PHOENIX — For six innings the Diamondbacks and the Angels traded nothing that stuck, two runs apiece and the feeling of a game that would come down to a single swing. In the seventh, Pavin Smith took it.
His solo home run broke a 2-2 tie, Geraldo Perdomo followed two batters later with a run-scoring double, and Arizona had the 4-2 cushion that carried it to a 4-3 win on Sunday night at Chase Field. The margin survived a ninth-inning scare, which is the only kind of comfortable these Diamondbacks seem to manage lately.
The seventh was the whole game, and it turned on a starter who had given Arizona almost nothing to work with for most of the night. Walbert Urena had cruised through six, holding the Diamondbacks to two runs and matching zeros with the home side. Then he came back out for the seventh, Smith got a fastball that stayed up, and the swing that followed changed the math of the evening. Perdomo’s double off the wall a few pitches later turned a one-run edge into the lead that decided it.
Ryne Nelson had quietly earned the right to win a game like this. The right-hander worked seven innings, allowed two earned runs and struck out five, the sort of unflashy line that does not lead a highlight show but keeps a team in front of a dangerous lineup. His record sits at 3-5, a number that says more about the run support he has lived without than about how he has thrown, and on this night Arizona finally gave him enough.
The Angels’ threat for most of the evening was the one it usually is. Mike Trout got hold of a pitch in the fifth and drove it out for his home run, the kind of swing that still bends a ballpark’s attention toward him a decade and a half into his career. Jo Adell added two hits, including a double, and for six innings Los Angeles looked like the side more likely to find the decisive run.
That it did not is partly because the bullpen held, and partly because Arizona’s seventh-inning runs gave Paul Sewald the room he needed to survive his own. Donovan Walton led off the ninth with a home run that cut the lead to a single run and put the tying runner in the building’s imagination, if not yet on base. Sewald steadied, struck out two, and closed it for his eighteenth save. It was tidy enough in the box score and not at all tidy to watch.
This is the texture of the National League this June, where one swing decides games that two good starting pitchers have kept level for two hours. A night earlier the story elsewhere was a pitcher who could not lose with the numbers he posted and somehow did, when Paul Skenes set a career strikeout high and still took the loss. Low-scoring baseball rewards the team that gets the one swing, and on Sunday that was Arizona.
It also rewards the team that does not give a run back on a technicality or a bad inning, the sort of late-game margin that has decided so many of these games. The week has been full of ninth innings that refused to go quietly, including a Soto home run that vanished on replay as Atlanta held off the Mets. Walton’s homer counted, and still it was not enough.
What the night does not settle is whether either of these teams is what its record suggests. The Diamondbacks have spent the season looking for the version of themselves that wins the close ones, and one tidy seventh inning against a good pitcher does not prove they have found it. The Angels keep getting the Trout home run and not quite enough around it, a problem no single loss explains and no single win solves.
The two sides meet again on Monday, with Arizona having taken the night it needed and Los Angeles left to wonder how a game it led the run-scoring conversation in for six innings got away in the seventh. The answer, as it so often is, was one swing they did not make and the other team did.
