Derrick Hall satisfied with D-backs’ buying and selling

The Arizona Diamondbacks did the exact opposite of what they said they were going to do at the MLB trade deadline.

“At this point, I would probably say no,” D-backs President and CEO Derrick Hall told 98.7 FM’s Arizona’s Sports Station’s Doug & Wolf about the possibility of a significant trade happening just six days ago.

And according to 98.7 FM’s Doug Franz, the D-backs didn’t feel the need to do anything.

But at the same time, the D-backs also did everything they said they’d do at Wednesday’s deadline. At least, said they could do.

The idea of buying and selling simultaneously had been floated around just as much as doing nothing at all. Both options would keep the team in the same place from a standings and timeline perspective. Fully buying or selling wouldn’t.

That was the flexibility that appealed to D-backs President and CEO Derrick Hall.

“I had said for a couple weeks I thought there was a way to do both, and we did,” he told Doug & Wolf Thursday.

But Hall said that the plan of doing nothing wasn’t just a smokescreen.

“Ken [Kendrick] and I telling were Mike [Hazen], ‘You don’t have to do anything. We’re okay with where the payroll is at. We’re okay with paying Zack Greinke what we’re paying him. However, if the return is going to look as strong as it did yesterday, we got to pull the trigger,'” he said.

The moves the D-backs made came in a flash.

“It was a flurry. It was crazy,” Hall said.

But the first deal, the one that saw No. 1 prospect Jazz Chisholm get moved for Marlins pitcher Zac Gallen, was one that the team had considered for awhile.

“Ever since Mike brought the idea to me a couple months ago, I’ve been watching this guy and I’ve been more and more impressed,” Hall said of Gallen.

“I thought it was a guy that was off limits. I thought it was an untouchable with the Marlins, for them to pull that off,” he said.

The buying and selling made the D-backs better in Hall’s mind.

“We’ve built on today with the future in mind,” he said. “I think, anytime you lose your best pitcher, and you say your rotation got better, that’s interesting and rare. And I think that’s certainly the case here today.”

The Greinke trade was where the flurry that Hall referred to started. The idea of trading him to Houston wasn’t brought up until the night before.

“We weren’t planning on moving him at all,” he said.

“I remember Mike called me at about 11 o’clock at night and said, ‘Hey, Houston’s interested.'”

The two were on the phone again at 5 a.m. the next morning.

“We didn’t think it would happen because we were shooting so high,” he said.

But the deal was too good to turn down for Arizona.

“For us, it was the price we had to pay to get better players,” Hall said. “These were guys we had been eyeing in trades in the past. These are guys that our farm system and our baseball leadership have identified as hopefuls.”

He stressed it was not a salary dump.

“This was not about salary, it was about acquiring talent now and thinking about the next five-to-10 years,” Hall said.

That was the one mindset the D-backs have echoed all summer. How they went about that was the question. And with Wednesday’s moves, that is now answered.