This story was excerpted from Steve Gilbert’s D-backs Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The champagne was flowing, or more accurately, being dumped on the heads of players in the clubhouse Saturday night following the D-backs' clinch of a Wild Card berth, when Brandon Pfaadt got the news.

D-backs general manager Mike Hazen walked over to Pfaadt with chaos going on all around and congratulated the rookie right-hander.

“I saw him and was like, ‘Hey, man, congrats,’” Hazen said. “I said, ‘Remember when [D-backs manager Torey Lovullo] told you when we were sending you down that you were going to be pitching in meaningful games? Now you’re pitching the first game of the [expletive] playoffs!’”

Pfaadt nodded his head and told Hazen something like “great” and Hazen moved on as the celebration in the clubhouse continued.

Later, once the party had died down and Hazen was in Lovullo’s office with other members of the staff talking about playoff preparations, someone asked if Pfaadt had been told the news.

Lovullo and pitching coach Brent Strom both said, "Not yet."

“I was like, ‘Uhhhh, I think he already knows. I think I did it,’” Hazen said. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know he hadn’t been told yet. I screwed it up.”

Hazen might have messed up delivering the news prematurely, but the D-backs don’t feel they are making a mistake by starting Pfaadt in Game 1 against Milwaukee’s ace Corbin Burnes.

The team's top two starters, Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly, pitched Friday and Saturday against the Astros because the D-backs were still trying to clinch a playoff spot. That left them unavailable until Games 2 and 3 of the NL Wild Card Series.

The D-backs could have gone with a bullpen game. They could have turned to right-hander Ryne Nelson, but they like what they’ve seen recently from Pfaadt, who was Arizona’s top pitching prospect coming into the season per MLB Pipeline.

The season wasn’t a smooth one for Pfaadt, who opened it at Triple-A Reno and struggled in his first two stints in the big leagues. But Strom suggested moving him from the far third-base side of the pitching rubber to the first-base side in July and that began Pfaadt’s improvement.

“He’s been on a search for information,” Lovullo said of Pfaadt. “He's been accepting of coaching and then with each time that he's gone down to Triple-A, he’s come back improved and ready for the next set of challenges. We just believe in Pfaadt’s overall ability to help us win baseball games period, plain and simple.”