DETROIT — The Diamondbacks dropped their final game before the Trade Deadline, falling 7-2 Wednesday to the Tigers at Comerica Park. They then boarded a chartered flight for Sacramento where they will spend Thursday’s off-day wondering what their team will look like when they reconvene at the ballpark Friday afternoon.
“Most of these things don’t happen until the Deadline, but things are moving along, and something may get done [Wednesday] or it may get done [Thursday], but I think it’s in a normal spot for where we typically are at this point,” Hazen said.
Suárez, Gallen and Kelly all figure to fetch a bigger return than the other two. The interest in them is greater with more teams involved. That’s one of the reasons Hazen pushed the market early on Naylor and Grichuk which now allows he and his staff to focus all their efforts on the three that are left.
While the interest in the players is high, it’s impossible for Hazen to predict just what will happen.
“Until the dominoes start to fall, it’s hard to really know where anything’s going to happen,” Hazen said. “We might be the first domino, but it’s until the dominoes really start to fall, it’s hard to know.”
The Diamondbacks got a scare Monday night when Suárez was hit on the right index finger by a pitch in the ninth inning and had to exit the game. However, an X-ray, CT scan and MRI all showed no serious injury and after sitting out Tuesday, Suárez was back in the lineup Wednesday and hit several balls hard, including a double.
Hazen said it did not appear like the hit by pitch has impacted his talks about Suárez.
The trade talks in general have seemed to take a toll on the Diamondbacks over the last 10 days. After sweeping the Cardinals after the All-Star break, Arizona has dropped eight of nine and has not looked good doing so.
Manager Torey Lovullo has tried addressing the elephant in the room, he’s tried yelling and in recent days focused on just being encouraging, but nothing has seemed to work. He’s hopeful that when the team gets back together on Friday that it will be able to get back to playing better baseball even if the roster is somewhat diminished.
“I think from the young players perspective, they probably know the chance of them getting traded is extremely low — not zero for anybody, but extremely low,” Hazen said. “So I don’t really even buy that from a distraction standpoint. For some of the veteran guys who’ve been talked about publicly, I understand it a little more. I just feel like, let’s get through the Deadline and see what happens. But yeah, it’s been a pretty disappointing [to] watch where we’ve been over the last 10 days.”
While there has been some speculation that the Diamondbacks would trade Gallen or Kelly, and not both, Hazen said he is not afraid to move both if the offers are right. He also reiterated that even if he does trade the three free agents the goal would still be to compete for a postseason berth in 2026.
The players just want to get through the Deadline and pick up the pieces after.
“It’s definitely not the spot that we wanted to be when we showed up to Scottsdale in the spring,” Wednesday’s starter Ryne Nelson said. “I think this is a really good group of guys. The guys really enjoy playing together and fighting for each other, but it’s been tough. It’s been tough with all the noise and a lot of people with opinions and things that they’ve said about us. I think this weighs pretty heavy on everyone.”
