After a treacherous 93-loss season for the Diamondbacks in 2016, the ball club in Arizona fired their manager Chip Hale and hired Torey Lovullo. Under new leadership, the Diamondbacks had a monster season in which they wound up second place in the NL West, clinched home-field advantage in the Wild Card Game, and had a 93-69 record going into the playoffs.

Arizona would wind up beating their division rival, the Colorado Rockies, in the NL Wild Card Game before losing to their other division rivals, the Dodgers in the NLDS.

Lovullo’s victory did not come easily though. All three finalists came from the NL West and those three were Lovullo, Dave Roberts (Dodgers), and Bud Black (Rockies). Dave Roberts led the Dodgers to the best record in the MLB, while Bud Black took a hopeless Rockies team and turned them into serious playoff contenders.

While all three skippers were very deserving of the honor, Lovullo came out on top with 18 first-place votes and a point total of 111. Dave Roberts followed him with 5 first place votes with a point total of 55. Bud Black only received 3 first place votes with a point total of 43.

Lovullo became the third Diamondbacks manager in history to receive the honor, following Bob Melvin in 2007 and Kirk Gibson in 2011. Interestingly, the first time MLB manager, Lovullo led the D-Backs to their first postseason since 2011 and was given the highest honor a manager can receive for his efforts.

If you would like to see the full scoring for the award, here it is.

National League Manager of the Year results