Bordow: 10 years later, Gonzalez remembers trade to D-Backs

The goatee is gone, and there are a few more lines under the eyes, but otherwise, Luis Gonzalez looks exactly like he did the day he showed up on our doorstep nearly 10 years ago.

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Yup, it’s been almost a decade since the Diamondbacks acquired Gonzalez — and $500,000 — from the Detroit Tigers for outfielder Karim Garcia.

The date was Dec. 28, 1998.

How can Gonzalez forget? It was the day that changed his life.

“It was pretty much the turning point of my career,” he said.

The funny thing is, the Diamondbacks really didn’t want Gonzalez. They originally asked Detroit for outfielder Bobby Higginson, but when the Tigers refused, they settled for Gonzalez as long as Detroit anted up some cash.

“He was considered the better player in the trade,” Gonzalez said.

It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.

Gonzalez was a baseball vagabond. Two stints with the Houston Astros covering seven seasons. Two years with the Chicago Cubs. A season in Detroit.

He signed one-year contracts for nine straight years. And here he was, 31 years old, vacationing in Florida, wondering where his career would next take him. And how long his career would last.

Gonzalez had heard the rumors. If the Tigers could sign Gregg Jeffries as a free agent, they’d trade him to Arizona. Gonzalez was excited by the possibility. The Tigers were going nowhere — they finished 65-97 in ’98 and would have losing records the next seven seasons — and the Diamondbacks were built to win now, having already signed veterans such as Randy Johnson and Steve Finley.

“I knew as soon as I got here that we had a legitimate shot of winning,” he said. “We had a lot of veteran guys that knew how to play the game. It didn’t matter who the hero was on any particular night. It was just going there and winning. That’s all that mattered to the guys.”

Gonzalez opened the 1999 season with a 30-game hitting streak and didn’t cool off for years. He became the face of the franchise, arguably the Valley’s most popular athlete since Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle were selling out America West Arena every night.

But there were, Gonzalez will admit now, a few weeks during that first spring training in Tucson when the Diamondbacks wondered if had anything left.

Late in the ’98 season, he opened his batting stance to enable him to hit with more power and take advantage of the short porch at Tiger Stadium.

But in March, in Tucson, all he seemed to do was hit harmless grounders to second base.

“I kept telling (hitting coach) Jim Presley, 'Just stick with me a little bit,’ ” Gonzalez said.

Good thing they did.

When the trade was made, Gonzalez thought he was in the “latter stages” of his career. On Sept. 3, he’ll turn 41.

“It has gone fast,” he said.

Does he ever wonder what twists and turns his career would have taken had he not come to Arizona?

“I don’t even want to think about it,” he said.

How about Karim Garcia? Does he ever wonder what happened to him?

“Sometimes,” Gonzalez said, a smile across his face.

Gonzalez, hitting .262 with seven homers and 39 RBIs for the Marlins, doesn’t know how much longer he’ll play. But he knows where he’ll wind up when he hangs it up.

Right back here, where he turned a footnote of a career into an indelible moment.

“This is where I want to be,” he said. “This is my home for the rest of my life.”