A bad look, and a busy night
According to an Arizona Republic report by Nick Piecoro at azcentral.com, injured Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte was spotted by fans gambling in the casino at Talking Stick Resort on Friday, Aug. 21, while the team was playing the Cincinnati Reds across town at Chase Field.
The report says multiple online accounts posted photos and videos of Marte at the casino, including one from @mrazsports on Instagram that showed him sitting at a roulette table while the game was on television in the top of the sixth inning. That detail is what made the moment land so hard for a lot of people following the Diamondbacks right now: it wasn’t just that Marte was away from the ballpark, but that he was seen out in public during the middle of the game.
The timing matters, too. The Arizona Republic noted that attention was already centered on Marte’s no-show in Boston earlier in the week, when he did not show up to Fenway Park for the Diamondbacks’ game against the Red Sox on Monday, Aug. 17. The article says he did not communicate with the team that day or in the days that followed until a three-hour meeting with club officials on Thursday, Aug. 20. So by Friday, the first game since that meeting and the first home game since the incident, nearly every question in Torey Lovullo’s pregame session was about Marte.
Lovullo tried to draw a line between what injured players are required to do and what they can do with the rest of their day. As the Republic reported, he said injured players are not required to be present for games, and later added that they are expected to do their rehab work at Salt River Fields, usually in the morning, before they are “turned loose.” He also said, “He’s free to do whatever he wants,” while adding that he expected Marte to show up the next morning and get his work done.
Still, when Lovullo was asked directly whether it was a bad look for Marte to be at the casino on this of all days, he paused before answering. That hesitation said plenty.
For a team trying to move on, this is the kind of story that keeps pulling everyone back into the same conversation. Lovullo said the club wanted to “turn the page,” but the optics around Marte are not making that easy.
Full details at [Arizona Republic / azcentral.com](https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/mlb/diamondbacks/2026/08/21/diamondbacks-ketel-marte-casino-arizona-game/91419720007/).
