Playing in a division like the NL West with the Dodgers, Padres, and even Giants shelling out money for free agents can be a challenge for teams like the Diamondbacks and Rockies. They have to be up for the challenge.
It sure seems like Arizona manager Torey Lovullo has the right mindset to go in and compete against bigger-market teams.
Lovullo worked his way up the minor-league coaching ranks in the early 2000s and joined the Blue Jays coaching staff in 2010. Now, over a decade later, he is preparing to enter his seventh season as the Diamondbacks manager.
Lovullo joined WEEI’s Rob Bradford on the Audacy Original Podcast “Baseball Isn’t Boring” and gave a peek into what his Spring Training speech might look like, including the mindset to compete in a stacked NL West.
“This year it’ll have the same tone that it’s had over the past couple of years, is we’re young. We don’t have the same payroll. Let’s embrace it. Let’s go out there and show people how good we can be by being prepared, by winning the inch, and not backing down from anybody,” Lovullo said (11:17 in player above).
Lovullo is a big proponent of winning the inch and putting the effort in to take advantage of mistakes. There are inches all over the baseball field, he said, from taking advantage of a pitch that missed the spot by an inch or two to getting that extra inch jump in the field to make a catch. Preparation goes a long way.
“We’ve got some young teams that have gone into big situations and just got overrun a little bit. I think when you have the type of team the Dodgers do, the Padres do, you don’t go in there knowing that you’re walking and standing as tall as you possibly can, they just overwhelm you,” he continued. “We fell victim to that in maybe 2021, but 2022 it was a totally different cast of characters and I talked about that a lot last year.”
Arizona isn’t a big market that draws free agents or has the payroll that its rivals do. But that is something that Lovullo takes pride in.
“We are who we are. We are not a big-market team. We’re not going to go out there, but we create from within, the opportunity is here,” he said. “We’re the boys that can go out there and do it together. We fight together and pull on the same rope together every single day and special things can happen. And I will continue to talk about that and we embrace it.
“We embrace the challenge of playing inside the NL West with a $100 million payroll compared to a $300 million payroll. Go ahead and buy your team, we’re going to find a way to slug it out with you.”
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