The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (10 page)

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Clayton Kershaw knew that every pitch he threw could be his last. Every pitcher did. But he didn’t believe it, not really. He’d never been injured during his five-year career, at least not badly enough to warrant going on the disabled list. Not only did he have that curveball and slider going for him; he also went through the world with the same sense of invincibility that informs the thoughts and actions of every healthy twenty-five-year-old man yet to suffer the indignities of a body in decline. He stood six foot four and weighed 225 pounds, a perfect frame for a major-league pitcher. In perhaps the biggest blunder in franchise history, the Dodgers had
traded a young Pedro Martinez away twenty years earlier because management thought his body was too scrawny to hold up. He went on to have a Hall of Fame career. Kershaw had about seventy-five pounds on Martinez. Still, a large frame didn’t guarantee wellness. By signing his contract extension before the season began, Kershaw could have eliminated the risk of getting injured and losing a nine-figure deal. But when the Dodgers didn’t meet his agent’s terms, rather than settle he decided to roll the dice.

Every time Kershaw took the mound before signing that extension he staked his future livelihood to his ability to throw baseballs as hard as he could while keeping his elbow and shoulder from getting hurt. His meticulous routine was the only thing standing between him and insanity. Kershaw had used the same glove for three years. He
also loved the comfort of numbers, and found it soothing to commit license plates in parking lots to memory. On days he pitched, he clung to his schedule with military precision.

The majority of Kershaw’s home starts began at 7:10 p.m. The days he pitched went like this: After waking up and eating his cereal, he would sit and watch TV with Ellen. Around 2 p.m. he would arrive at the field and make himself a turkey sandwich with cheese, pickles, and mustard, and grab a side of potato chips. Between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m. he attempted to burn off his nervous energy by alternating between walking around the clubhouse, bouncing baseballs off the walls, and trying to guess the other team’s lineup—which he wasn’t often wrong about. Though Kershaw rarely watched himself pitch, between outings he liked to study the most recent starts that Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner and Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels made against the opponent he was set to face. Because Bumgarner and Hamels were both excellent lefties, he found value in scouting a team’s approach against them, figuring they’d try to attack him in a similar way. Then, at 4 p.m., Kershaw would grab a yogurt and a handful of fruit and head into the training room in the team’s clubhouse to take a nap. On days he could not sleep, he consoled himself by watching East Coast ball games that had already started.

Between 5:15 and 5:30, Ellis and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt joined him to go over the other team’s lineup and talk strategy. Most starting pitchers develop a game plan based on the weaknesses of the hitters they face that night, but it’s subject to change. Greinke, for instance, pitched by feel: he corrected course after every pitch and bounced ideas off Ellis in between innings. Not Kershaw. Since his strengths typically bested a batter’s strengths, once his game plan was set he didn’t often deviate course.
“We’re like the pit crew,” said Ellis. “He comes to us when he needs something, otherwise we don’t interfere.”

At 5:58 p.m. on the dot Kershaw placed heat packs on his shoulder, elbow, and sometimes his back. Then he covered the same areas
with Icy Hot and finished getting dressed. At 6:20 p.m. he walked into the dugout wearing a blue Dodgers team jacket over his uniform and poured himself a cup of water. For the next three minutes, he sat on the bench and alternated between staring at the ground and staring into space. “Just zoning out,” he says. At 6:23 on the dot he took the field and began warming up. Though Kershaw wore number 22 and is superstitious about numbers, he had good reason for not walking onto the field at 6:22.
“I don’t need the extra minute,” he says.

After taking the field, Kershaw trotted down the line toward the outfield grass and put his hands on the ground to elevate his body into the yoga pose known as crow. Then after a couple of arm windmills, he jogged to the center-field wall and punched it once with his right (nonpitching) fist. After a few more laps from the foul line to the fence, some backward and some with high knees, he stretched with the help of a Dodgers strength coach, starting at 6:36.

At 6:40 p.m. he began playing catch with Ellis. “Sometimes I’ll joke with him, ‘Six thirty-eight today? Six forty-one?’ ” says Ellis. “I don’t think he finds it very funny.” Ellis loved Kershaw like a brother but sometimes worried the young pitcher’s intensity would cause him to have a stroke. A few months earlier, a well-meaning man sat next to Kershaw in the dugout before he was about to take the field and pitch a meaningless spring training game and attempted to make small talk. Kershaw squirmed in his seat and offered a few polite one-word answers. But after a few minutes he couldn’t take it anymore. He looked the man in the eye, apologized, and ran. That man was Mark Walter, the principal owner of the Dodgers. Walter had no idea about Kershaw’s strict pregame regimen, and when he found out later, he felt terrible. Still, to be so focused that you blow off the man who has the power to make you the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history was pretty damn impressive.

From 6:40 to 6:48 Kershaw played long toss with Ellis, stepping back a few feet after each throw until he reared back and lobbed balls
some two hundred feet to his catcher. At 6:50, he walked to the Dodgers’ bullpen to begin throwing to Ellis off a mound. At 7:02, after the national anthem was sung, he began the long walk back to the dugout. At home, Dodger faithful screamed his name and begged for autographs. On the road, visiting fans shouted obscenities. He blotted out all of it. At the beginning of each season Kershaw showed up clean-shaven and wore his sandy blond hair cropped close to his head. But as the season wore on he let the hair on his head and on his jaw grow long and scraggly. Before he threw a pitch, Kershaw put his glove in front of his face so that only his eyes were visible to the batter. He tried to grow a beard to look older, but his hair was too fine and wispy to make him look menacing. And even if his facial hair could grow in thick on his cheeks, his eyes were too open and vulnerable for him ever to look mean. By Memorial Day the ends of his hair would poke out from behind his ears under a ball cap he never washed. Before 7:10 starts, he would walk to the rail of the Dodgers dugout and stand on the edge, nod to his teammates, then lead them onto the field. “It might sound stupid, but it’s the little things that help me in baseball,” Kershaw says. “Like if I didn’t do one of those little things and then went out and pitched bad it’d probably be in the back of my head like, Why didn’t I do that? And then in my head afterward I’d be like, You know what? I let the team down today because something was off by a minute.”

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Clayton Kershaw was born on March 19, 1988, in Dallas. His mother, Marianne, worked as a graphic designer crafting logos for companies like Bibbentuckers, a local dry cleaner. His father, Chris, wrote radio jingles that won awards. They both made decent money when he was a little boy—enough to be middle class—and his father coached his Little League teams. Life was good until it wasn’t.

Kershaw’s parents started having problems around the time he turned ten. He remembers noticing them sleeping in different bedrooms, but thought it was just a by-product of his dad working late.
“He was crazy talented,” Kershaw says of his father. “He played every instrument. But you get in that lifestyle and it’s like, Oh I’m not talented until three or four in the morning. And then you stay up all night.”

Even though he was an only child, he was spared from being caught in the middle of their demise. “They did a good job protecting me from it,” he said. “I didn’t know a whole lot of it. I didn’t know about any of that stuff going on when I was little, so that was huge.”

After his parents divorced, Kershaw lived with his mother. Money was tight and private school was no longer an option. So his mom stretched herself thin renting a home in affluent Highland Park, just outside Dallas, so he could go to public school there. Kershaw had played youth soccer with two boys from his new school: future Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, and another friend named Josh Meredith. When he switched schools, he was relieved to wind up in Meredith’s class, so he at least had one friend. Years later, Meredith was the best man in his wedding.

Kershaw was an anxious child. “I was kind of a worrier,” he said. “I wanted to control everything. I had friends, and Josh was always around but I was always worried about different things. Being late was the scariest thing. Like if I was late for baseball practice that was the end of the world for me. My dad was perpetually late. He’d pick me up sometimes to go to practice and I would just wait like a dog in the front window. Like, please show up, please show up, please show up.” He cites his sixteenth birthday as one of the best days of his life, because he got his license. He could finally drive himself somewhere two hours early if he wanted.

The upside to Kershaw being a worrier was that his mother never bothered to remind him to do his homework or turn the TV off and go to bed at a reasonable hour on a school night. She knew he would do it on his own.

Because his mom worked late, Kershaw would usually head to a friend’s house after school, and often camped out there for a few days. Sometimes he wouldn’t check in for hours. That was no problem,
because his mother knew he was so paranoid about following the rules that he would never do anything to get himself in trouble.

“She took a very hands-off approach because she knew I would take care of myself,” Kershaw said. “That lack of authority was perfect for me. The responsibility I took on helped me grow up.”

When Kershaw’s parents split up his life became about controlling variables. He found Jesus as a teenager because the idea of turning over his worries to a higher power was a huge relief. He couldn’t control everything, but he could build his own family, and once he let someone in, he remained fiercely loyal. He was a man who met his best friend in the second grade and his wife in the eighth.

In Dallas there are two high school sports seasons: football and off-season football. Kershaw played center on the freshman football team and Stafford lined up behind him. The coach put him on the offensive line because he was, as he describes it, “a pudgy little doughboy.” But he got bored and quit after one year, because being a lineman wasn’t the most fun job for a fifteen-year-old.

He grew six inches in the summer between his sophomore and junior years, and turned his focus to baseball full-time. His father went to his games and sat in the stands, but the two seldom spoke. “I’d say hi to him, maybe see him for a dinner every once in a while,” he said. When he talks about his father now, which isn’t very often, he doesn’t let himself acknowledge the pain of having a complicated relationship with one of the principal people in his life. “The years that I needed a dad around, like age one through ten, he was there,” said Kershaw. “And they had a great marriage and I had a great dad. I was raised by then, so that’s good.”

He also had the Melsons. Ellen Melson grew up in a close-knit family with two brothers and a sister. Kershaw became a fixture at their home, and reveled in its wholeness. Every Thanksgiving the Melsons would have Kershaw and his mother out to their ranch outside Dallas. Kershaw’s father passed away a month into the 2013 season at age sixty-three, never having made it to Dodger Stadium to see his son
play. The cause of death was diabetes and other health problems. “He deteriorated really fast,” said Kershaw. He left the team to go back to Texas and attend his father’s funeral.

Because he was raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, Kershaw knows his life could have gone another way. But the early anxiety he endured propelled him to greatness. The fear of having no control became the fuel that remained. On the mound he was an unflinching warrior who had never been wounded. But off the field his shyness could still appear in fleeting moments. “Some people can go to a party where they don’t really know anyone and be totally social and have a great time,” he said. “I am not one of those people.” Every year he had been in the big leagues he collected the autographs of his coaches and teammates on a baseball. During his first three seasons on the Dodgers he played under Joe Torre. But the 2008 ball from his rookie campaign is still missing Torre’s signature. He’d been too timid to ask.

Scouts began noticing Kershaw in the eleventh grade. By the time his senior season rolled around he was a six-foot-four, 215-pound lefty who mixed a 95 mph fastball with a curveball teenage boys had no hope of hitting. He went 12–0 for the Highland Park Scots that season, with a 0.77 ERA. He struck out 139 batters in 64 innings.
USA Today
named him the 2006 national high school player of the year.

Teams with the highest picks in the Major League Baseball draft have one job and one job only: not to screw it up. And while Kershaw had been dominant, there was no greater draft risk than a high school pitcher. Throwing a baseball overhand at 95 miles per hour for a living is a horrendous thing to do to an arm. And teenagers who touched the mid-90s with their fastball flamed out quicker than most. High school coaches rarely consulted with travel ball coaches on the appropriate workload a young arm could handle. Fundamentally, a prep school coach’s goal (to win) was at odds with what was best for a teenage pitcher (to advance to the next level with an intact elbow and shoulder).

After graduation, Kershaw planned to go to Texas A&M, where Ellen would enroll in the fall. If he played ball for the Aggies, he’d be
eligible for the draft again after his junior season. Conventional wisdom says that drafting a twenty-one-year-old pitcher with three years of college experience is less terrifying than betting on an eighteen-year-old who has only ever faced other teenagers. The Dodgers held the seventh pick in the 2006 draft,
a consolation prize for their 2005 season being their worst in thirteen years. The last time Los Angeles had picked in the top ten was in 1993, when they selected Wichita State pitcher Darren Dreifort second overall, right after the Mariners took Alex Rodriguez. Though he was billed as a future ace, Dreifort struggled to stay healthy during his nine-year career, and underwent at least twenty surgeries for a degenerative connective tissue disease before he was forced to retire. Dreifort posted a 4.36 career ERA. The Dodgers lost more games he started than they won.