D-backs GM and his front office share a bond beyond baseball

PHOENIX -- They come to Mike Hazen’s house most Sundays, filling it with friendship, with conversation, with laughter. They gather in the ranch home Mike shares with his four teenage sons.

Mike, the general manager of the National League champion Arizona Diamondbacks, will make the main course -- typically Italian, though in his expanding culinary skillset he has also begun to incorporate Mexican, barbeque, Middle Eastern and other cuisines. Amiel Sawdaye and Mike Fitzgerald, Mike’s top lieutenants, bring their wives and children and the side dishes. In a given week, manager Torey Lovullo and his wife, Kristen, might stop by, as will other members of the Arizona front office and various neighbors.

These Sunday suppers don’t just fill the house but the souls of its inhabitants.

“We wanted their home to feel like a fun place where there’s a lot of love,” says Fitzgerald, “and not just sorrow.”

Not long ago, Mike and his sons -- Charlie (age 18), John (16), Teddy (15) and Sam (13) -- had their lives forever altered by the tragic loss of their matriarch, Nicole Hazen, who passed away in 2022 after a battle with brain cancer. And at some point after the untimely death of a vivacious woman who loved to cook and genuinely loved the company of others, it was decided the best way to honor her would be to do as she would have done.

“It’s really important to us,” John Hazen says. “It’s relatively new, but with the amount of times we’ve had Sunday dinner, you wouldn’t think that it’s new. It’s fun to hang out with our extended family. It's a way to keep a strong connection with the people we love.”

You hear that word “love” a lot in the D-backs’ inner circle. It’s a word more freely shared among this club’s leadership team in the wake of Nicole’s death.

During the World Series, MLB.com told the story of Nicole’s beautiful life and heartbreaking death. And in a new MLB Network feature, “A Bond Beyond Baseball,” we tell you the story of the 20-year-old friendship between Hazen and Lovullo and how they have had each other’s backs through trying times on the field and tragic times away from it.

But these stories only scratch the surface of the heartfelt connections that exist within a team that, in rallying around the Hazens, has truly become a family.

• Nicole Hazen Fund For Hope

“I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Mike Hazen says. “This job would suck if we didn’t have that. Yeah, we have our arguments. But I wouldn’t want to do this job any other way. It’s what makes it worth doing. It’s what gets you through the losses.”

The D-backs did a lot of losing in 2021 -- 110 games, to be exact. It was a humiliating season that, in the cutthroat world of professional sports, could have led to a lot of people losing their jobs.

That didn’t happen in Arizona.

“I think teams can be too impatient,” D-backs CEO Derrick Hall says. “They want quick fixes, and we were guilty of that for years. It was a revolving door when it came to managers and general managers. But when you get one you know is special and is right, you have to show the loyalty and the commitment they’ve been showing you. We were much more patient with these guys because we believed in them.”

With Hazen navigating not only the struggles of his baseball team but the deteriorating physical condition of his bride, who had been diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2020, the D-backs had added reason to extend him some grace. And because he knew well that he was ultimately at fault for the failures of the roster he had built, Hazen was not going to make Lovullo the fall guy for the team’s foibles, as so often happens with managers.

Instead, Arizona’s leaders focused on honesty, transparency and lifting each other up.

And nowhere, of course, was that more prevalent than in helping Mike and his sons navigate those dark days of watching the cancer claim Nicole.

“He would leave the room and take phone calls, and we’d make a comment like, ‘How’s he finding the strength to deal with the minutiae [of running a baseball team] while hearing a prognosis about his wife’s health?’” Lovullo recalls. “We drew inspiration from the strength he was showing every day.”

As Nicole’s condition worsened and Mike took a leave of absence early in the 2022 season, Sawdaye and Fitzgerald absorbed the majority of the day-to-day front office tasks.

“We love Mike, and we love his family,” Fitzgerald says. “In a lot of ways, I’m closer to Mike than I am with members of my own family. We love the guy, and he loves us. And that’s kind of a weird dynamic at times for people to think about. But we got the behind-the-curtain look at what he was dealing with on a daily basis and his commitment level to his family, and it’s really difficult to not want to do everything you can to try to help a person like that out.”

No one was a bigger help than Kristen Lovullo.

Thrust into the kind of arranged friendship that often forms among baseball wives, Kristen and Nicole had become true companions, like sisters. And when Nicole became too ill to perform her duties as a mother of four, Kristen was the one she trusted to get her busy boys, involved in school and sports and other endeavors, ready for their days and where they needed to be.

“I think she knew our youngest was gone and away at school,” Kristen says. “She waited [to ask for help] until she knew she wasn’t taking me away from my family. She was unselfish until the very end.”

Kristen would show up first thing in the morning, bright and perky and trying to make things feel as normal as she could for the Hazen boys. In cooking and cleaning and putting together birthday or holiday gifts, she would seek and act upon very specific instructions for how Nicole wanted things done.

“I wanted Nicole to still feel like she was in charge of her life,” Kristen says. “What people don’t understand is Nicole was giving back to me -- and Mike and the boys were giving back to me -- by letting me be here and be invested with them and spend time with her that I wasn’t going to have.”

Nicole passed away on Aug. 4, 2022, at the age of 45. It was around 4 a.m. when she breathed her last. The first people through the door of the Hazen home, roughly a half hour later, were Torey and Kristen Lovullo.

So no, this is not the typical relationship between manager and general manager.

“They helped walk my wife into death in a way that was comforting and loving,” Mike says of Torey and Kristen. “It doesn’t matter what else happens. I’m never going to forget that.”

After Nicole died, Mike left it up to his sons whether he would return to his baseball duties. They voted unanimously for him to continue.

That decision proved profound last season, when the D-backs’ young roster came together quicker than most pundits had forecast and went on an incredible October run to the franchise’s first World Series appearance in a generation.

“It was life-changing,” Charlie Hazen says. “The biggest part of it that we loved is we knew our mom supported our dad so much to get to that point. She wanted nothing but to see the D-backs do what they did. Her spirit was watching over us as we went through that.”

Throughout that run were reminders of Nicole, who had come to be associated with the number four for her four sons, her birthdate (Jan. 4) and, sadly, the day she died (Aug. 4).

In the NL Division Series against the Dodgers, the D-backs became the first team in postseason history to hit four home runs in a single inning. And the Most Valuable Player of an epic, seven-game NL Championship Series against the Phillies was Ketel Marte, who wears No. 4.

“I’m not clairvoyant at all,” Lovullo says. “But after Game 2 in Philly, when we had just gotten beat 10-0 [to fall into an 0-2 series hole], all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I thought about Nicole. It was like she just sat on my desk and said, ‘It’s gonna be all right.’ And she held serve.”

Though the D-backs’ magic ran out in the World Series loss to the Rangers, the pain of that defeat was nothing compared to what these people had already been through together. And with Hazen and Lovullo both having been extended last fall and ownership having made significant offseason investments in the roster, the D-backs family feels fortified and more optimistic than ever.

Those around Mike Hazen on a daily basis say he is navigating the challenges of running a baseball team and a household as a single father remarkably well.

“He’s in a really good place professionally because of where we are,” Sawdaye says. “He’s in a good place personally because the boys talk about it and they can remember Nicole in so many ways now, both with the charitable work they’ve done and the personal stuff they can talk about. So he’s seeing his boys go through high school and playing sports and is able to be there for them while also having this real comfort that what we’ve done is starting to work.”

Mike says he has found added comfort in coming to work in a place where he is surrounded by people who knew Nicole well, who share the sadness of her absence and who understand what he is going through without having it explained.

“In a screwed-up way, the volume of everything keeps your mind occupied from sitting and dwelling on what you’ve lost, which happens when you have the quiet moments,” Mike says. “It’s the little things that catch you off guard a lot. That’s what I’ve noticed. It just hits you … something you miss about some place you might have went with her or did with her. It’s that little sting. That’s where it’s the hardest. But the community aspect of it, the shared experiences are helpful.”

Less than a month after Nicole’s death, Mike and the D-backs launched the Nicole Hazen Fund for Hope, which supports medical research for aggressive brain tumors and support for those diagnosed with them. That fund is among the charities supported by the club’s annual Evening on the Diamond Fundraiser.

At this year’s fundraiser, held at Chase Field near the end of Spring Training, pop star Andy Grammer performed for about 800 guests. One of the songs he performed was “Saved My Life”:

I was lost until I saw your halo
I was blind until I saw your light
I believe, my friend, we all have angels
And you are mine
I think you should know you saved my life

As Grammer sang those words, members of the D-backs family looked at each other knowingly. The message resonated.

There is a saving grace that accompanies those Sunday gatherings at the Hazen household. There is no replacing what Mike and his boys lost, but there is beauty and dignity in the way this group of friends and coworkers comes together as one to support them.

When Mike and Nicole moved to Arizona and purchased the home in 2017, Nicole had directed a renovation that reflected her love of communal functions. A wall was removed to create an open floor plan, which comes in handy now that anywhere from 15 to 30 people gather on Sundays, laughing and gabbing among the many framed photos of Nicole and her magnificent smile.

Somewhere, they know, she’s still smiling.

“Nicole is probably the one who would have enjoyed the dinners the most,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s a shame that it took her passing to have everybody want to get together and make the commitment to do that. But I definitely believe that she would be very happy with her boys and Mike having a strong sense of community and friends and people around that truly care about them.”

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