The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (21 page)

A few hundred thousand people may one day boast that they attended Yasiel Puig’s first game, but the truth was the club had been playing so badly that Dodger Stadium was only half full that night. At first pitch, about 75 percent of the seats were empty. A reporter joked that there were as many media members in attendance for Puig’s debut as there were spectators. It was hard to fault Dodger fans for staying home. Until Puig’s call-up the team’s lineup consisted of a hodgepodge of bench players thrown into starting duty in place of injured regulars. When Puig was promoted, the Dodgers had $87 million worth of players on the disabled list. (Fifteen teams had opened the season with payrolls lower than that.) As such, the Dodgers’ lackluster line-up for Puig’s first game looked like this:

RF Yasiel Puig (first major-league game ever)

2B Nick Punto (subbing for the injured Mark Ellis)

1B Adrian Gonzalez (regular starter)

C Ramon Hernandez (Subbing for the injured A. J. Ellis. Hitting cleanup. Would be cut eleven days later and never play in the big leagues again.)

LF Scott Van Slyke (subbing for the injured Carl Crawford)

CF Andre Ethier (Subbing for the injured Matt Kemp. Only third game in his eight-year career that he started in center.)

3B Jerry Hairston (Subbing for Luis Cruz, who had to move over to shortstop to fill in for Hanley Ramirez. Four months from retirement.)

SS Luis Cruz (Subbing for the injured Hanley Ramirez. Hitting .120. Three weeks from being cut.)

P Stephen Fife (Called up from Triple-A earlier that day to replace injured Chris Capuano in rotation. Making seventh career start.)

Mattingly opted to bat Puig leadoff for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to get Puig as many at-bats as possible, especially given how decimated the Dodgers’ lineup was. Second, he was wary of a roadkill situation. Puig was so fast around the bases that the skipper worried that if he batted a slower runner in front of him, the young right fielder might run over him. Guys who hit first in a major-league lineup tend to be quick and small, with their primary job being to get on base so the power hitters slotted third, fourth, and fifth can drive them in. Puig was one of the largest leadoff hitters in the game’s history. If he was nervous, he hid it well. But that didn’t mean he knew what he was doing.

His first at-bat was straightforward, but the Dodgers’ coaching staff had to remind him to take his time walking up to the plate before his second at-bat so that he might give the pitcher, who hit in front of him when the lineup turned over, a chance to get back to the dugout. They also told him not to argue with umpires. After running through the simple vocabulary with McGwire during batting practice, Puig went and stood on first base while a member of the club’s coaching staff mimicked the pickoff move of Eric Stults, the Padres’ starter that night.
Even though Puig was fast, he lacked basic survival instincts, punctuated by his inability to slide. Watching him run the bases reminded some in the organization of handing the keys of a Ferrari to someone who couldn’t drive stick. The coaches did not rehearse Stults’s move so that Puig might try to run on him. Stealing bases was too advanced. The objective was just to help him avoid getting picked off.

•  •  •

Vin Scully told listeners that night that Puig’s pregame pickoff tutorial was something he’d never seen before in his sixty-four seasons on the job. Scully, eighty-five, had been around the game his whole life. Born in the Bronx, he played center field for Fordham University and once even suited up against a Yale squad that featured George H. W. Bush at first base. “I could run, I could throw, but I couldn’t hit,” Scully would say about his ballplaying career. Upon graduation he began his career as a fill-in for a CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., focusing on college football. Impressed by his professionalism, legendary Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber invited Scully to join him and Connie Desmond in the booth a year later, in 1950. Like Puig, Scully was just twenty-two years old when he began his Dodger career. When Barber left the club for the Yankees three years later, Scully became the team’s lead announcer, at age twenty-five. Going into the 2013 season he was the second-longest-tenured team employee, after former manager Tommy Lasorda, who became a vice president, then a special advisor to the chairman after he retired.

As Scully put on his gray sport coat and fixed his silver and white striped tie before leaving for Dodger Stadium for Puig’s first game, even he could not have imagined what was about to unfold. Vin Scully loved baseball, but what he loved even more were the stories of the men who played it. If a player’s mother’s cousin was a descendant of John Wilkes Booth or related to the astronomer who had discovered Pluto, Scully would figure out a way to weave that fact into the broadcast. One of the best stories he told was about racing Jackie Robinson on ice skates. The two men, along with Robinson’s wife, Rachel, had
gone to a resort in the Catskills one winter and Scully told them he was going to go skate. The couple asked if they could come along. “When we get there I’d like to race you,” Robinson said.

“Jack, I didn’t know you skated,” Scully said, knowing Robinson had grown up in Southern California.

“I’ve never skated in my life,” Robinson replied. “But I want to race you because that’s how I’m going to learn.”

Sure enough, when Robinson laced up his skates he could barely stand on the ice. He raced Scully anyway, running on his ankles.

Scully told this story, some fifty years after it happened, with the same sense of wonder that must have overtaken him on the day it took place. The legendary announcer was blessed with the rare combination of a child’s enthusiasm and a poet’s tongue.

Hours before Puig’s first big-league game, Scully and his wife of forty years, Sandi, ducked into the car that waited outside their home in Thousand Oaks and began the forty-mile ride to Dodger Stadium. When he was younger, Scully drove himself to the park every day. But as he grew older a chauffeur shuttled him. During the drive to the stadium, which could take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, Scully and his wife liked to listen to show tunes and standards. Sometimes on the ride home he’d berate himself over mistakes he made during the night’s broadcast. Though he was in the middle of his seventh decade working for the Dodgers, because of his advancing age he approached his job like a man employed on a year-to-year basis. For decades, he did every Dodger game, home and away. Then he began to scale back. First by calling away games only within the division, then by not traveling any farther east than Phoenix. Each August, he would announce whether he would return the following season.
In 2012 he got so sick during one of the team’s trips to San Diego that he thought it might be time to walk away. But he recovered and kept on going.

The Scullys’ driver would arrive at Dodger Stadium around four o’clock every day and drop the couple off at the players’ entrance near
the top of the park. Like Puig, Scully’s voice usually entered rooms before he did. He could be heard saying hello to every security guard and usher he passed, calling each of them by name on his way to the elevator, or whistling a standard like “Singin’ in the Rain,” his all-time favorite song. He and Sandi would then descend three floors to the media level and enter the press box named after him. He’d go over his game notes, film any pregame spots that were needed, then retreat to the press dining room for dinner with his wife. After he finished eating, he would often sidle up to the table with the writers on the Dodgers beat and trade stories about baseball and current events. Young reporters would ask him about watching Sandy Koufax in his prime, and he would never tire of telling them what a marvel he was, how it was impossible to compare any modern-day pitchers to Koufax because he took the mound every four days instead of five, and how he threw twenty-seven complete games in each of his final two seasons because there was no such thing as a pitch count. He would also say that out of everyone he saw in all the games he covered or attended as a fan, watching Willie Mays patrol center field at the vast Polo Grounds was perhaps the most remarkable.

Red Barber had told Scully when he began his career to refrain from being partial to the home team. And though Dodger fans claimed him as their own, Scully never referred to the Dodgers as “we,” as in “We need to score some runs,” or “We need to not get blown out tonight.” He was so good at remaining impartial while broadcasters from other towns descended into homer-ism that it wasn’t uncommon to hear a Dodger player wonder if Scully was in the tank for the other team. Scully, of course, was not, but it was the best possible testament to the fairness of his calls. His wife used to watch the games from the owners’ suite, but in recent years had taken to sitting behind Scully during his broadcasts because he liked her company. Aside from the odd tech engineer and producer, Scully worked alone. Within sixty seconds of the final pitch of every home game, the Scullys were whisked out of the press box by security, through a crowd of fans hoping to catch a
glimpse or a wave, and into the elevator, which was held for them. Then their driver took them home.

Vin Scully had called thousands of Dodger games before Yasiel Puig came into his orbit. In that time, he’d witnessed fourteen Rookies of the Year, ten Cy Young winners, and eight MVPs. But after watching Puig run and hit and throw and revive the energy around Dodger Stadium for two weeks, Scully was just as dumbfounded as everyone else. “He is not to be believed,” Scully said. “Because this game is not that easy.”

The buzz surrounding Puig was defeaning, but no one knew what to expect. Though the Dodgers desperately needed to change the course of a disastrous season to give fans something to cheer about, club officials asked the team’s
social media coordinator, Josh Tucker, not to hype Puig too much on the team’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, because they didn’t want to put even more pressure on the kid.

The Dodgers were playing San Diego at home on June 3, just eight weeks removed from the brawl that had cost them Greinke. They sat in last place in the NL West, with a 23-32 record. Only the Brewers, Mets, Marlins, and Astros had fewer wins—and the latter two clubs entered the season with the lowest payrolls in MLB, at $39 million and $24 million, respectively. When Puig ran onto the field, his crisp white uniform appeared brighter than those worn by his teammates, having not yet been muddied and ripped and colored by dirt and grass stains. He stood in right with the manufacturer’s
sticker still stuck to the underside of his blue cap. As he stepped up to the plate for his first major-league at-bat, the sparse crowd granted him a valiant ovation. Greinke and Kershaw moved toward the end of the dugout nearest the plate and leaned over the railing to get a better look. Kershaw worked on an enormous wad of bubble gum while Greinke spit sunflower seeds into a paper cup.

Puig stepped up to the plate carrying a two-toned bat with a wood-colored handle, the barrel painted black, and his name carved into it in capital letters. How many hits would it have in it? So many prospects
advanced to the major leagues with breathless hype they never lived up to. Would Puig be one of them? He looked out at Eric Stults on the pitcher’s mound as though he was already mad at him. One of the most terrifying things about Clayton Kershaw was that his face remained kind while he dominated hitters, like that of a sneaky executioner. Puig more closely resembled Greinke on the diamond: he glared at his opponent with cold eyes that steeled against any human inclination toward empathy. The young Cuban took the first pitch he saw from Stults low for a ball. He was fooled by the next pitch, swinging way ahead of a changeup as if he were trying to hit the ball to the moon. He took Stults’s third offering for a ball, then fouled off another changeup. With the count even at two, Stults delivered the perfect pitch to any anxious rookie in his first major-league at-bat: soft, low, and away. Puig surprised everyone by waiting on it, and then reaching out and extending his bat until it almost touched the dirt to hit it. The ball looped over the shortstop Everth Cabrera’s head and dunked into left-center field for a single. It wasn’t a home run, but he was happy to take the hit. Puig rounded first, shrugged, and smiled. He was erased from the base paths a batter later when Nick Punto grounded into a double play. Up next was Adrian Gonzalez, who yanked a home run into the right-field bullpen, close to the spot where he had hit the ball in his first at-bat with the Dodgers eight months earlier. Gonzalez circled the bases and ran down the length of the dugout looking for Puig, to congratulate him on his first hit. When he found him, he pointed at the kid. They embraced.

In Puig’s third at-bat, he hit a chopper to the right side of the infield that deflected off first baseman Kyle Blanks’s glove and bounced into the outfield. Puig sprinted to first out of the box, rounded the base, and took an enormous turn toward second, daring the Padres’ right fielder, Will Venable, to choose which base to throw to. It was a reckless move that Puig would employ over and over again in his first year with the Dodgers. Sometimes it would result in a rushed throw that sailed into the stands and awarded Puig two extra bases. Other times,
he’d be thrown out by thirty feet. Puig played the game the same way he lived his life: gambling on his ability to stay one step ahead of whatever was chasing him.

•  •  •

Like many of his baseball-playing countrymen, Yasiel Puig had tried several times to defect from Cuba before he made it to the United States, including an attempt in April 2012 that was foiled by the U.S. Coast Guard on an open stretch of water between Cuba and Haiti. To finally make it out, he
relied on a powerful Mexican drug cartel called the Zetas to smuggle him by speedboat from Cuba to Isla Mujeres, a four-mile-long island near Cancún, just off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Miami investors who had heard of Puig’s talents and wanted to cash in on his potential agreed to pay the smugglers $250,000 to get the young Cuban to Mexico, where he could establish residency and then be eligible to sign a free agent contract with an MLB team.