TRADING PLACES BEING DEALT IS AN OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD FOR THE PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE, BRINGING EMOTIONAL TRAUMA AND LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARES.

Byline: RAMONA SHELBURNE 

Staff Writer

It was all coming together. His life, his career, his family. After twoyears of climbing up through the Houston Astros' farm system and four years of playing his way into the everyday lineup, Luis Gonzalez had begun to allow himself to think he'd made it.

He was hitting well, the fans in Houston loved him and the team seemed to be heading in the right direction as its budding stars -- Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and Gonzalez -- started breaking out.

If it hadn't been for the strike in 1994, the Astros might have even made the playoffs.

Then came the call. Well, actually it was a page over the public-address system at Houston's Hoby International Airport.

He'd been traded.

"It was really hard," he said. "As a young player, you think you're going to be with an organization your whole career and then all of a sudden, within a matter of minutes actually, everything changes. You go from being in one spot, trying to help one team win, to driving back to the ballpark to pack your locker up.

"You take it personal at first, but you realize it's a business real fast. It's just the nature of the game."

You hear a lot of "it's just business, it's not personal" talk this time of year. Tuesday is Major League Baseball's non-waiver trading deadline. It's what guys say when they hear their names pop up in trade rumors. They pretty much have to. As highly paid, professional athletes, it's not like they can complain.

Sudden, traumatic relocation is something of an occupational hazard for the professional athlete.

It happens to just about every player at some point. Nine current Dodgers -- Gonzalez, Nomar Garciaparra, Jeff Kent, Rudy Seanez, Derek Lowe, Brad Penny, Wilson Betemit, Mark Hendrickson, Jason Schmidt and Roberto Hernandez -- have been traded in-season during their careers.

While athletes are generally well-compensated for their trouble, the emotional trauma and logistical nightmares of a midseason trade are very real. Families are uprooted, kids pulled out of school, leases broken, cars rented or shipped.

This is the fine print at the end of the transaction people tend to gloss over when evaluating the merits of a trade. Fans want to know how the new guy is going to put them over the top. They care about his ERA, not his IRA.

Most of the grunt work --the shipping of cars, selling of houses the packing of boxes -- falls on the families, because the athlete has got to be uniform for his new team 48 hours later.

"I'm just really glad I have such a great wife," said Florida Marlins outfielder Joe Borchard, a former Camarillo High standout who played for threeorganizations last season. "I don't know how I would've made it without her."

Put yourself in Borchard's shoes. Your wife, Erin, is twomonths pregnant. It's the beginning of spring training with the Chicago White Sox and it's looking as if you're going to make the club.

Then your agent tells you that you've been traded to Seattle. So you and your wife pack up your apartment, drive out to Seattle and try to settle in as quickly as possible. Then sixgames into the new gig, you're told you've been designated for assignment.

Do you stay in Seattle? Do you go home to Los Angeles and wait for a call from another team? What do you do with the cars? Should you ship them? Drive them?

And damn, why did we sign that lease for the new apartment?

Borchard chose Option B. He and his wife packed everything up and drove to Los Angeles to wait it out. Eight days later, the Marlins called and said, "We've got a game in Washington, D.C. tonight, how soon can you be at the airport?"

Borchard, of course, wanted to impress his new bosses. But it was 10:30 a.m. and his parents' house in Camarillo was more than an hour's drive to the airport. Best-case scenario, he could make an early afternoon flight. With the time change and a stopover, that night's game against the Nationals was out.

"I was in uniform the next morning, though," he said, chuckling. "It was kind of a blur, but it's your job. You do what you've got to do."

Borchard actually did pretty well. He got a career-high threehits in his Marlins debut.

There are companies that specialize in helping athletes relocate quickly. Manhattan Beach-based SportStar Relocation is one of the biggest. It makes a profit through standard real-estate commissions when an athlete buys a new house or sells an old one. It also is set up to help an athlete ship cars or home furnishings and find new personal chefs, nannies or bodyguards.

That kind of high-end service wasn't an option for Borchard, though.

"I make the league minimum," he joked. "Maybe I'd do that if I was getting $6 million a year."

Still, Borchard considers himself lucky. He was traded to a team that wanted him and had room on the roster to play him regularly.

Plus, Marlins manager Joe Girardi had quickly developed a reputation as a players' coach who could develop young talent.

Overall, the moving around was good for Borchard. But it's not always that simple.

San Antonio Spurs guard Brent Barry frequently heard his name pop up in trade rumors this year. The team had been disappointed in the development of third-year guard Beno Udrih and was thinking of adding a veteran point guard to back up Tony Parker. As an unproven young player, Udrih didn't have trade value, but Barry, a solid veteran sharpshooter, did.

A trade was never made, and the Spurs, of course, turned out just fine. But it's never fun to hear your name pop up in trade talks, especially when you're married with two kids, like Barry.

"I think age plays a factor," Barry said. "If you're a young player and you get traded, it's like 'Boom, get my stuff and I'll go rent another place in the next city.' But if you're an older guy with a family and your kids are in school, it affects a lot more than obviously where you're going to be living. Your main concern is what's going to happen with them."

In 1998, Barry was traded from the Clippers to the Miami Heat in the middle of the season. At the time, it was shocking to him, but not all that uncomfortable.

"I had no ties yet. I was renting a place and staying up late. I was still getting my feet wet in the league," he said. "As a fan, I'm kind of old-school, though. I've been around the NBA for a long time and I've always enjoyed having guys that you relate to for a long time and living through the ups and downs of what a guy does throughout his career.

"It's part of modern-day athletics now. It's different than generations before, where so many guys were synonymous with their teams for so many years. Probably a good 80, 90percent of their careers were spent in one place. Now it seems like barely a quarter of your career is spent in one place."

True, but it's not exactly easy being the guy charged with sending a player to a new place. While general managers don't have to worry about sudden, pack-your-bags-and-get-on-a- plane-in-two-hours change, they've got a whole different set of issues to deal with.

For one, it's not easy to be the one delivering the news to a guy you usually had a hand in bringing to the club in the first place.

"It's the tough part of what we do," Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti said. "Especially when you've built long-standing relationships with a guy."

Colletti recalled oneparticularly uncomfortable trade when he was an assistant general manager in San Francisco. The club had agreed to trade infielder Bill Mueller to the Chicago Cubs on a Friday morning. But as plans were being made to inform Mueller, the Giants heard he was going to attend the Stanford-Cal football game on Saturday morning with pitcher Shawn Estes.

"We talked about it and decided we couldn't have him going to the Big Game as anything other than a Giant, so we sat on the trade until Sunday," Colletti said.

Then there's what comes after the trade. Sometimes it's fallout, sometimes it's celebration, sometimes ... everyone wants your head.

What if, in five years, the Triple-A third baseman you traded to get a fifth starter turns into an All-Star? What if the fifth starter you acquire turns out to have arm problems and only makes three starts?

Baseball is littered with stories like these. How would you like to be the guy who traded Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen? Or Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields? Or Doyle Alexander for John Smoltz?

"There's nobody who makes trades who doesn't wish he had a few back," Colletti said. "We're in the business of predicting human nature. We don't have X-ray vision, so at some point, you've got to hope your scouts have done a good job and you've done as much preparation as possible."

Then, after all that, it all comes down to having the guts to pull the trigger.

"It's not a job for the meek," Colletti joked. "They say the meek shall inherit the Earth. Yeah, but the meek might not win too many championships."

Clippers guard Cuttino Mobley was fortunate to run into a benevolent general manager when he was shipped from Orlando to Sacramento during the 2004-05 season. Mobley had a hard time leaving the team, particularly his close friend Steve Francis. But Mobley was going to be a free agent at the end of the season and it was clear the organization wanted to get something for him before he left.

"I was cool with the GM in Orlando (John Weisbrod), he sent me to a really good team. The change was good for me," Mobley said. "But it's still a lot to deal with. I was close to the guys on the team -- Steve, Kelvin (Cato), Grant Hill -- so it was tough to leave.

"And, it's not like a regular job where you get two weeks' notice. We don't get that. It's like, you just got traded, get on the plane and go. People think it's easy because we're playing a sport we love ... but there's nothing easy about getting traded and having to play right afterwards."

For Dodgers pitcher Mark Hendrickson, getting traded from Tampa Bay to the Dodgers last season was a mixed bag. On the one hand, he went from being with a team 15games out of first place to being with one a half-game out. But personally, it was anything but a smooth transition. Hendrickson and his girlfriend had just bought a condo in Tampa and had invited her sister down for a visit. A week before the trip, Hendrickson learned he'd been traded to L.A., along with catcher Toby Hall, for catcher Dioner Navarro.

In a professional sense, Hendrickson was ecstatic. He went from one of the least desirable major-league ballclubs to a pennant contender. In 10 years of professional sports -- four in the NBA and sixin baseball -- Hendrickson had never played for a team that had a chance to win a title.

That's what he kept reminding himself of in the first few crazy weeks after the trade.

"It's so quick, and it's the middle of the year, so you really never get settled into the new city until after the season," he said. "When I first came out, I got a hotel in Santa Monica because my (girlfriend's) sister was coming out and we wanted to be staying in a vacation spot."

At the time, that sounded like a great solution, considering his guest's travel plans had to change when he got traded. But as Hendrickson quickly learned, Santa Monica isn't an ideal home base for a guy who works in Chavez Ravine.

"It was taking me like twohours to drive to the ballpark every day," he said. "After a while, (thankfully) we found a place in Pasadena. We love it there now."

Gonzalez hears stories like that and laughs. The first time he was traded felt like that, too. It was crazy, but when you're still relatively young and you don't have kids yet, the whole process seems kind of fun when you look back on it.

Moving the family nowadays takes a little more doing. Gonzalez and his wife, Christine, have 9-year-old triplets. With a family that large, even an offseason relocation is tough.

"I had to leave Arizona and my kids were still there for school. They had their friends and their camps, the things they liked to do," he said. "At first, they were like, 'Why do we have to leave?' They don't really understand. Now, they love it here with the beach and all that stuff.

"We've got a place in Manhattan Beach. We put furniture in it and everything because we're going to be here the whole year. But after this year (Gonzalez is on a one-year contract), you don't know what's going to happen. If you don't stay, I guess you just pack it up and move on to whatever the next city is."

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CAPTION(S):

10 photos, 3 boxes

Photo:

(1 -- 5 -- color) no caption (Luis Gonzalez)

Photos by Getty Images

(6) Joe Borchard, who attended Camarillo High, played for three teams last season, eventually ending up with the Florida Marlins.

Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

(7 -- color) no caption (suitcase)

(8) SHAW

(9) KONERKO

(10) REYES

Box:

(1) TWENTY MOST LOPSIDED DEADLINE DEALS IN MAJOR LEAGUE HISTORY

Source: Baseball Prospectus

(2) DODGERS NOTABLE TRADES

(3) ANGELS NOTABLE TRADES