The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (31 page)

And then there were the new friends who were ripping him off.
One of them asked to borrow his Lincoln, and Puig said sure, because he always did. Unbeknownst to Puig, his friend took the car to get expensive work done to it to make it flashier, then slapped Puig with the bill. Puig may have been naïve but he wasn’t stupid: the figure sounded too high. His security team got rid of the friend after that. Puig’s financial troubles were not uncommon among young ballplayers. But his recklessness, and the fact that he went from an unknown kid to a superstar overnight in the country’s second-biggest market, amplified the tension. Everyone wanted a piece of him. It weighed on all he did.

The Cardinals scored an unearned run in the bottom of the fifth off a double, a passed ball, and a sacrifice fly to take a 1–0 lead.
Kershaw led off the top of the sixth with a single to left and clapped toward the dugout after he reached first base. Crawford followed with a ground ball that took forever to skid into the glove of Cardinals second baseman Matt Carpenter. Because he had to rush to catch the speedy Crawford at first, Carpenter chucked the ball into a camera well. Kershaw took third and Crawford trotted over to second. With nobody out, runners at second and third, and the meat of the Dodgers’ order coming up, it looked as if the club might score its first run in its last sixteen playoff innings. Some in the Cardinals organization noted that the Dodgers had an advantage going into the series because Mark McGwire, the club’s former hitting coach, was intimately acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of St. Louis hitters. But McGwire’s intel didn’t matter if the Dodgers couldn’t score. Through the first nineteen innings of the NLCS, L.A.’s potent offense had managed just two runs.
“Two and a half billion dollars,” a team executive said later. “And two fucking runs.”

The Cardinals drew their infield toward the grass for a possible play at the plate. Mark Ellis stepped into the box just needing to hit a fly ball deep enough for Kershaw to tag up and tie the game. He took a ball from Wacha, then popped up the second pitch he saw to Carpenter. One out. Adrian Gonzalez was up next. With one out and first base open, Molina called for Wacha to issue the first intentional walk of his career, loading the bases for Puig. Although the Dodgers’ right fielder had pummeled Atlanta pitching in the Divisional Series, going 8-for-17 and accounting for more runs (5) than strikeouts (4), the Championship Series had been a disaster for him. Puig had gone a miserable 0-for-6 in Game 1, leaving a game-high seven runners on base. He had struck out in his first two at-bats in Game 2. But with the bases loaded and the Dodgers down 1–0, the young Cuban could give his club the lead and change the momentum of the series with one swing.

Wacha surprised Puig with a first-pitch 95 mph fastball down the middle of the plate. Puig was late and swung through it so violently that he fell down to one knee. Wacha threw another fastball that nicked
the bottom of the zone for a called strike two. Puig thought that pitch was low, and he turned around and glared at home-plate umpire Mark Carlson. The crowd got even louder. Puig took the next pitch, and the next and the next to work the count full. With the bases loaded and nowhere to put Puig, Wacha threw a fastball in the dirt. Puig started to swing, then tried to stop himself. It was too late. He struck out with a feeble stab at the ball, then began the slow walk back to the dugout with his head down. He descended the steps past Mattingly, turned right down the tunnel that led to the batting cages, collapsed against the wall, and sobbed. His new translator, Roman Barinas, found him huddled against the wall just as Michael Young passed him on his way back to the dugout from the indoor batting cages. Young, who had been preparing to pinch-hit if necessary, leaned in to console Puig.
“It’s not over yet, we need you,” Young said. Barinas translated. “You’re gonna get another chance.” The Dodgers trailed by only a run but it didn’t matter. Puig had come to St. Louis to show the people who wanted to see him fail that he could lead the Dodgers to the World Series. And now he was humiliated.

While this was going on, Uribe came up to bat with the bases loaded and two out. He struck out. Puig dried his tears and jogged back out to his position in right. The next nine Dodger hitters went down in order, save for a Nick Punto single. Puig struck out looking in the ninth. Kershaw had been brilliant again, allowing two hits and no earned runs in six innings. Desperate to generate offense, Mattingly had pulled him for a pinch hitter in the top of the seventh after he’d thrown just seventy-two pitches. Kershaw removed his cap and stood alone with his hands on his hips and watched as Young hit for him. He flied out to end the inning. In nineteen playoff innings in 2013, Kershaw had given up one earned run. Despite managing only two hits in Game 2, the Cardinals won to take a commanding 2–0 NLCS lead. The series headed back to Los Angeles for Games 3, 4, and 5.

If the Dodgers could win at least two of those games, the clubs would be forced to return to St. Louis for Games 6 and 7. But after
the brutal Game 2 loss, even pushing the series to five games seemed like a tall order. The Dodgers had already burned Greinke and Kershaw, while St. Louis had held on to its ace. In Game 3, Hyun-Jin Ryu would face off against the superb Adam Wainwright, the only pitcher in the National League who had thrown more innings than Kershaw that season. After Game 2, Hanley Ramirez sat quietly at his locker with his shirt off and two large bandages covering his left side. A large contingent of media gathered around Puig’s locker, waiting for him to appear from the showers. Of the sixty or so people in the room, the only person making any noise was Matt Kemp, who was riding around on a scooter chirping
“meep meep.” Puig emerged ten minutes later to face reporters with wet, red eyes.

•  •  •

If Don Mattingly was worried about being fired, at least he knew he had one powerful ally in his corner. Before Game 3 in Los Angeles, Mark Walter and his daughter, Samantha, approached him on the field during batting practice at Dodger Stadium and threw their arms around him. If the front office wanted to get rid of Mattingly, they would have to come up with reasons compelling enough to trump Walter’s obvious affection for the man. Though he valued the opinion of others in the organization, Walter was the self-described decider-in-chief. He would ultimately make the call.

Hyun-Jin Ryu had played it safe against Atlanta in the NLDS, and his conservative approach led to his removal after three innings. He arrived at Dodger Stadium before Game 3 of the NLCS vowing not to make the same mistake. Rather than conserve energy so he could stick in the game longer, Ryu signaled the sense of urgency the entire team felt by pumping a 95 mph fastball to Carlos Beltran in the first inning. It was the hardest pitch he’d thrown all season. Ryu cruised through the first four innings and did not give up a hit until the fifth. The life on his fastball caught the Cardinals flat-footed; in the seven innings Ryu pitched, St. Louis was able to muster only three singles and a walk. Nobody made it to third base.

As Cardinal bats remained cold, Dodger bats heated up. Ramirez returned to the lineup without the Toradol injection, and it sparked the club. Despite his broken rib, the shortstop singled in the first, hit a fly ball deep enough to advance Mark Ellis to third in his next at-bat, and beat out an infield single that plated a run in the eighth. Puig snapped out of his funk, too. After striking out looking in the second inning, he tripled in a run in the fourth. When the ball left his bat he assumed he had hit it out of the park, so he flipped his bat, raised his arms in celebration, and stopped to watch it fly. Upon realizing it bounced short of the fence and remained in play, Puig sprinted to third and celebrated again. This did not sit well with those who thought he was a hot dog. Puig didn’t care. He had been mortified to tears during the previous game and probably would have executed a front flip on third base now if it had occurred to him. Brian Wilson and Kenley Jansen closed out Ryu’s gem, and the Dodgers took Game 3 to crawl back into the series, besting Adam Wainwright 3–0.

The Dodgers’ coaching staff thought about moving Greinke and Kershaw up a day to pitch on short rest for Games 4 and 5 but quickly nixed that idea, in part because they didn’t want to push Greinke, but also because they didn’t want to find themselves in a situation where Ricky Nolasco had to pitch an elimination game on the road.
So Nolasco took the mound in Game 4, and it marked the first time he had pitched in more than two weeks. Nolasco looked as uncomfortable as Ryu had appeared confident the day before. He got through the Cardinals lineup the first time just fine, but fell apart the second time through the order, giving up a single, a double, and then a mammoth home run to Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday that gave St. Louis a 3–0 lead. The Dodgers battled back in the bottom of the fourth, with RBI singles from Puig and A. J. Ellis. With two on and one out, Mattingly pinch-hit Schumaker for Nolasco. Schumaker grounded into a double play. The Dodgers never got another good chance after that and dropped the contest 4–2, pushing them to a loss away from elimination. After the game, Ramirez said he was in way more pain than he
was the day before. His discomfort was obvious; after fouling a pitch off in the first inning he grabbed his side and bent down in agony in the batter’s box. He struck out three times.

The mood in the Dodger locker room was glum, but Mattingly told reporters he wasn’t nervous. “I’ve got one of the best pitchers in the world going tomorrow,” he said of Greinke. But Greinke was antsy. He had never pitched twice against a team in the same series in his career, and his restless mind worked through all the possibilities of how Cardinal hitters might try to attack him. “They’re going to make an adjustment,” he said before Game 5. “And you’ve got to be faster than them at it.” But being quick with countermoves was going to be difficult. Of all the teams Greinke had faced in his ten-year career, he felt the Twins and the Cardinals adjusted the fastest.

Ramirez still hadn’t taken the Toradol shot and his status for Game 5 remained in question. Even though the Dodgers had Greinke and Kershaw lined up to potentially even the series, the players seemed nervous before Game 5 and barely spoke to each other. Ramirez sat in the dugout and a media scrum formed around him. “I owe it to the city and to the fans to play today,” he said. It seemed to make people feel better, as if having an injured Ramirez in the lineup was better than no Ramirez at all. But by the seventh inning he would be pulled from the game and replaced by Nick Punto because he could no longer move. When Greinke took the mound in the first inning he had the same uneasy look in his eye as Nolasco the day before. His discomfort was made even more obvious by the amount of time he took between pitches, which was much longer than usual. The Cardinals jumped on him, loading the bases with a single, a walk, and another single before many fans had made their way in from the parking lot. Their big power-hitting lefty Matt Adams came up to the plate in a dream scenario: with no out and the bases loaded. Greinke outsmarted him and employed the strategy Kershaw used in Game 1 of the NLDS to wiggle out of the jam. Of the nine pitches the first three St. Louis hitters saw, eight were fastballs. Greinke started Adams with a fastball, and Adams took it for
a called strike. It was the only heater he would get. With Adams looking fastball all the way because there was nowhere to put him, Greinke used three curveballs and a changeup to fool him, striking him out on a pitch in the dirt. He then got Molina to ground into an inning-ending double play with another curveball. As Greinke settled down, Dodger hitters stayed hot. Crawford and A. J. Ellis each homered, and Gonzalez homered twice. Greinke went seven and allowed two runs, and Los Angeles won 6–4 to push the series back to St. Louis.

The Dodgers had never overcome a 3–2 game deficit in a postseason series in club history. But based on the way the guys were goofing around on the field before Game 6, one might have assumed they were up 3–2. After the Dodgers won Game 3, Adam Wainwright described some of the club’s on-field celebration antics as “Mickey Mouse.” A Cardinal fan Photoshopped a picture of Gonzalez wearing Mickey Mouse ears on Dumbo the elephant ride and called it Dumbo and Dumber. He turned the picture into a poster and made another
poster comparing Puig to a squirrel. Gonzalez and Puig saw the posters during batting practice and loved them. They ran over to the fan, signed the artwork, and happily posed for pictures. Gonzalez had worn a Mickey Mouse T-shirt the first day he showed up to Dodger Stadium after being traded from Boston. He had come full circle. It was an odd scene, but the Dodgers felt good for a few reasons. First, they had Kershaw taking the mound. Second, the Cardinals had coughed up a 3–1 NLCS lead to the Giants the year before and San Francisco went on to win the World Series. The possibility of history repeating itself weighed on St. Louis heavily. “We got Kersh going tonight, then in Game Sevens anything goes,” Dodger players said to reporters and to each other. And they believed it. With Kershaw on the hill there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the series was going seven. And then it would be all hands on deck.

The Dodgers were facing Michael Wacha again, but they felt they had a better shot at getting to him this time with Ethier and Ramirez back in the lineup. Ramirez thought the off day between Games 5 and 6
would help his rib cage feel better, but it had the opposite effect. When Game 6 started the temperature in St. Louis was fifty-two degrees—thirty degrees colder than it had been at first pitch for Game 5 in L.A. The chill made his ribs hurt worse. The Dodgers’ training staff had tried everything to ease Ramirez’s pain and gift him some mobility: ice, steam, ultrasound—to no avail.
Ramirez finally acquiesced to the needle.

It was fitting that the Dodgers were entrusting their season to Kershaw. At just two wins away from a National League pennant, Los Angeles was the closest it had been to a World Series berth in twenty-five years. When the Dodgers made the NLCS in 2008 and 2009 the Phillies needed only five games to eliminate them. Game 6 started out on a promising note, with Crawford beating out an infield single. But Mark Ellis grounded into a double play, and after getting ahead in the count 3-0 Gonzalez tapped out to third. If Cardinal fans were worried about a redo of the previous year’s collapse, it was perhaps a blessing that Wacha was a rookie and those ghosts didn’t occupy his psyche.