What really turned the tide of public perception on this trade isn’t so much the personal performances of Weaver and Kelly or even Goldschmidt. The tide has shifted because the Diamondbacks have been decent.
At 46-45, the Diamondbacks will come out of the All-Star break just 1.5 games out of the second Wild Card spot. This qualifies as a surprise. The only certainty about the Goldschmidt deal was that it dropped the Diamondbacks from the royal rumble of contention into the nausea-inducing Count-of-Monte-Cristo dungeon currently occupied by the Giants and Marlins.
And yet here we are, the Diamondbacks off the chain and scrapping their way through the fray in their ridiculous snakeskin unis.
But you know who’s not surprised? The Diamondbacks.
While many fans spent the post-trade winter treating it like the North Star – the guiding light to illuminate the Dbacks intentions to tear this mother down, GM Mike Hazen and manager Torey Lovullo remained otherwise aligned: this team was going to compete. No matter how often and how loudly they said so, to the outside world, the team’s direction was clear (thumbs-down fart sound).
But the Diamondbacks’ brass were unwavering in their confidence. And it was soooo cute. Still, it was all too easy – natural, even – to presume Hazen/Lovullo were being….maybe coy? maybe diplomatic? But definitely disingenuous when they denied the (obvious) rebuild underfoot.
After all, why would they think the Diamondbacks could sniff contention after departing Goldy, A.J. Pollock and Patrick Corbin? Hazen’s faith was beyond incongruous with public evaluations of the talent on-hand: it was antithetical.
Only the Diamondbacks never wanted to rebuild. “We knew this would be a year where we could go one way or the other,” team President & CEO Derrick Hall recently told The Athletic’s Zach Buchanan. “I don’t know that we’ve defined which way we should go at this point.”
The Goldschmidt trade wasn’t a coda for a Diamondbacks era of contention – it was the prologue to an era of pit-crew roster building. Hazen’s gonna fix this team on the fly.