The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (11 page)

While Kershaw was considered the top high school pitcher going into the draft, there was even more pressure on the Dodgers than usual to get their first-round pick right. The club had been burned the year before, when they drafted University of Tennessee pitcher Luke Hochevar in the first round. They reached an agreement with Hochevar’s representative, but when he dumped that counsel and hired the superagent Scott Boras, the deal fell apart and they failed to sign him. Hochevar opted to pitch a year in independent ball instead.

With that debacle fresh in their memories, the Dodgers’ front office was wary of selecting another Boras client. So the club’s director of amateur scouting, Logan White, put Kershaw and Long Beach State third baseman Evan Longoria at the top of the team’s draft board. Six teams picked ahead of them. The Dodgers held their breath.

The Royals, Rockies, and Devil Rays picked 1-2-3. They selected Hochevar, Stanford pitcher Greg Reynolds, and Longoria, respectively. Hochevar posted an ERA over five in his first seven seasons. Reynolds blew out his shoulder right away. He won six games total over three seasons in the big leagues before moving to Japan to play for the Seibu Lions. Longoria became a superstar for the Rays, and the face of their franchise.

The Dodgers had hoped to draft the face of their franchise on that fateful day as well. But it was the day before the draft that altered the course of their history. That day, Kershaw pitched a high school game on a tiny field in Lubbock. The night before his start, University of Houston right-hander Brad Lincoln pitched across the state in a game versus Rice. Teams picking near the front of the draft sent their top scouts to Texas to take one final look at both pitchers. Lincoln dazzled. Kershaw stunk. In Kershaw’s final audition before the draft, the first guy he faced hit a home run. He couldn’t throw his breaking ball for a strike and walked four batters. His team still won the game, but he said later his performance made him want to puke.

The Pirates picked fourth and took Lincoln. The Mariners went next and selected Brandon Morrow, a pitcher from the University of California, Berkeley. Detroit was on the clock.
“I totally thought I was going to the Tigers,” said Kershaw. “I was sure of it.”

But Detroit decided to go with University of North Carolina pitcher Andrew Miller instead. When Kershaw fell to the Dodgers at the seventh pick, White was ecstatic. “If he had pitched well that night we might have lost him,” White told the
Los Angeles Times
years later. In his first six seasons with three different teams, Miller posted a 5.79 ERA, bouncing between starting jobs and the bullpen. He eventually became a dominant relief pitcher, but given the way Kershaw panned out, the Tigers would love to have that pick back.

After the Dodgers drafted Kershaw and offered him a $2.3 million signing bonus, he decided not to play ball at A&M after all. The first thing he did was write a half dozen checks to the people his mother had to borrow money from so they could afford to stay in the Highland Park school district. Kershaw says he never knew about those loans until after he signed.
“She took on some pretty serious debt so I could play on the best sports teams,” Kershaw said. “She did a great job making sure I never went without.”

The next pitcher chosen in the draft was a skinny kid out of the University of Washington named Tim Lincecum. Though the
five-foot-eleven righty had overwhelmed collegiate hitters for the Huskies, and won the Golden Spikes award as the nation’s top collegiate baseball player, teams were terrified of his unorthodox, windmill-like delivery, and unimpressed by the fact that, like a young Pedro Martinez, he appeared to be 150 pounds soaking wet. Undaunted by his slight frame, San Francisco selected Lincecum tenth. He dazzled in his second
year in the big leagues in 2008, winning the National League’s Cy Young and earning the nickname “the Freak” for his ability to dominate the competition despite being so small. When he won the award again the following year, Dodger fans groaned. Many wondered why the club selected Kershaw while Lincecum was still on the board. Making matters worse, while the Dodgers were mired in the McCourt mess,
Lincecum helped the Giants win World Series championships in 2010 and 2012. When Kershaw took the ball for the Dodgers on opening day in 2013, he was facing the reigning champs. Over time, Lincecum’s size would catch up with him. And when Kershaw made his ascension to the top of the baseball universe, Lincecum began his fall back to earth. In 2012, Kershaw’s earned run average was about half of Lincecum’s. White was right to draft him ahead of the college righty after all.

With Lincecum deposed as ace,
the Giants gave the opening day start to Matt Cain. Though Cain didn’t have his best stuff, he labored through six innings to match Kershaw scoreless frame for scoreless frame. The 0–0 tie was nothing unusual for Kershaw. The Dodgers had a difficult time scoring runs when he pitched, a fact that had cost him wins, and without them the Cy Young the year before. But it wasn’t as if Dodger hitters went into hibernation on purpose when he took the mound.
It seemed as though every opposing pitcher Kershaw faced was inspired to pitch the game of his life, hoping he could one day tell his grandchildren he had beaten the best.

In the eighth inning, with the score still tied at 0–0, Kershaw had grown tired of the ineptitude of Dodger hitters. The Giants had replaced Cain with George Kontos, a right-handed reliever in his third year in the big leagues. Kontos knew the scouting report on Kershaw’s hitting: awful. In his five big-league seasons he had hit .146, with one extra-base hit in 332 plate appearances. Just after Kershaw stepped into the batter’s box, Kontos fired a 92 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. Early in games, Kershaw might take a couple of pitches to do his part to help tire the opposing starter out. But as the game reached the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, his typical strategy was to grab a helmet and run to the batter’s box before Don Mattingly could lift him for a pinch hitter. Then, if he led off the inning, he’d swing at the first pitch to end the at-bat as fast as possible. His energy was precious in crunch time, and he needed to conserve every ounce of it for the mound. Plus, there was something else. Cain had struck him out in his first two at-bats that day, and he was embarrassed.
“I went up there swinging at the first pitch because I really didn’t want to strike out again,” Kershaw said afterward.

He started his swing almost as soon as the baseball left Kontos’s right hand. His bat whizzed through the strike zone and
whack
! The crowd knew it was gone before he did. Kershaw sprinted out of the box toward first base with his eyebrows raised in disbelief and his mouth hanging open. And when he rounded the bag and saw the ball clear the center-field fence to give the Dodgers the lead, he screamed and continued to race around the bases toward home, as if he had to cross the plate before they could take the home run away from him. He grinned the whole way round. It was the first time his teammates could remember seeing him smile during a game in which he was still pitching. It was his first career home run. The last time he homered was in a spring training game on his twenty-first birthday. On every birthday since, Ellis had wished him a happy anniversary of his last home run.

After he touched home and returned to the giddy mob of teammates waiting to pounce on him in the dugout, Kershaw did something else he was loath to do: he granted the crowd a curtain call. In the top half of the ninth inning, Kershaw returned to the mound and
retired the defending champs in order on nine pitches. On the biggest day of his professional career to that point, Kershaw had tossed a four-hit shutout on ninety-four pitches and gave the Dodgers the lead with a late home run. He’d beaten the Giants in every way possible. After the game, before he went and found Ellen, talked to the media, or did anything else, Kershaw headed straight for the team’s weight room to ride a stationary bike alone. Nothing would interrupt his routine.

When Kershaw hit the home run, Magic Johnson jumped to his feet in the owners’ box next to the Dodgers dugout. After he rounded the bases and crossed home,
Johnson turned and high-fived Mark Walter with both hands, then leaned toward him and yelled, “Wow!”

The next day, Kershaw was shagging balls on the warning track at Dodger Stadium during batting practice when the team’s traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, walked out onto the field from the dugout and waved at him. This was odd. Typically, the only time Akasaki ever flagged down a player during BP was when he was being traded or demoted. Neither scenario seemed possible. Curious, Kershaw jogged back toward the dugout and asked Akasaki what was up. Akasaki led Kershaw into a tunnel, saying that Ned Colletti wanted to see him. Colletti walked Kershaw back to a room under the stadium near the batting cages that he’d never seen before. The door swung open to reveal the secret owner’s bunker. Inside sat Walter, Stan Kasten, Todd Boehly, and Kershaw’s two agents, Casey Close and J. D. Smart. They wasted little time with small talk. On the table was an offer for $300 million.

T
he new owner’s bunker
had been open for two business days when it became the setting for the biggest contract offer in American sports history. After Colletti led Kershaw down the tunnel for his impromptu sit-down with ownership and his agents, Colletti learned that he wasn’t needed for anything else. “That’ll be all, Ned,” he was told. The door closed. Despite being the team’s general manager, Colletti was shut out of the conversation. His loss of power was an open secret in the clubhouse.

The pressure to win was enormous. On opening day in 2013, the Dodgers’ payroll was $214 million, or about three times what Frank McCourt intended to pay players annually. When Kershaw took the mound to face the Giants, the southpaw ace led a team onto the field that was favored to win it all. Gonzalez jogged over to his position at first base and skipped the ball across the dirt to the club’s sure-handed second baseman, Mark Ellis. At thirty-five years old, Ellis was starting his eleventh season in the big leagues, and his second with the Dodgers.
He’d spent most of his career in Oakland playing on excellent teams, and was a rookie on the famous Moneyball club. But he’d never won a championship. With his career winding down, this figured to be his best chance.

As the Dodgers’ best fielder with the least amount of thwack in his bat, Ellis stood out on a team that prioritized offense. He was different from many of his teammates in another fundamental way, too.
Baseball was serious business for him. Though teammates agreed he was one of the nicest human beings ever to swing a bat, he played the game with a silent, gnawing intensity that made it seem like it was no fun for him at all. He didn’t like to make small talk with opposing catchers as he stepped into the batter’s box and tortured himself without mercy whenever he slumped. While many of his teammates enjoyed the never-ending spoils of being young and rich in Los Angeles, Ellis’s idea of a good time was hitting the ball to the right side to advance a runner. He batted second in a lineup crowded with superstars, and in many ways functioned as the club’s captain. He was as steady as he was respected, and his teammates wished he could be as kind to himself as he was to others.

To Ellis’s right was a plucky young man doused in tattoos and hair gel named Justin Sellers. At 160 pounds, Sellers skipped onto the field that day with a noticeable spring in his step, as a scrub occupying one of the glory positions on baseball’s most glamorous team while the Dodgers’ starting shortstop, the superlatively talented Hanley Ramirez, was off nursing a torn thumb ligament. (
Sellers was sent to the minors weeks later and cut after the season.)

At third base stood Luis Cruz, a journeyman infielder who spent the better part of twelve seasons in the minor leagues with six different organizations, even taking a whirl through the Mexican leagues before earning a shot to make the Dodgers’ opening day roster. With the team’s regular third baseman, Juan Uribe, slumping in 2012, the unknown Cruz emerged from bush-league obscurity in the final three months of the season and hit .300. That he hailed from nearby Mexico endeared him to hometown fans even more.

Cruz had the inglorious distinction of taking the job of the most popular man in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. Like Jeff Kent, Uribe was another former Giant nearing the last licks of his career when Colletti rewarded him with a three-year contract before the 2011 season. His first two years in Los Angeles had been a disaster. Entering the 2013 season, his career batting average for the Dodgers sat at an abysmal .199; he’d hit just six total home runs. So feckless was Uribe at the plate that he was given just one at-bat in the last month of the 2012 season. But in the final team meeting of that tumultuous year, Mattingly singled him out for his leadership and his unselfishness. Addressing the group, he thanked Uribe for maintaining a positive attitude, and for showing up to work every day with a smile on his face despite all else.
“He thanked him for being a professional,” Colletti said. “Even though his year hadn’t gone as he planned—or we planned—and even though September didn’t provide him many opportunities, he singled him out because of who he is.”

Uribe’s teammates loved him just as much as Mattingly and Colletti did. Because of significant language and culture barriers, baseball locker rooms are almost always segregated by race, with white players hanging with white players, Latinos with Latinos, African-American players with other black players, and Asians with their translators. Not Uribe. He had an easy way of mingling with everybody and making outsiders feel included. When the Dodgers signed starting pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu out of South Korea the previous off-season, Ryu showed up to spring training not speaking a word of English.
“Coming over here I was worried about making friends,” Ryu said later, through a translator. “Like would my new teammates like me?” Uribe took care of that. He noticed Ryu sitting alone one day, and, not having any idea how to say “Come hang out with us” in Korean, he walked up to Ryu and slugged him on the shoulder. Ryu looked up at him, confused. Uribe smiled, and wrapped his arms around him. Then it was on. The two men began wrestling until Ryu pinned Uribe, to the delight of cheering teammates. “He understood that I wasn’t able to blend in and
speak the language here, so he really reached out and accepted me for who I was,” said Ryu. “He’s got a great sense of humor and he’s just a great person to be around.” From that day forward the two men were inseparable, even though neither had any clue what the other was saying, ever.