One general manager repeatedly violated one of the unwritten rules for front office executives in the past decade. The accepted etiquette is that you should not initiate trade conversations with a peer whose team is playing terribly. Rather, you should wait for your colleague to call you, lest you come off like a vulture circling a dead carcass of a team.
But this one GM was unconcerned about such social convention, and if another club struggled in April and May, and appeared headed for a sell-off, he would be the first to text or call to ask about possible deals. In the eyes of some of his peers, he was kind of an ambulance chaser, to the degree that at least one head of baseball operations blocked his cell number.
"F--- that guy," he said to a friend.
By the first week of June, however, the realities of the standings began to manifest, which is why rival evaluators have been perusing the roster of the Arizona Diamondbacks over the past couple of weeks. After losing to the Mets on Wednesday, Arizona is 15 games out of first place in the NL West, a division that includes the defending World Series champions, the Dodgers; arguably the most dynamic team, the San Diego Padres; and MLB's biggest surprise team, the San Francisco Giants.