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In this piece, we’ll take a look back at each player’s 2024 season with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

We will include player evaluations for the 2025 prospect season who are still eligible to be rookies. Here we show the players in descending order of their aWAR, which is calculated by averaging the WAR from Baseball Reference and FanGraphs.

Diamondbacks on SI: Ryan Thompson’s career statistics and projections through 2024 / Alex D’Agostino
Nobody, maybe with the exception of Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen, could have predicted the magnitude of the influence that right-handed reliever Ryan Thompson would have when he was signed to a minor league deal in the middle of the 2023 season.

With his destructive repertoire and perplexing sidearm angle, Thompson immediately stepped into a high-leverage role, adding constant steadiness to Arizona’s bullpen. He baffled opposing batters and pitched to an outstanding 0.69 ERA with the D-backs throughout the regular season.

Resuming his high-leverage role, Thompson did so at the start of 2024. The right-hander continued his strong play from the previous season during the first several months. With a 1.14 ERA through May, he made 22 appearances and gave up just three earned runs.

Even in June, he was dominant until a three-run outing against the Oakland A’s on June 28 when he allowed three hits, a walk, and a home run. He got back into his groove fast enough; in July, he allowed only two runs while maintaining a.143 ERA.

His performance declined in the later months, as did that of many of the D-backs’ other arms. Similar to the majority of Arizona’s pitching staff, the remainder of the high-leverage arms lost their stride as Paul Sewald started to falter in his role as closer.

The moment this started to go apart, which coincided precisely with Sewald being removed from the game in the ninth inning, was strangely decisive for Thompson.

Sewald walked a leadoff batter on July 31 while holding a slim advantage over the Washington Nationals. Manager Torey Lovullo drew nearer and resorted to Thompson to complete the task in order to prevent tragedy. The sidewinder won it all and ended the nail-biting finish.

Officially demoting Sewald occurred two days later, and Thompson’s problems started to manifest. While the right-hander’s ERA of 2.30 was still an objectively great figure, it had more than doubled in just over a month after he let a run in his first three August outings (including a botched save).

Over his subsequent three games, he allowed only one earned run; nonetheless, his self-assurance took a hit on August 16.

The usually lockdown reliever allowed a walk and four hits in a messy series against the Tampa Bay Rays, which was plagued with errors. Thompson only got two outs, surrendering the lead and allowing three runs—even though a number of those hits were cheap and should have been outs.

After that, he made six more scoreless appearances, each of which appeared more laborious than the last. His command appeared less sharp than usual, and he saw spikes in pitch counts. His slider and sinker frequently sailed far outside of the zone due to location mistakes.

Despite a two-run performance against the Dodgers to end the month, Thompson’s August earned run average was a dismal 6.17. He had his worst performance of the season opening September against the D-backs in San Francisco, allowing four runs on four hits and a walk.

As the season came to a close, his once-sparkling ERA inflated to a still-respectable but closer to average 3.26. September marked his second consecutive month with an ERA of 6.00 or above.

That so, his season shouldn’t be seen unfavorably only because of these late issues. All things considered, Thompson was a fantastic D-backs arm, and the team often relied on him to shoulder a heavy load out of the bullpen.

In 2024, the sidewinder threw 66.1 innings across 67 appearances, which was 23.2 innings more than his previous season-best. As a pitcher who flourished on weak contact, he was prone to a lot of cheap hits and occasionally got bit by bad defense, but his FIP was 3.30, so he pitched about as well as his stats revealed.

He started to see a decline in the mobility of his slider and sinker, his two main soft-contact pitches. The righty seemed to be suffering from exhaustion, and a combination of bad luck and fatigue made for a challenging stretch.

The D-backs’ bullpen, though, would have been much worse off if Thompson hadn’t helped. Despite his struggles later in the year, he has been an integral part of Arizona’s relief corps since 2023, when he helped the team reach the World Series.

The projected amount for 2025 is $3,070,000 per Spotrac, and the current state of the contract is arbitration.

The massive right-hander is projected to make $3,070,000 in the upcoming season, and he is still eligible for arbitration. There’s little question he’ll be back with the D-backs in 2025, and he’ll probably still play in circumstances with more leverage, even if the team adds a player.