‘Heck of a lot more fun’: Jerry Dipoto pleased with Mariners’ trade deadline upgrades

All along, and almost all the way up to Tuesday’s MLB trade deadline, the Mariners front office was all-in.

That was Jerry Dipoto’s characterization of the Mariners’ efforts to upgrade the roster, matching various descriptions of the team’s intentions over the past week.

The Mariners were “aggressive,” he said, once the trade market began to crack open late last week, which allowed them to acquire outfielder Randy Arozarena from Tampa Bay on Thursday night.

That was the first big move of the trade season and, objectively, Arozarena was the most significant move any team made for an offensive upgrade.

“Really happy with what we were able to do and [I] do feel like we’re meaningfully better than we were a week ago,” Dipoto, the club’s president of baseball ops, said after the deadline passed Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday, the Mariners added 39-year-old Justin Turner — who drove in a run in his first at-bat with the M’s in Boston — and up until midday Tuesday, Dipoto said the Mariners were trying to add one more bat.

The market for big bats, he said, just never fully materialized.

“We had other irons in the fire on bats, particularly infield bats,” he said. “We were generally engaged [until] I think about midday today was when it really started to become apparent to us that the next big thing likely wasn’t [going] to happen.”

The Mariners were reportedly one of three teams involved in negotiations for Tampa first baseman Yandy Diaz, the reigning American League batting champ.

The Yankees and Astros were in on those discussions, too, but the Rays did not deal Diaz. The Rays were said to be asking for major-league-ready talent; the Mariners’ farm system is about as strong as anyone’s, but all of their top prospects are in Class AA or lower.

Diaz; Vladimir Guerrero Jr.; Luis Robert Jr.; Brent Rooker; Pete Alonso.

All the big names mentioned as potential trade chips — and all linked to the Mariners at some point — stayed put.

“That was kind of our expectation going in, [that] this might have been more smoke than fire in terms of availability of some players in the market,” Dipoto said. “To no one’s surprise, the biggest names that were being floated out there as potentially available, I’m not sure how available they ever really were.”

Arozarena ended up being the most impactful hitter traded anywhere. Jazz Chisholm Jr. (to the Yankees), Isaac Paredes (to the Cubs), Jorge Soler (to the Braves) and Austin Hays (to the Phillies) were among the few others.

The Mariners had been hoping to add one more piece to the lineup.

They did execute two trades with the Blue Jays. On Friday, they acquired Yimi Garcia, who looks like he will wind up being the Mariners’ second-most valuable reliever down the stretch (after Andrés Muñoz).

They added Turner on Monday. And during the various discussions with Toronto, Dipoto said he was engaged on other Blue Jays players who did not ended up being moved.

The Mariners were known to have strong interest in Guerrero (and, well, who wouldn’t?). The Blue Jays, publicly and privately, had maintained all along that they did not plan to trade Guerrero or Bo Bichette, and they held true to that.

“Not close,” Toronto GM Ross Atkins told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. “It was never our intention to trade either one of them.”

“I’m not sure that it actually ever felt like those [big names] were realistic targets for us,” Dipoto said.

A week ago, he said, it wasn’t clear if the Rays were going to make Arozarena available. Once they did, the Mariners pounced.

“Fortunately for us, we do have enough back-and-forth rhetoric with the Rays that as soon as that door opened, we felt like we got in there and got the deal done pretty quickly,” he said.

As the Mariners were wrapping up their final trade on Tuesday afternoon — reacquiring reliever JT Chargois from Miami, their fourth trade in six days to add to the major-league roster — Dipoto said he looked out and saw Julio Rodriguez (ankle) and J.P. Crawford (broken hand), both on the injured list, working out together on the field at T-Mobile Park.

“I think they are energized by picking up a couple of new guys that add some personality to a team that was in a tough spot for the last 30 days,” Dipoto said “We needed a little bit of juice. … It’s gonna be a heck of a lot more fun than it was before.”

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Even with the club’s struggles over the past month, they entered Tuesday tied with Houston atop the AL West. Winning the division has been the organization’s goal since the beginning of the season, and Dipoto thinks the new additions give them a better chance to accomplish that.

“We feel like we’re in a more meaningful position, as opposed to any of the last three years, really, because this year we have an opportunity to go win a division,” he said. “And that’s very different than playing for a second or third wild card in a lot of ways. So we took it seriously. …

“The fact that we were able to do this sends a message to our team, to the players and staff in the clubhouse, that we want to win. And I think this was a step in this direction.”