The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (7 page)

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Ned Colletti’s newfound fiduciary flexibility came with a catch. After Mark Walter took over the Dodgers he installed Stan Kasten as team president to run the club’s day-to-day operations. Kasten had worked in that same capacity for the Braves from 1986 to 2003, before moving to Washington to help guide the Nationals after they relocated from Montreal. During his tenure in Atlanta the Braves became the class of the National League, winning fourteen division titles in fifteen years and five NL pennants with homegrown talent and the best starting rotation of the modern era. During that dynasty, future Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz functioned like a three-headed monster that chewed through opposing lineups with devastating results. Kasten brought with him to Los Angeles an emphasis on pitching and developing a strong farm system. But on the surface, he was a counterintuitive choice to run the new cash-drunk Dodgers.
“I just don’t like giving a lot of money to players,” said Kasten.

Nevertheless, the job was his. The Dodgers were setting themselves up as the new Yankees West, and they made no secret of the fact that they were hungry for superstars to showcase on their new television network. Kasten hadn’t run the Braves that way. When he took over in Atlanta the team held the impressive distinction of having the highest payroll ($16 million) in the National League and finishing last in its division. Knowing the Braves’ farm system was also in tatters, Kasten traded better-known players for prospects and slashed the club’s payroll to $12 million. The press roasted him. But Kasten preached patience to his owner, Ted Turner, even advising the media mogul to avoid local sports talk radio for the next few years. After finishing in last place in the NL West the next three seasons, the Braves rebounded in 1991, winning their division and advancing all the way to the World Series. They captured the NL pennant the following year as well. Most impressive, the Braves didn’t sign their first big free agent, Greg Maddux, until after they’d been to the World Series twice. “We kept everyone as they were growing and becoming all-stars,” said Kasten. “My last year there our payroll got up to eight-five or ninety million dollars—which was maybe the highest payroll in the National League—but we had earned our way there because we had started from the bottom.”

Kasten hated the idea of trading away blue-chip prospects for veteran rentals who could help his club win in the short term while wrecking its future. Instead, he believed that in order to win year in and year out, the first thing an organization had to do was stuff its farm system with young talent. Kasten’s measured approach relied on self-control. But Mark Walter didn’t want to wait. While Dodger fans welcomed Guggenheim with much excitement, Walter was smart enough to know that the honeymoon affection his new ownership group enjoyed from the city would evaporate if the club went into rebuilding mode. In order to bring back fans alienated by McCourt and compete with the Lakers, he knew his team had to win, and to win now. Walter couldn’t be at Dodger Stadium every day to deal with the minutiae
of overseeing a major-league baseball team because he still lived in Chicago, where he ran his multibillion-dollar investment firm. So he turned the keys to the club over to Kasten. The Dodgers were not Walter’s team or Colletti’s team or even Mattingly’s team: the Dodgers were Kasten’s. Everyone knew it.

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Stan Kasten never stood still. On game days, he arrived at Dodger Stadium by eight in the morning and often stayed until midnight. During the sixteen hours or so he was at the ballpark each day he roamed the premises like a shark that feared it would die if it ever stopped moving. Kasten was not only the captain of the Dodgers’ ship, he was also the club’s hall monitor. His constant motion put everyone he came into contact with on edge. While baseball was a game to many, it was a high-stakes business to him. If something went wrong, Kasten had to answer to billionaires who did not like it when things went wrong. He could not rest when there was anything to be done, and there was always something that needed doing.

After the new ownership group came in, Kasten sat down with Colletti and made a wish list of players they would love to see in Dodger blue—whether they were available or not.
At the top of that list was Boston’s first baseman, Adrian Gonzalez. “He was offensively great, defensively great, bilingual, from Southern California, a pillar of the community,” said Kasten, of Gonzalez. “He just checked all the boxes. So he was on the list of the most perfect guys we could ever get some day.”

The Dodgers had employed James Loney at first base for the past seven seasons but were looking to upgrade the position. Loney was a lanky high school senior from Houston when the Dodgers selected him in the first round of the 2002 draft, and he’d spent his entire career in the organization. His slick fielding made him one of the best defensive first basemen in the game, but he’d never hit more than fifteen home runs in a year. That lack of sock in his swing wouldn’t do for a burgeoning super team. Getting Gonzalez from Boston wouldn’t be easy:
the Red Sox had just signed the left-handed slugger to a seven-year, $154 million contract extension before the previous season. But Gonzalez’s tenure with the Sox had started on an awkward note. Though he had hit twenty-seven home runs in his first season with Boston and collected an MLB-leading 213 hits on his way to a .410 on-base percentage, Gonzalez drew the ire of Red Sox Nation when, after the team suffered a spectacular collapse in the season’s final month and failed to make the playoffs, he shrugged and told the media that a championship just
wasn’t God’s plan. The following year when he struggled to start the season, the boos rained down on him at Fenway. It stung.

Gonzalez had played most of his career in San Diego, a sleepy city whose fan base gives its players minimal grief when they sputter. He never got used to playing under a microscope. When Boston scuffled in the final months of his first season with the team,
Gonzalez blamed the club’s schedule. Because the Red Sox were one of the league’s best teams, many of their Sunday day games were moved to the evening so they could be shown nationally. Late Sunday start times meant more overnight flights on getaway days—something Gonzalez rarely had to deal with as a Padre. But they also meant that he was playing on a winning team—and he was mad about that? Gonzalez had moved from one of the most relaxed cities in America to the one wound tightest.
“You go to the grocery store and you’re getting hitting advice,” said teammate Nick Punto, of Boston. “You go to the barbershop and you’re getting hitting advice.” That kind of pressure bothered Gonzalez. “They didn’t like that I was a calm person,” he said later to the
Los Angeles Times
, of the Boston media. “I won’t throw my helmet. I won’t scream, I won’t use bad words if I strike out. That’s what they want over there.”

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That Kasten had finessed control of player transactions from Ned Colletti’s grasp became evident on the night the Boston mega-trade was struck.
Colletti had called the Red Sox general manager, Ben Cherington, in early May 2012 and asked what it would take to land the
power-hitting first baseman in a trade. Cherington told him Gonzalez was not available. So the Dodgers got creative. Kasten knew the struggling Red Sox had a handful of albatross contracts they would love to be rid of, so he called Boston’s president, Larry Lucchino, and told him his club was in the somewhat rare position of having an owner who was willing to take on a ton of extra money in player salary if Gonzalez was packaged with guys who were way overpaid. Lucchino was intrigued. That July,
Colletti thought the Dodgers had struck a multiplayer deal for Gonzalez—but it fell apart on the day of the trading deadline, in part because the Red Sox still believed they had a shot to make the playoffs and they didn’t want to trade away one of their best hitters. “It just didn’t happen and we were all disappointed,” said Kasten.

The bitterness of that failure had been lingering for two weeks when Kasten approached Walter and said he wasn’t ready to give up. The two men brainstormed how far they would be willing to go to take one final crack at landing Gonzalez.
Then, opportunity struck. Kasten and Walter were in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Denver for Major League Baseball’s quarterly owners meetings when they noticed Red Sox owner John Henry smoking a cigar on the hotel patio with a group of men that included White Sox emperor Jerry Reinsdorf. Kasten was about to make a beeline for Henry when he saw something out of the corner of his eye that could thwart his plans. Also in the lobby stood two veteran national baseball writers who were in Denver covering the conference. Had either of them seen Kasten lure Henry away for a private conversation, they would have poked around to find out what was up. Kasten knew each man had been in the business long enough to have the sources necessary to break the story of the trade before it happened, which could have wrecked it. Striking a deal with another team before the nonwaiver deadline was difficult enough. But trades after July 31 were always trickier to pull off because by rule a player must be placed on waivers before he is traded, and, for the sake of competitive balance, every other team with a worse record than the
club that wants him has first dibs. What that meant was that if any of the Dodgers’ or Red Sox’ rivals got wind of the mammoth trade they were scheming, they could have claimed one of the players involved in the deal just to derail the whole thing.

Kasten had to think fast. He had an idea. Walter had owned the Dodgers for only three months, and he was still a mystery to the national media. Kasten approached the reporters. “How would you guys like an exclusive sit-down with our owner?” he asked. The men jumped at the chance. An interview with Walter, the man crazy enough to plunk down $2 billion for a sports franchise, would make for great copy. Kasten ushered the reporters to a table with Walter, making sure their backs were facing the patio. Then, after they were tucked away, he walked up to Henry. “John,” he said. “Can we talk?” Henry extinguished his cigar and followed Kasten out of the lobby.

When Kasten pulled Henry off that patio on that August night in Denver, the Dodgers and Red Sox could not have been in more disparate positions. Kasten was looking for bold-faced names. Henry had them, and his team was flailing. In 2011, Boston had played well for five months before imploding down the stretch, becoming the first team in baseball history to blow a nine-game wild card lead in September. The Red Sox dropped eighteen of their final twenty-four games and were eliminated from the playoffs on the last day of the season after a furious ninth-inning comeback by the lowly Orioles. The club’s manager,
Terry Francona, and general manager, Theo Epstein, were both run out of town.

In an effort to reboot, before the 2012 season the Red Sox brass hired Bobby Valentine, a known authoritarian, to manage the team, and installed Cherington as general manager.
The players hated Valentine. But the front office had every reason to believe its talented—and very expensive—team would bounce back and perform well that year. Their center fielder, Jacoby Ellsbury, had finished second in the AL MVP voting the year before, Gonzalez had finished seventh, and second baseman Dustin Pedroia had placed ninth. The Red Sox took
the field on opening day in 2012 with a $161 million payroll, third highest in MLB behind the Yankees and the Phillies. That kind of money brought huge expectations, which is why Boston didn’t want to give up Gonzalez on July 31 when they were just three and a half games out of earning a wild card berth to the playoffs.

But when the calendar flipped to August, the Sox lost eight of their first twelve games. And on the evening that Henry stubbed out his cigar and accompanied Kasten out of that hotel lobby, Boston had fallen to eleven games back of the Yankees in the AL East, and five and a half games out of the wild card race with just six weeks left to play.

Though Gonzalez was only a season and a half into his seven-year deal, it was becoming clear he might benefit from a change of scenery.
His coaches and teammates compared him to a clubhouse lawyer who liked to argue for the sake of arguing. Some even began referring to him as the Professor behind his back, a dig at their perception that he thought he was smarter than everyone else.

It was true that Gonzalez didn’t display his emotions on the field very often, which made it difficult for fans to tell how much he cared. The only time he seemed to react was when he disagreed with an umpire’s call. Thanks to his exceptional plate discipline, Gonzalez led the major leagues in walks in 2009, with 119. But his walk total decreased in the years after that, and he walked only 42 times in 2012. The explanation was simple enough. He told teammates and coaches that he was tired of taking pitches in 3-2 counts, because it gave the umpire a chance to mistake a ball for a strike. If taking the power out of an ump’s hands to call him out on strikes meant that he was going to walk only a third as often as before, well then so be it. It was also true that Adrian Gonzalez was more verbose than the average baseball player. And though he may have exhausted some teammates with his argumentative streak, his benign transgressions fell far short of the stage-four clubhouse cancer some in the Boston media made him out to be. Even those he annoyed couldn’t help but respect his work ethic.

Gonzalez had been the first overall pick in the 2000 draft, and he
had lived up to his potential. During his nine-year career he had kept his nose clean, never having been mentioned on a human growth hormone mailing list or in a police report. And above all else, the man could still rake. Even though the Red Sox had fallen out of contention in 2012, Gonzalez wanting out of Boston wouldn’t have been enough to force the club’s hand. The Dodgers made the Red Sox an offer they couldn’t refuse, at precisely the right moment. That morning, Yahoo! Sports reported that a frustrated Gonzalez had texted Henry to complain about Valentine. Players had met with ownership to disuss their unhappiness, and details about that meeting leaked as well. When Kasten approached Henry in that Denver hotel, a frustrated Henry was ready to blow up everything and start over.