The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (26 page)

Every at-bat was like a blind date. His hands were so fast and his instinct so sharp it didn’t matter. He had no use for any ammunition other than a bat—all that information, what the pitcher liked to throw against righties like him, how the ball spun out of his hand, what his ERA was—all of that was just noise that could confuse him. While his teammates reviewed charts for hours, Ramirez would spend that time in the training room prepping his body for battle, stretching, getting
massaged, and hooked up to suction devices as part of an ancient Chinese medicine treatment known as cupping. His goals for the season were simple: he would show up early, he would hit, he would smile, and then Mark Walter would pay him a lot of money to stay in Dodger blue so he could do it all over again for years to come.

Unfortunately, his newfound attitude was challenged by bad luck. In the championship game of the WBC, Ramirez dove for a ground ball and jammed his right thumb. At first, the injury wasn’t thought to be serious. But an MRI later revealed a torn ligament that required surgery. Effort had its consequences; Ramirez would be sidelined for two months. Still, when he was able to handle a bat again and take a few rounds of hacks with his teammates, they couldn’t help but be excited by the way he stung the ball. Ramirez would start batting practice by spraying line drive after line drive to right, center, and left field, then encore with a home run exhibition. The Dodgers tumbled into last place without Ramirez. When he came back, the tenor of the season changed.

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After Collmenter finished warming up to begin the top of the fourteenth, Ramirez began his slow walk toward the batter’s box. Ellis called after him from the on-deck circle.
“Show me why you’re the best hitter I’ve ever played with,” he said. Ramirez said nothing. Ellis didn’t think he had heard him. A month earlier, a heartbroken Ellis had told his wife, Cindy, that because the team was so terrible it would be all right if she wanted to start making vacation plans for October. A lot had happened in the last thirty days, though, to bring the playoffs back into focus. But there was still work to do. Collmenter set his feet on the rubber and pumped a first-pitch cutter toward Ramirez. The ball was up and away, out of the strike zone. It wasn’t a good pitch to hit but that didn’t matter to Ramirez. His eyes widened, and he unleashed his black bat at the baseball. The ball screeched out to right field and cleared the fence on a line drive. Ramirez rounded the bases alone, and pointed to the sky with both hands when he crossed the plate.
Then he skipped toward Ellis and slapped him five. As Ellis began to walk toward the batter’s box, Ramirez turned around and said to him, “That’s why.”

Mark Ellis’s scouting report proved correct. Collmenter’s seventh pitch to A. J. Ellis left his hand looking like it was headed toward the inner half of the plate. It stayed straight. Ellis whacked it for another home run. Of the few thousand fans who remained at Chase Field, the ones in blue began to chant
Let’s go Dodgers! Let’s go Dodgers!
Jansen closed out the game for the win. Later, after the players showered and dressed, no one said it out loud. They didn’t have to. Though there were seventy-two games left, and the Dodgers’ record was now at just .500, the NL West race was over. Los Angeles was playing like the team everyone thought it would be when the season began. The underdog Diamondbacks didn’t build up a big enough lead while the Dodgers were wrecked by injuries, and they would not be able to hang with them now that their players were emerging from the disabled list. Arizona’s lead was now one and a half, but it felt as if Los Angeles was up by ten. The Dodgers had won fifteen of eighteen, and there was the sense that they’d only get better when Kemp came back.

But some of his teammates wondered if the club might be better off without him. Though Kemp was happy the team was winning, it was frustrating to watch them succeed without him. While Kemp praised Puig in public, many of this teammates thought he was privately terrified of being replaced. The Dodgers were playing so well that as they headed into the all-star break they were perhaps the only team in baseball not looking forward to it. Fair or not, Kemp irritated some teammates by heading to Cabo San Lucas for the break instead of rehabbing his injury.

After the break, the Dodgers flew to Washington and activated their center fielder. He said his hamstrings felt good as new, and that his shoulder was continuing to heal. And he did well in his return versus the Nationals on July 21, collecting three hits and a walk in four at-bats with a home run that helped lead the Dodgers to a blowout 9–2
victory. But in the top of the ninth, Kemp was on third with the bases loaded and two out with Carl Crawford at the plate. Crawford tapped a slow roller to first and hustled down the line to beat it out. Because he didn’t think he’d have enough time to get the speedy Crawford, Nationals first baseman Chad Tracy threw the ball home to try to force out Kemp. Not expecting the ball to be anywhere near him, Kemp had been trotting toward the plate. When he realized there would be a play at home, he hurried his pace and awkwardly dove, rolling his left ankle in the process. After being thrown out, he screamed, grabbed his foot, and tucked into a ball in the dirt. Kemp had been an active member of the roster for less than twenty-four hours, and he was about to be lost again.

If Kemp had been worried about being replaced, this game was the ultimate metaphor. With him back in the fold, the Dodgers enjoyed the luxury of having their four outfielders healthy on the same day for the first time all season. Puig had been given a rare game off. But with Kemp unable to take center in the bottom of the ninth, Puig subbed for him. An MRI later revealed an ankle sprain bad enough to land Kemp back on the disabled list. His failure to hustle in his first game back would cost him the next fifty-two.

The next day Los Angeles took over first place in the NL West for good.

•  •  •

The resurgent Dodgers went 19-6 in July. This run included five- and six-game winning streaks. They went a month without losing a game on the road. By the time the trading deadline arrived on July 31, they led the Diamondbacks by two and a half games. Colletti had made at least one trade on deadline day every year since he took over as GM before the 2006 season. Among other players, his July 31 haul over the years included Greg Maddux, Julio Lugo, Scott Proctor, Manny Ramirez, Octavio Dotel, Ted Lilly, Ryan Theriot, and Shane Victorino. Each man was added on the annual trade cutoff day in hopes that he might be the final piece to push the Dodgers to a championship. None
ever was. At the 2013 deadline, the Dodgers circled a deal with the
Angels for second baseman Howie Kendrick that would have sent pitching prospect Zach Lee, their first-round draft pick in 2010, to Anaheim. The club was also rumored to be sniffing out a Matt Kemp for Cliff Lee trade with the Phillies that would ease the Dodgers’ outfield logjam and basically represent a salary swap of oft-injured players. But the club was playing so well that the front office decided against making any major moves. Colletti was able to keep his streak alive, however, by working out a small deal for Twins catching farm hand Drew Butera, who would provide insurance should Ellis or Tim Federowicz get hurt.

On July 31, the Yankees came to Dodger Stadium to face Clayton Kershaw. L.A.’s ace pitched eight scoreless innings, despite more than a few obstacles to his regimented pregame routine. Since the Yankees visited Los Angeles only once every three years in interleague play, the Dodgers’ marketing department capitalized on the high-profile series and treated it like a playoff game. Normally, before Kershaw started warming up in the bullpen he would sit in the Dodgers’ dugout alone, staring at the ground or off into space while he gathered his concentration. But
the pregame festivities turned the dugout into a mess. Magic Johnson and Mark Walter stood on the top step, while dozens of media members crammed around them. Nicole Scherzinger of the pop girl group the Pussycat Dolls and her handlers weaved their way through the crowd toward home plate so that she might perform the national anthem. Before that could happen, the Dodgers paid tribute to retiring Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, with Walter and Johnson presenting him a giant deep-sea fishing rod after a video tribute blared through the stadium. Just before the Rivera ceremony, the soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo had been kicking a ball around on the infield grass with Puig. As Kershaw sat with his eyes fixed on the ground, the ball whizzed by his head, narrowly missing it. After Scherzinger finished singing, the actor Samuel L. Jackson read the starting lineups for the Dodgers and Yankees over the public address system. Then, new sports agent Jay-Z took his seat behind home plate a few rows from Scott
Boras, who had just lost the Yankees’ star second baseman Robinson Cano as a client to the rapper-agent months earlier.

Jay-Z, Jackson, Ronaldo, and Scherzinger were exactly the kind of patrons the club’s marketing department hoped to attract to their Dugout Club, the section that made up the ten rows behind home plate at Dodger Stadium. Folks who spent nine hundred dollars a ticket were treated to unlimited free food (gourmet and ballpark fare), wait service, televisions, and a private cash bar. Over the years, the Lakers had become known for their celebrity courtside clientele, and the Dugout Club was the closest thing the Dodgers had to the same starry incubator. If the new Dodger owners got their way, the club would become like the ultimate Hollywood lunchroom, with actors, pop stars, models, and studio heads mingling and mugging for the cameras. In some ways it already was: all the major talent agencies and entertainment law firms in town owned season tickets in the premium spot, and their clients popped in and out of those seats every night. The stars who attended the game versus the Yankees matched those on the field. Television ratings for the game that night were the highest for any MLB regular-season game in the Los Angeles market on record. This was no small thing, because the Dodgers were as much a media and entertainment company as they were a baseball team.

The Yankees were the closest business model the new Dodgers hoped to emulate, with a few caveats. Walter said when he took over that he didn’t want to price families out of the stadium; that if the Dodgers were going to raise ticket costs he’d rather tax the rich down in the Dugout Club and surrounding seats than stick it to the people in the cheap seats. For the most part, he kept his word.
It was still possible to buy season tickets in the upper deck for $5 per game.

Despite all the pregame pomp and circumstance, Kershaw delivered the first pitch at 7:11, just a minute behind schedule. It had been a long summer for the big lefty. Though the Dodgers’ brass loved him best of any player, members of the club’s front office were growing more exasperated with his contract situation. When the Dodgers were
flailing in last place with a record comparable to the awful Astros, it was hard to blame Kershaw for being wary of signing on for fifteen more years. But the Dodgers were winning now. What did he want?

•  •  •

While the club’s front office fixated on Kershaw, fans, teammates, and the press continued to obsess over Puig. The right fielder ate it up. Now that Bravo was gone, Puig had no handler to tuck him in at night and make sure he got to the stadium on time. The Dodgers traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, sent regular group text messages to players about things like when to show up for a game and when to pack a suit for a travel day. A small whiteboard in the team’s clubhouse next to Puig’s locker also posted the same information. To help Puig with his chronic tardiness, McGwire told the kid to find out whatever time the Dodgers were due to begin stretching on the field that day and show up to the park two hours earlier. That advice didn’t take.
He arrived twenty minutes late for a team meeting in July and Schumaker told him to clean it up. Puig just glared at him.

When teams are at home, players are responsible for getting themselves to the ballpark. When they’re on the road, the club organizes two buses to transport players and staff from the team hotel to the stadium. The league was pretty much divided between early bus guys and late bus guys. Puig fell into the latter group. Mattingly defended that.
“I’ve seen guys that are in the Hall of Fame that came on the second bus,” he said. “Rickey Henderson was a late bus guy. Dave Winfield was another late arriver. And honestly I wasn’t one of those guys who was at the ballpark early. But in those days I guess there wasn’t much reason to get there early. There weren’t full batting cages in every city back then. There weren’t full kitchens. There was just a candy rack.”

The late bus was fine, as long as a player was on it. But during a series with the Marlins in mid-August, Puig—who made his off-season home in Miami—opted to sleep in his own bed and drive himself to the ballpark. He showed up thirty-five minutes late. A ballplayer missing stretch was a rare occurrence. Longtime Dodger beat writers couldn’t
recall a player ever showing up that late. Nick Piecoro, a reporter who had covered the Arizona Diamondbacks every day for seven seasons, said that he remembered a player missing stretch once, and that happened during spring training with a random reliever who had no shot at making the team anyway. “He said he was jet-lagged from flying in from Australia,” said Piecoro. While Puig was prone to oversleeping and getting stuck in traffic, his constant tardiness was made more serious by the fact that the organization had arranged a private security firm to watch over him because of the drug cartel threats. Teammates wondered if one day Puig wouldn’t show up at all.

Mattingly benched him that night but told reporters he had planned to give Puig the day off. Barring Puig from playing in Miami was enough to get the kid’s attention. Since his defection from Cuba, many of his relatives had joined him in the United States, and made their homes in and around Miami. Puig’s mother, sister, cousin, and many other friends were on hand to watch him play at Marlins Park. Not to get to run out onto the field in front of them was painful, and perhaps what Mattingly needed to do to get his young slugger in line. But the skipper ultimately decided he needed Puig’s bat more than he needed to teach him a lesson. Since his call-up on June 3, Puig had led Major League Baseball in batting average, runs, hits, and total bases. In the eighth inning with the game tied 4–4, Puig came off the bench and hit the first pitch he saw for a mammoth home run to center field, giving the Dodgers a lead they would not relinquish. If any message was sent, it was that Puig could break rules and still be handed a bat, because winning mattered most.