Remember the Arizona Diamondbacks? You know, the franchise with the owner who will not allow fans of other teams to wear non-Dbacks clothing behind home plate because he doesn’t want them to appear on local television, which is probably one of the many reasons why his franchise is ranked 24th in the MLB in attendance this season with an average draw of 25,686 fans per game?

Yeah well, don’t look now but they have been playing pretty good baseball since the All-Star break and have moved to within 4.0 games of the Giants and 6.5 games of the Dodgers in the NL West standings.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Since the break the Dbacks are 20-19 (.512) and have won four of their last six games and 11 of their last 20. And while they are still expected to finish third in the NL West behind the Dodgers and Giants, the Dbacks are hoping for a fierce battle between the two archrivals down the stretch to allow themselves to sneak back into the race – a long shot, but a distinct possibility with the way that the two teams ahead of them have been playing of late.

The best-case scenario for the snakes would be for the Dodgers and Giants to go 4-3 or 3-4 against each in the seven remaining head-to-head games against one another while they themselves continue to play above .500 in their remaining 37 games. That said, Chip Hale and his boys still have seven games against the Dodgers and six against the Giants – and that’s the good news for them. The bad news is that they still have two more games against the NL Central-leading Cardinals (having already lost the first two games of the current four-game series), three more games against the smoking-hot Wild Card-contending Cubs and finish the regular season with three interleague games against the AL West-leading Houston Astros.

The Dodgers certainly have enough problems of their own right now with their current 1-5 road trip (with two games remaining) and their dangerously thin 2.5-game lead over the Giants to even give the third-place Dbacks much thought. But should Mattingly’s boys continue to struggle, the non-factor Arizona club could very quickly become a huge factor in the stretch run.