SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Sure, Mike Hazen was thinking about it. How could he not? The Diamondbacks general manager described Shohei Ohtani as “the superstar of all superstars.”
“And I don’t think you want the teams in your division to land the superstar of all superstars,” Hazen said.
But then he acknowledged reality. The Dodgers weren’t just going to respond to another championship-less year by crawling into a financial fetal position. So “it didn’t surprise me one bit” when Los Angeles invested $700 million to secure Ohtani and by the time the Dodgers also went over $1 billion in offseason investments by making Yoshinobu Yamamoto the highest-paid pitcher in baseball ($325 million) before he had thrown a major league pitch and kept adding with Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernandez and …
“When it’s that extreme, it helps you even more to focus on what we need to fixate and obsess over — and that’s what is going to make the Diamondbacks the absolute best Diamondbacks team we can be and see where that takes us,” Hazen said.
Hazen was speaking late Wednesday morning in manager Torey Lovullo’s office at the club’s spring facility, Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. Physically 40-ish miles away on State Route 101 and metaphorically way more than that, the Dodgers were scheduled 24 hours later to open the most anticipated camp perhaps in MLB history. Because of the investments and what it will mean once combined with Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and eventually this season Walker Buehler and Clayton Kershaw.
Netflix might be following the Red Sox. Everyone else will have at least one eye on the Dodgers and how they handle being Team Bull’s-eye.
But before the Dodgers fittingly for this year become on Thursday the first of 30 teams to open a spring camp, I thought it worthwhile to visit the club that, you know, humiliated them in the playoffs last year and actually won the NL title.
“That attention [on the Dodgers] is deserved,” Hazen said. “Baseball is built on 162 games and the fact is over 162 games, they were about 20 games better than us (actually 16 in winning the NL West). We can’t unwrite that. Yes, we got hot in the playoffs and played our best baseball of the season for an incredibly large stretch of October, which is exactly what you want to have happen. But when we sat there with 84 wins to get into the playoffs, the discrepancy and the disparity between the two clubs was fairly stark. And nothing’s changed with that. I think we’re both better than we were at the start of last season. I’m not sure we closed the gap on paper.”
It is why Hazen is advising his brain trust to eliminate thinking about two items — the 2024 Dodgers and the 2023 Diamondbacks. There is no defense, in Hazen’s mind, against the Dodgers’ competence in improving internally teamed with the finances to augment externally. And while Hazen uses the word “magic” several times to describe the 2023 postseason ride, he sees living in that magic kingdom now as the enemy.
“What we’ve talked about is doubling down on eliminating 2023 from what we’re focused on,” Hazen said. “It was amazing. It’s over. Dead. We need to focus on February 14 of 2024 [when their camp opens]. How are we getting better today to be able to go out there to play our best against the teams in our division and in the National League and focusing on anything else is going to expose our margin for error.”
My first stop in Arizona last year also was with the Diamondbacks. Hazen remembered why. The team had not made the playoffs the past five years and had lost 110 games as recently as 2021. Yet, I thought they had built a playoff contender and was asking if that was the internal belief. At that time, Hazen said he hoped his team forced him to be a deadline buyer. On Wednesday, Hazen said he expects to be a 2024 deadline buyer.
And he should feel that way. Hazen addressed a lack of lefty diversity and having among MLB’s worst DH production by signing Joc Pederson. Eduardo Rodriguez joins the outstanding rotation duo of Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly; with Brandon Pfaadt seeing if he can build off a strong postseason. Closer Paul Sewald, last year’s key deadline acquisition, returns for a full pen season in conjunction with the emergent Kevin Ginkel and Ryan Thompson.
NL Rookie of the Year Corbin Carroll is a star and catcher Gabriel Moreno is on the doorstep. The re-signing of Lourdes Gurriel, the acquisition of third baseman Eugenio Suarez and Pederson deepen a lineup with Ketel Marte and Christian Walker — all made deeper if the defensively excellent shortstop Geraldo Perdomo and center fielder Alek Thomas turn big postseason offensive moments into something more regular in 2024.
It’s not the Dodgers. But it should not be ignored — even in the shadows.
