It’s been clear for a full week leading into the MLB trade deadline that the Arizona Diamondbacks had already decided their 2025 direction. D-backs president and CEO Derrick Hall said it out loud hours before the team traded first baseman Josh Naylor.
The Eugenio Suarez deal on deadline eve is likely not the last move for Arizona, with starting pitchers Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly on contract years and receiving plenty of trade interest.
To Hall, selling and selling hard does not put a wet blanket on the remaining 53 games this season — maybe because the play of the team lately has been soggy and uninspiring anyway.
“We just have to rediscover who we are,” Hall told Arizona Sports’ Bickley & Marotta on Thursday morning after Suarez was dealt for first baseman Tyler Locklear and pitching prospects Juan Burgos and Hunter Cranton.
“I’m not saying go out and recreate or reinvent yourself but rediscover, bring back that style of baseball. I remember at the end of (the 2022 season), all my counterparts at an owner’s meeting said, ‘We hate playing you. We did not like playing you the last couple of months.’ … We have that opportunity again.”
Yes, there is positivity to be found on Hall’s end despite the big whiff on reaching this season’s expectations.
It was the 52-win 2021 season that set up a 74-88 campaign in 2022 that saw the rise of core pieces and future All-Stars Corbin Carroll and Geraldo Perdomo. Hall sees a comparison there.
“… We didn’t have any expectations, but we were going through a seller’s mode and trying to acquire assets and trying to improve,” Hall said of those seasons. “But it gave us the opportunity to bring up young players like Corbin Carroll, like Alek Thomas, and then we made the trade for Gabi (Moreno) … and we had all these young players and all our fans loved ’em and they still do.”
The passing of the deadline should help calm the clubhouse, Hall believes. The pressure could be off the team’s backs, and the distraction of the trade deadline will be gone.
It could lead to cleaner and more inspired baseball than the team has seen in the recent 1-8 stretch, he said.
Hall also made clear that prospects like Locklear and pitcher Brandyn Garcia, a return piece from the Naylor trade last week, will get opportunities to prove themselves immediately in the big leagues.
The same goes for infielder Jordan Lawlar, who Hall said will be immediately positioned to replace Suarez at third base once he is back from a hamstring injury that has him on the minor league injured list.
As for the tailspin of late, Hall took a bit of the blame.
“Maybe it’s our fault that we proclaimed ourselves sellers too early and that we made a few trades right away, and it just sent a shockwave through that clubhouse,” Hall said. “I think they’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, ‘Oh, am I going to get traded?’
“We just became a shell of ourselves.”
