Arizona Diamondbacks Reward Lovullo With 3-Year Contract Extension

Torey Lovullo’s season of winning extended into the first week of November.

Lovullo, who managed the Arizona Diamondbacks to the second World Series appearance in franchise history, received his second contract extension in six months on Monday, a week after the Diamondbacks lost to Texas in five games in the 2023 World Series.

Lovullo’s new deal, which goes through the 2026 season, replaces the third consecutive one-year extension he signed on June good through the 2024 season. Terms were not announced.

Lovullo was rewarded for leading the Diamondbacks out of a recent funk that coincided with the COVID epidemic in 2020. The Diamondbacks were 52-110 in 2021 and 74-88 in 2022, and their 10-game improvement to 84-78 this season was enough to get them into the playoffs for the first time since 2017 and the World Series for the first time since 2001.

The Diamondbacks survived a nine-game late-summer losing streak to clinch their NL wild card berth in the penultimate game of the regular season before sweeping Counsell’s Milwaukee Brewers and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first two rounds of the playoffs. They beat Philadelphia in the NLCS by winning the final two games on the road.

Lovullo’s is the second recent extension for an ownership that acknowledges success. As the playoffs began, Arizona managing partner Ken Kendrick and president/CEO Derrick Hall OKd a five-year extension for general manager Mike Hazen that takes him through the 2028 season.

The way Lovullo handled the summer slump was instructive, Hazen said, as the Diamondbacks became one of eight teams in major league history to make the postseason despite a nine-game losing streak in the regular season.

“I think he has always been an incredible game manager. I think he does a great job in our clubhouse, relationships with our players,” Hazen said before the World Series.

“I think that has taken on a new level. I think when we went through the skid in the middle of July and August, I think that’s where we really started to see him take control of some things — in the clubhouse, a little bit more aggressively — that I think that could have sunk a lot of seasons, and it didn’t sink ours.”

Lovullo was Hazen’s first hire in the fall of 2016 and is 495-537 in seven seasons, 13-10 in the playoffs. Only Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash (nine years), Counsell (eight years, five months) Seattle’s Scott Servais (eight), the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts (eight) and Atlanta’s Brian Snitker (seven years, four months) have been in the position longer. Colorado hired Bud Black on Nov. 7, 2016, the same day the Diamondbacks hired Lovullo.

Lovullo was named the BBWAA NL Manager of Year award in 2017, when the Diamondbacks went 93-69 and beat Colorado in the one-game wild card round before falling to the Dodgers in the NLDS.

He is not among the three finalists for the award this season in balloting that is conducted before the playoffs begin. Counsell, Snitker and Miami’s Skip Schumaker are the finalists. Schumaker, whose team won 84 games and also made the playoffs as a wild card, is considered the favorite.

“To get to that point where we can call ourselves a champion,” Lovullo said of the organizational goal following the World Series. “We got a taste of it. It tastes really good. But it wasn’t the final thing we wanted to do. It’s going to motivate me to keep that feeling of what we almost achieved. Who would ever ever thought we would have another month of baseball?”

The industry holds managers’ salaries close to the vest, although some figures are known. Former Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell on Monday signed a reported five-year contract worth at least $40 million to replace David Ross as the manager of the Chicago Cubs, which would be the most lucrative deal for a manager in major league baseball history.

Former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre had the previous high dollar value, a reported $7.5 million in the latter stages of his 12 seasons in New York. Former Cleveland manager Terry Francona was reported to have made between $4.5 million-$5 million last year, which was the highest in the league. USA Today reported six managers made in excess of $3 million in salary in 2023.

Hazen said it was an easy (and responsible) decision to ride with Lovullo through it all, even after the 110-loss 2021 season.

“We talk about accountability a lot,” Hazen said. “When you lose 110 games, it’s pretty hard for a manager to have that much impact on that. That’s a roster issue. That’s me. It’s kind of hard to fire somebody when your overarching feeling is you didn’t do your job.

“I make mistakes. We make mistakes. We don’t always give him a perfect team. We didn’t have a closer for the first half of the (2023) season. I never heard anything (like) ‘we can’t win because we don’t have X. I think those are important characteristics. Those are the things that he brought to the table.”