Arizona Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo sat down for Tuesday morning’s press conference alongside general manager Mike Hazen with a sense of disappointment, but also relief.
After nearly sneaking into a NL Wild Card playoff spot, the season came to a disappointing end when the Diamondbacks lost their last five games. After barely missing out on October baseball two years in a row, debate continued about Lovullo’s future with the organization.
On Monday, he learned that he will be back for his 10th season with the club.
Now, the team is trying to learn from what went right and what went wrong late in the season, knowing there will be some continuity with Lovullo’s return. It remains to be seen whether he will make changes to his staff, and Lovullo deferred when questioned about possible coaching changes.
“I don’t know if you guys were paying attention, but yesterday was a really big day in my life,” he said. “And I’m getting my own footing right now.”
While Lovullo felt the fire throughout the season, Hazen took part of the blame for how the season unfolded.
“I’m aware that a lot of what happens during the course of a season falls on the manager producing wins,” Hazen said. “We’re in charge of winning these games, period. It’s black and white, both of us. And we can’t do it without each other, and I can’t give him a bad roster and then tell him to go out there and win 90 games.
“And I felt like from the engagement to the coaching to the pushing of the players to where they needed to go, I thought he did a good job.”
Poor defense, underperforming pitching and a slew of injuries led to a 51-58 record at the July 31 trade deadline, forcing Hazen to move key cogs such as Eugenio Suarez and Josh Naylor. Arizona was left with a young, inexperienced roster.
But that’s where the season took an unexpected turn.
Down 9.5 games for the final NL Wild Card spot, Arizona rallied with their youth movement to make it the race interesting down the stretch, staying in wild card contention until the final weekend of the regular season, playing solid baseball along the way.
“I learned that they’re gritty, they’re hungry, they’re prepared, and they’re not afraid,” Lovullo said of his young players. “That’s the most important thing. I want to put a team of players out there that is not afraid, has a zero-backdown mentality, and they want to get in the middle of the ring and duke it out.
“That’s what I learned about some of the current players that we have. That blended in with the youngsters. So player development did a really nice job of getting these guys ready.”
The identity of the team late in the season relied on athleticism, strong defense and good starting pitching, traits that Lovullo and Hazen want to build their team around in the future.
“We are so aligned on what a successful team looks like,” Lovullo said. “For me, it starts with pitching and defense. I love offense … but the pitching and defense aspect of it is really, really important to me, and that’s who I am at my core. I think that’s what we talk about in there, and it shows up. The youthfulness, the ability to watch those guys improve every single day and have success is what we’re all about.”
With that in mind, Hazen has plans for how to address the upcoming offseason.
“So we are usually in a situation where we’re making binary choices, right?” Hazen said. “We may be taking somebody that’s playing on the corner that is a bat-first player, that we are taking some lumps on defense, but we’re getting a lot of offensive upside with.
“We’ve made some of those choices before. I believe the offensive identity is pretty clear, though. We talk every single day about having nine hitters going against one pitcher and grinding that pitcher and that pitching staff down.”
The manager and general manager agreed that the Diamondbacks have to get off to a quicker start next season. Lovullo said his message to his players in one-on-one meetings was to show up at spring training “with your glove broken in.”
Hazen called the club’s play last April “sloppy” and said that there will be an emphasis on playing winning baseball from the start next season.
Hazen and Lovullo have optimism for the team, despite all the injuries in 2025 and another failure to make the postseason. It is born out of the way the team played down the stretch.
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to feel disappointed in the way it ended, given the roster that we had going through to the end,” Hazen said. “But we still feel that way because you get that close and we played as well as we had. So overall, not where we want to be sitting, what we expected, where we wanted to be today by any stretch of the imagination.
“But I do want to at least highlight that I’ve watched teams sell at deadlines before. And the way our team played in the second half is not the norm.”
Now if only they would spend the money on decent relievers and on $20M Starting pitching that don’t go on the IL after signing the contracts. They have spent this kind of money 3 different times only to get terrible to mediocre pitching out of them