The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (28 page)

The pool headache wasn’t as big of a nuisance as the Dodgers’ crowded outfield, however. Even though they entered the season with three highly paid outfielders in Crawford, Kemp, and Ethier, and added Puig along the way, finding room for all four was never an issue because they were never healthy for a full nine innings at the same time. Until now. When Kemp returned from the disabled list, Kasten met with Mattingly to ask what he intended to do with four guys for three positions. Mattingly told Kasten about how he planned to play matchups and platoon the men, as two were right-handed and two were lefties. A person with knowledge of the chat said Kasten told Mattingly that a rotation was fine, but if Puig wasn’t in the starting lineup they would have a problem.

Later, Mattingly summoned all four men into his office and told them that with the division sewn up, he would work out a rotation to keep all four outfielders fresh for the playoffs. Puig and Crawford shrugged. Ethier told Mattingly he would do whatever was best for the team. Kemp fought for playing time.
“I’m a starter,” he said to his skipper, in front of the other three. If Mattingly and Kemp had once been close, their relationship now seemed over.

But Mattingly didn’t need to worry about juggling his four outfielders after all. Days after the platoon conversation, Kemp’s slow-healing ankle was reevaluated and team doctors discovered that the injury was much more significant than previously thought. One of the bones in Kemp’s foot was so swollen that if he continued to put any weight on it he risked snapping it and ending his career. Kemp was told he’d need surgery on the final day of the season. It was the second time in as many years that he had played through a freak injury that had been missed. Another disastrous season, complete.

The Dodgers had invited their fans to stay in the stadium after that
game for a playoff pep rally. Players gathered on the field and some spoke to the jubilant crowd. After starting the season with a 30-42 record, the Dodgers had finished the season at 92-70, winning the National League West by eleven games. A division title wasn’t really what the Dodgers were after, however. They wanted a world championship. And as the players looked around at each other, they believed they had the talent and the momentum to do it.

T
he Dodgers entered the
2013 playoffs on an auspicious note. Only four teams in history had ever won forty-two of fifty games during the regular season. Each went on to make the World Series.

Earning a spot in the Fall Classic was not going to be easy, however. To get there, Los Angeles would have to beat two very good National League teams, and they’d have to do it without home-field advantage. Because they were the first team to clinch their division and had
injury issues all year, the club’s brain trust chose to rest many starters during the season’s final week. With backups on the field, the Dodgers dropped four of their last five contests, and slipped down to the third seed in the National League behind St. Louis and Atlanta.

First, they had to face the NL East champion Braves in a best-of-five series. Though the Dodgers sent Kershaw to the mound for Game 1 of the division series, victory was no guarantee. The Braves countered with their own ace, Kris Medlen, who had been named the NL’s pitcher of the month for September. Medlen had faced the
Dodgers twice earlier in the year and flummoxed Los Angeles hitters both times, allowing zero earned runs in 13.2 innings pitched. But both of those games came early in the season, when the Dodgers weren’t any good.

During batting practice before Game 1, Stan Kasten stood on the dirt near the visiting on-deck circle and greeted old friends. It had been ten years since he had left the organization he helped turn into an annual contender, and a lot had changed. Atlanta had won its division in twelve of Kasten’s last thirteen years as team president, but they’d captured that crown just three times in the decade since. The biggest reason for that drop-off, of course, was the loss of Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz to free agency and middle age. In some ways, the nineties Braves had set the standard for what the Dodgers were trying to do. Los Angeles could control winning the NL West most years by outspending everyone else. And since the playoffs were a crapshoot, the best way to win a World Series title was to buy a ticket to the postseason every year and hope for the best. The Braves had been very good under Kasten but they had also been unlucky. The club’s twelve division titles had produced five trips to the World Series but only one championship. Maybe it was because Atlanta hadn’t won a playoff series since 2001, or perhaps so many first- and second-round flameouts in the nineties had numbed fan excitement, but enthusiasm for the 2013 Braves squad around the city was tepid. The day before Game 1,
Dodger officials were told that Turner Field still had eighteen thousand unsold tickets.

While Kasten pressed Atlanta flesh, Matt Kemp ambled his way up the dugout steps toward his teammates who were waiting to hit. As Kemp rested on his crutches, a cameraman circled him for a shot, and he became annoyed. “I think you got enough,” he said, as he stared out into space. Puig approached him, and Kemp said something awkward to him about steak and eggs, the meal Puig credited for giving him his power, and forced a laugh. It was not a coincidence that these two fan favorites were so uneasy around each other. Imagining the two of
them playing in the outfield together for a championship team was difficult; they were like the same sides of a magnet, so fundamentally similar that they repelled each other. Puig was an alpha male in a group of alpha males, and did little to hide it. In a game in St. Louis in early August, Gonzalez was on first base when Puig doubled off the wall. After Gonzalez held at third rather than trying to score on the hit, a visibly angry Puig threw his hands in the air in disgust. Confused, Gonzalez turned to him and yelled “What?” across the diamond. After they both eventually came in to score, Puig screamed at Gonzalez in the dugout. Cameras captured the incident. Knowing viewers at home had seen his outburst, Puig waited until the camera was on him later in the game, and then went over to Gonzalez, smiled, put his arm around the first baseman’s shoulder, and patted his head as if he were a child. That sort of thing would never have flown with Matt Kemp. These Dodgers had won the West, but they played very few games with both Kemp and Puig in the lineup. The two men were contracted to play some combination of right and center field together in Dodger blue through the 2018 season. That seemed unlikely. And since Puig was much cheaper and younger, Kemp was more likely to be traded. He knew it.

Before he took his hacks in the cage, Puig removed his cap to put on his batting helmet and revealed a freshly shaved playoff Mohawk. In his first three months in the big leagues the rookie outfielder was exceptional at the plate, hitting .349 with an on-base percentage of greater than 40 percent. But he sputtered in September, posting a .214 batting average and a .333 OBP. “
They found the hole in his swing,” said one Dodger staff member as he watched him take batting practice that evening. “It’s not where you would look at first, but they found it.” While Puig feasted on low fastballs thrown near his shoe tops, he struggled to hit heaters in the upper third of the strike zone—which was the wheelhouse of most players.

If Puig did have some kind of glitch it was understandable. Most ballplayers take years to perfect their swings in the minors. Puig was
forced to make his adjustments at the highest level. Because the mechanics of his swing were otherwise almost perfect, opposing pitchers knew they had to beat him between the ears. The Dodgers’ coaching staff expected Puig’s emotions to be amplified in the playoffs, the time of year when the ability to slow the game down is most crucial. They worried that the more he tried to do, the less effective he would be.

To accommodate playoff television programming, Game 1 started at 8:07 in Atlanta—some fifty-seven minutes later than night games typically kicked off at Dodger Stadium. Kershaw did the math and wrote down the adjusted times for his pregame rituals. But it was clear from the first inning that the Dodgers’ ace did not have his best stuff. Though he struck out two hitters in the opening frame, he struggled to throw his fastball where he wanted and had to use nineteen pitches to get the first three outs. The big southpaw liked to paint the corners of the strike zone with four-seamers to get ahead of batters early in counts and then mix in his off-speed pitches to put them away. When he got ahead by two strikes, he was lethal. In 0-2 counts versus Kershaw, batters struck out more than 50 percent of the time, and were five times more likely to whiff than collect a hit. He gained such an advantage because he didn’t have to throw strikes in these counts; hitters often flailed at pitches in the dirt.

In the fourth inning, Kershaw threw first-pitch fastballs to each of the six Braves he faced. But they caught too much of the plate. Atlanta hitters capitalized on his lack of command, collecting two hits and a walk. And even though they managed only one run against him, they had made him throw seventy-seven pitches to get twelve outs—no minor victory. The best way to win a game Clayton Kershaw pitched was to somehow get him off the mound. Knowing this, in the fifth inning Kershaw decided to turn his fastball into a secondary pitch. It worked. Of the eight pitches he threw to B. J. Upton and Jason Heyward in the fifth, seven were sliders, the other was a curve. He struck them both out. He fanned the Braves’ best hitter, Freddie Freeman, the next inning without throwing him a fastball, either. After the game,
some of the Braves said his slider was one of the best they’d seen all year. As a matter of fact, it was so good they hadn’t seen it at all. Kershaw struck out nine of the last eleven hitters he faced, and finished the game giving up one run on three hits—all singles—while striking out twelve in seven innings. His dozen strikeouts were the most by a Dodger in a postseason game since Sandy Koufax had struck out fifteen in Game 1 of the 1963 World Series. The Dodgers rolled over Medlen and the relievers brought in to back him up, scoring six runs on eleven hits, including three doubles and a home run.

Los Angeles took a 1–0 series lead but the win came with a cost: Kershaw had thrown 124 pitches, which made it unlikely that he’d be able to come back and pitch Game 4 on short rest. Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu were scheduled to pitch Games 2 and 3, with Ricky Nolasco on track for Game 4. Though Nolasco had pitched well for the Dodgers in the regular season, he had never taken the mound in the playoffs in his eight-year career, and those around the team said he looked terrified. If the Dodgers dropped the next two games of the series, Nolasco would have to pitch an elimination game unless Kershaw could work on three days’ rest. Because of this, Mattingly was criticized for leaving Kershaw in to toss more pitches than he’d thrown in five months in a game the Dodgers appeared to have well in hand. But Mattingly knew how much his ace wanted to stay on the mound and said afterward that he felt he owed Kershaw the opportunity to try to get twenty-one outs.

Of course, there would be no need for Game 4 if Los Angeles could beat Atlanta in Games 2 and 3 and sweep the series. With Greinke on the bump for Game 2, the Dodgers liked their chances of heading back to L.A. needing one more victory to advance. They jumped out to a quick lead in the first inning, after Mark Ellis walked and Hanley Ramirez doubled him home. It was Ramirez’s first postseason appearance as well, but he seemed to the coaching staff to be as relaxed and confident as Nolasco was nervous. Greinke looked like the pitcher the Dodgers envisioned when they signed him in the off-season, giving up
two earned runs in six efficient innings. Though he had thrown only eighty-three pitches and might have had another inning left in him, with the Dodgers trailing 2–1 and Skip Schumaker on second with one out, Mattingly opted to pinch-hit for Greinke in the top of the seventh with a new player on the team, the veteran infielder Michael Young. Young collected an infield single, setting up runners at the corners. But Carl Crawford grounded into an inning-ending double play.

The top of the seventh wasn’t Mattingly’s fault. Though Greinke hit well—he would go on to win the NL Silver Slugger award as the league’s best-hitting pitcher—Young was a .300 career hitter, and two years removed from finishing with the most hits in the AL. The bottom of the seventh threatened to cost Mattingly his job. He sent rookie flamethrower Chris Withrow to the mound to relieve Greinke. The trouble with being blessed with a fastball that travels 98 mph is that the man throwing it often has no idea where it’s going. Withrow walked the first batter he faced, then allowed a single. The Braves gave the Dodgers a gift out by asking shortstop Andrelton Simmons to bunt the runners up a base. Then Withrow bounced back, striking out Elliot Johnson looking on three pitches. With runners on second and third and two out, the pitcher was due up in the order. Atlanta sent light-hitting Jose Constanza to the plate to pinch-hit.

The left-handed Constanza had collected just eight hits on the year, all singles. Nevertheless, Mattingly was uncomfortable with the fact that all eight of those hits had come off right-handed pitchers, such as Withrow. So he replaced Withrow with lefty Paco Rodriguez. Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez countered by substituting right-handed pinch-hitter Reed Johnson for Constanza to get the matchup that he wanted. Rather than pitch to the veteran journeyman Johnson, who had hit just .244 with one home run on the year, Mattingly had Rodriguez intentionally walk him to load the bases for Jason Heyward, one of Atlanta’s best hitters. Heyward was a lefty, and the average left-handed hitter has a much more difficult time hitting left-handed pitchers, because the ball tails away from him. But Heyward was no
ordinary player. In 2013 his batting average and on-base plus slugging percentage were both higher against lefties than righties. His numbers against southpaws were significantly better than Johnson’s, too. Knowing those numbers, giving Johnson a free pass to pitch to Heyward seemed like a mistake. It was. Heyward singled in two runs, and the Braves took a 4–1 lead. Mattingly’s gaffe was made even more painful when Hanley Ramirez hit a two-run home run the next inning that would have given the Dodgers the lead. Instead they lost 4–3. The club flew back to L.A. with the series tied at a game apiece, and two guys lined up to start Games 3 and 4 who had never thrown a pitch in a playoff game in their lives.