fifty games for the Diamondbacks: Kole Calhoun (Tempe), Shea Hillebrand (Mesa) and current occupant Josh Rojas (Litchfield Park). At 322 games, Rojas is the franchise leader in games played for Arizona by an Arizona, and is also the first native man to appear in more than two seasons for the Diamondbacks. Wonder who the next will be? Anyway, below is the chart of all 50 states plus two, so you can see where yours ranks. Sporcle of the best from each, to follow on Saturday!

* Subsequent research showed Delaware actually comes out ahead with an average of 19.5 bWAR per player. Like Alaska, it has two players. One of them is Paul Goldschmidt. The other... isn’t.