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PHOENIX — The party was wet and raucous.

For the first time in six years and just two seasons after losing 110 games, the Arizona Diamondbacks had clinched a playoff spot, sealing up a National League wild card on the season’s penultimate day. Clad in neon ski goggles and champagne-soaked black shirts, the celebrants filled Chase Field’s signature pool in right-center. A spontaneous roll call began, summoning coaches and executives into the water, and one by one they took the plunge. Yet Mike Hazen, the team’s general manager and the architect of this surprisingly competitive club, remained planted among onlookers on the outfield turf.

“You have to come up here!” special assistant Jason McLeod beckoned from above, but Hazen just smiled and shook his head. Moments later, another mantra arose — HAZEN! HAZEN! HAZEN! — and this time the executive relented. The 47-year-old GM vaulted the fence and leaped into the frothy water. After three years defined by heartbreak, it was a splashdown of pure joy.

In May 2020, a seizure had gripped Hazen’s wife, Nicole, the first sign of what would soon be diagnosed as glioblastoma, a malignant brain cancer that claims most patients within two years. As the Diamondbacks flopped in that year’s pandemic-shortened 60-game season, Hazen was also managing the care of his wife and the well-being of his four school-age boys. Nicole’s decline hastened in 2021 as Arizona limped to the second-worst record in club history, leading Hazen to spend more time away from the park. Last August, when Nicole died 26 months after her diagnosis, he considered never returning.

He came back because his children wanted him to and because he had been nagged by the sense of a job left undone. Hazen knew home was where he was supposed to be, that he faced the infinitely harder task than a disappointing season, yet he couldn’t help feeling as if he should have been stuck in the baseball muck, too.

But the Diamondbacks are stuck no more. Arizona stormed out of the gate in 2023, buoyed by impactful roster additions and a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/07/11/corbin-carroll-diamondbacks-seattle-all-star/" target=_blank>transcendent all-star season from rookie sensation Corbin Carroll</a>. The Diamondbacks finished 84-78, claiming the NL’s final playoff spot and setting up a three-game first-round series against the Brewers that begins Tuesday in Milwaukee. They are only the third team in major league history to lose at least 110 games and make the playoffs only two years later.

Such a turnaround occurred, Hazen’s friends and colleagues say, because he is uncommonly strong and clear-eyed, capable of juggling immense family tragedy along with the demanding responsibilities of a GM. It happened also, according to Hazen, because so many people stepped up to help. They drove his kids to school and sat with his ailing wife. They handled tough conversations with players and phone calls from rivals. They were wherever he couldn’t be, and they still are.

This night, though, they were together, sopping wet and giddy and basking in their return to October. After his submersion, Hazen emerged and draped his arms over the shoulders of his top assistants, Amiel Sawdaye and Mike Fitzgerald. As much as anyone, they had carried his load. “The level of appreciation I have, I can’t express,” Hazen said, sitting in the dugout the following morning. “I tell them that, but it’s not enough.” Without them, he would have walked away completely. “I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic,” he said. “That is a fact.”

And without her, Mike Hazen finds a way to go on.

Courtesy of Arizona Diamondbacks

His life with Nicole began with another playoff celebration. It was Jan. 19, 2002 — the Tuck Rule Game.

A Boston native who was then a young scout with Cleveland, Hazen had watched in his Ohio apartment as his New England Patriots took on the Oakland Raiders in the NFL playoffs. He despaired when a young Tom Brady committed a late fumble that seemed to cost the Patriots the game. He rejoiced when the call was infamously overturned, leading to a game-winning field goal. Out of beer but riding high, he and a buddy hit the local bars. And there was Nicole.

“I never would have met her otherwise,” he said.

Their romance brought them four boys and to three cities. Nicole was particularly suited to the baseball grind. If the sport demanded his attention, for just a few minutes or for a week, Nicole encouraged him to offer it. If Mike’s career pulled him elsewhere — as it did to Boston and then to Arizona — Nicole embraced each move as a new adventure. Within days, she had made new friends.

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She also became a rabid baseball fan, gripped by the passion the family shared. She watched every game and would be there every night when Hazen returned home, sometimes asleep on the couch and sometimes awake, ready to share his joys or burdens. After wins, they might pour a glass of wine and rehash the victory. After losses, they might sit in the comforting silence only a spouse can  offer. Her smile would lift him. Once, in the depths of her illness, Hazen relayed a player’s offer to be of assistance. Nicole replied, “He can f---ing play better.” The GM passed along her appreciation but stopped short of the rest.

Hazen’s front office is close-knit and collaborative, and a tight gaggle crammed together for intense 80-hour workweeks. They laugh and tease and argue and forgive, and their families intertwine. Naturally, the GM hid nothing from his friends and co-workers — not Nicole’s first seizure and not the results of her biopsy or any of the dispiriting updates that followed. They sprang into action however they could. Sawdaye fielded calls on Hazen’s behalf, sharing news of Nicole’s progress so the GM didn’t have to. When Hazen had to drive Nicole to chemotherapy, former assistant GM Jared Porter took the boys to school. Kristen Lovullo, the wife of Manager Torey Lovullo, spent months at Nicole’s side and helped raise her children.

All the while, Hazen strove to carry the two demanding loads of GM and family crisis manager. But he could feel the gravitational pull toward home. In February 2021, the Hazens revealed Nicole’s diagnosis to the public, heading off inevitable questions about why Hazen wasn’t around the team as often. Midway through that season, Hazen made his absence more official, taking what he termed a “physical leave of absence.” He brought on past associates McLeod and Allard Baird, with Sawdaye stepping in as acting GM. Hazen was still involved in almost every major decision, but more games than not, he watched from home.

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He was grateful for the flexibility the Diamondbacks offered him and knew he was in the right place. Yet Hazen couldn’t shake the feeling that he belonged in two emotionally draining spots at once. The Diamondbacks went 3-24 the same month Hazen announced his leave. Though he and Sawdaye talked at least seven times a day, that couldn’t make up for being absent in the season’s hardest moments. “I didn’t feel guilty about leaving baseball for my wife at all,” Hazen said. “I felt guilty about the people that were here going through that.” Conversely, Sawdaye and others worried they were letting him down. “Unequivocally, the two things that matter to Mike are this family and this team,” Fitzgerald said. “I think that’s it.” Fitzgerald felt as if they were dropping the ball on the latter.

Nicole’s condition worsened in 2022. Cancer claimed her ability to speak and walk and use her right arm, forcing her to leave her middle school teaching position in Phoenix. It did not dim her smile or her determination. “She was pissed off anytime I told her a drug wasn’t working, that the MRI was worse, that the tumor is progressing,” Hazen said.

Twice, the doctors told Hazen that Nicole wouldn’t make it through the next 24 hours. Twice, he herded his boys and relayed that sobering news. The first time, Nicole survived that prediction by several weeks, handily beating the median life expectancy of a year to 18 months. “She wanted every single day,” Hazen said. Nicole stopped treatments only when Hazen insisted the remaining ones would only speed her decline. On Aug. 4, 2022, mere days after Hazen helped steer another trade deadline, Nicole Hazen died. She was 45.

Hazen finished out the 2022 season, but people up and down the organization wondered about his future with the club. Team owner Ken Kendrick and president Derrick Hall encouraged him to take his time to decide whether to return. Hazen put the question to his boys. Did they want their dad to keep doing this for a living? The vote to continue had to be unanimous, and a single “no” would have sealed his fate. “I was a child away,” Hazen said.

Each boy said yes. Baseball and the Diamondbacks had been their lives before, and they would be again.

As Hazen vaulted over the outfield fence and into the drink, a new feature of his appearance poked out of his beer-soaked sleeve. His left arm is now a tapestry of remembrance, the product of more than 30 hours under a tattooist’s needle. Nicole is depicted as a dove, the four boys as animals of their own. Seventeen-year-old Charlie is an eagle, and 16-year-old John is a bear. The fox is 15-year-old Teddy, sly and witty, and 13-year-old Sam is the dolphin, the smartest of them all. Tucked among the collage are maps of the places where the Hazens spread Nicole’s ashes.

A year after her death, the Hazen family is learning to live with her memory and without her presence. Hazen still goes home early on weekday homestands to make dinner, help with homework and facilitate bedtime. He leaves his baseball games for theirs, checking in with Sawdaye nearly 10 times a day when he’s away. At work, he has steered the Diamondbacks out of the skid, making impactful trades over the winter and again at the deadline and signing Carroll to a record-breaking extension before the season began. He has been there for the tough times, too. When Arizona cut loose two accomplished veterans — pitcher Madison Bumgarner in April and shortstop Nick Ahmed in September — Hazen was around to deliver the news.

At home, he is learning how to raise four boys alone. Hazen has accepted many offers to help, but he also feels the need to figure out how to do this himself. He can’t say for sure how the boys have internalized their pain or how they’re coping now. “I’ve tried to give that an incredible amount of space,” he said, “because I feel like someday, they’ll tell me.”

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Nicole’s memory lives on through the Nicole Hazen Fund for Hope, a charitable endeavor started before her death by the family and the team. Seeded with $1.5 million in donations from Major League Baseball and its individual teams, including $250,000 from Diamondbacks ownership, the organization funds research into new therapies and treatments for brain cancer. This year, the fund presented a check for $200,000 to the Ivy Brain Tumor Center at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix.

Hazen is overwhelmingly grateful for that and for the support and flexibility that Kendrick and Hall have afforded him. “I’m extremely fortunate to work for people who treat us like that,” he said. They encouraged him to take his time, to hire people to fill in the gaps, told him that the job would be there for him when he got back. And they are amazed that, even during his leave, he never really left. Hazen, Hall said, “was remarkably strong.”

As champagne spray coated the Diamondbacks‘ clubhouse Saturday night,  the joyous occasion still was marked by an absence. The last time the Diamondbacks celebrated a postseason berth, he told reporters that night, his partner was at his side. He wasn’t the only one who felt that same twinge of melancholy. Hazen, Lovullo, Sawdaye and Fitzgerald had experienced the trauma of the past several years together. The postgame hugs in Lovullo’s office, the manager said, “were a little bit deeper.” At the pool, the chants of Hazen’s name seemed a little louder than the rest, the splash of his impact just a little higher.

“The emotion that we felt,” Fitzgerald said, “was largely a function of the care that we have for Mike.”

Later that night, Hazen repeated an old ritual. He drove home, opening the door to find beaming loved ones ready to share in his happiness. The boys hadn’t been at the game — they had shot their shot the night before, which hadn’t turned out to be the clincher — and now the two youngest were asleep. But Charlie and John were up and glowing. “They’re teenage boys. They grunt more than they talk,” Hazen said. “But the smiles on their faces when I walked in the door …”

The next morning, he played for them the video of his dive into the pool. There was Dad, laughing and unburdened.

“That,” Hazen said, “seemed like their favorite part.”

Zach Buchanan

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