The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (23 page)

It wasn’t just Kemp whom Uribe goofed on. The Dominican-born player gave up on trying to pronounce Skip Schumaker’s name, so he began calling him Chewbacca. He took Puig under his wing, too, and chided him when he hid from media in the shower or the commissary. While the Dodgers’ front office loved that Puig’s play helped revive an otherwise flatlining club, many of his teammates worried about putting so much pressure on a player who was so emotional and immature. His stellar play gave the coaches no other option; regardless of his mental lapses and temper flares, he was allowed to take up residence in the club’s central nervous system because he hit like, well, DiMaggio.

A week after Puig’s debut, the first-place Diamondbacks came to L.A. for a three-game set on June 10. A Dodgers sweep would cut Arizona’s lead to four and a half games. But if the Diamondbacks won all three contests the Dodgers would trail them by ten and a half games with a little over half the season to go. With Kershaw on the mound for the first game, the club felt good about its chances of gaining some ground. The big lefty was his usual self, going seven innings and giving up one earned run before handing the ball to Jansen for the eighth. Jansen tossed a perfect frame, and the Dodgers took a 3–1 lead into the ninth. Brandon League walked to the mound to close it out. After striking out Montero, League imploded. He gave up a double, three singles, and a walk, and the Dodgers watched the Diamondbacks score four runs to win the game. In a season full of bitter losses, this one tasted the worst. Throughout their slide, the club at least believed that when they sent Kershaw to the mound, it would stop the bleeding.
League’s waste of Kershaw’s gem was devastating. After it was over and the players were left to dress in silence,
one veteran infielder said he hoped a blogger would ask a dumb question so he could pop him.

The best managers understand that a baseball season is grueling and cruel, and slumps can gnaw away at the confidence of even the most talented players. When a guy struggles, often the worst thing a skipper can do is panic and change his role, especially if he needs something out of that player down the road. The Dodgers were committed to League for two and a half more seasons. The last thing Mattingly wanted to do was add to his self-doubt. Even though League was a millionaire many times over, the money didn’t make the humiliation of public failure any easier. Dodger fans booed him at the stadium and cursed him on social media. The pain struggling players go through is rarely as bad as the anguish their families feel, sitting in their aisle seats at the stadium for quick exits or in front of their televisions at home, peering at the carnage through their fingers, helpless to stop it. Pitchers’ next of kin had it the worst. Their wives are often as nervous during May games as the team’s most die-hard fans are during the postseason: sometimes one pitch away from vomiting. In the middle of League’s ninth-inning shellacking his wife, Sasha, burst into tears.

Most Dodger players loved how patient Don Mattingly was, except for when they needed him to hurry up and make a decision. “Leaguer’s our guy,” Mattingly would say over and over again whenever he was asked about the closer’s status after a poor outing. Players respected Mattingly for his loyalty, but in this case his optimism was hurting the club. While management worried Jansen might come down with a case of the youth yips if Mattingly named him the new closer, his teammates thought the Dutch Caribbean righty had the best stuff in the bullpen and the perfect temperament to finish games. Jansen seemed to exist on island time, as if his growing up so close to the changing ocean tides taught him he could not stop the waves from breaking but he could learn how to surf. Jansen never got too high or too low and
he spent more time living in his right arm than in his brain. His relaxed attitude was given away by his uniform pants, which he wore so long they often caught and ripped on his spikes. He never seemed to worry about tripping and falling.

While some closers grew enormous beards or sprinted into the game to the throbbing of heavy metal music, Jansen kept his hair a smidge longer than a buzz cut and jogged in to Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which mostly made the crowd want to get up and dance.
He wore number 74 because it was the address of the house he grew up in back in Curaçao. His first big-league paychecks had gone toward paying off what his family owed on it, and he never wanted to forget his roots. Mattingly didn’t want to make a closer change, but League’s struggles didn’t leave him much choice. The following day he named Jansen the new closer.

•  •  •

No one would remember June 11, 2013, as the day the Dodgers finally made Kenley Jansen their ninth-inning guy. No one would remember it as the day that Chris Withrow—a former first-round draft pick whose fastball touched 100 mph—was called up, either.

While the new Dodger owners packed their team with all-stars, the front office of their small-market division-rival Diamondbacks realized that their window for winning the NL West might have closed when McCourt was run out of town. Arizona had been interested in signing Hyun-Jin Ryu before the season, and submitted a bid to his Korean team during the auction process. Their general manager, Kevin Towers, told the press that the Dodgers had blown everyone away with their $25.7 million posting fee for Ryu, which was double the second-highest rumored bid for the lefty, which came from the Cubs. The Diamondbacks had been in on Puig, too, but didn’t offer anything close to what the Dodgers paid to get him. “When you have that wherewithal financially it doesn’t mean you’re the best scouting organization,” a frustrated Towers said in a radio interview in mid-July. “You just have the wherewithal to go out and buy whatever you want.”

Determining an international player’s value was a fool’s errand, since overseas stats didn’t necessarily translate. The Cubs never confirmed what they bid on Ryu, but they had been aggressive in the international market, inking Jorge Soler to the $30 million deal months earlier that inspired the Dodgers to sign Puig. If Los Angeles had outbid the next-highest offer for Ryu by tens of million of dollars in the blind auction, was it still bad business if Ryu was worth more than they paid? Mark Walter had already demonstrated that he didn’t care that others thought he was overpaying when he bought the Dodgers because he believed everyone else was undervaluing the club. He was right. Perhaps because they did not want to miss out on another Soler or Puig, the Diamondbacks would change their philosophy and sign twenty-four-year-old Cuban third baseman Yasmany Tomas to a six-year deal for $68.5 million in 2014.

Because they would never have the cash to outbid teams like the Dodgers on the free agent market for players like Greinke, Kershaw, or Kemp, the D-backs embraced the philosophy that there was a right way to play the game, and a wrong way. The right way involved a strict adherence to baseball’s unwritten rules: runners were to be advanced station to station, a man should play for the name on the front of his jersey and not the name on the back, the tallest weed was to be plucked, etc. In that way, the culture clash between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks was a microcosm of the battle between capitalism and communism. For Arizona, the team was more significant than any single player. And any opposing player caught celebrating a personal accomplishment for one second longer than necessary was to be greeted with a fastball to the numbers in his next at-bat. Towers made it clear the following off-season that if one of his pitchers shied away from throwing at opponents on purpose when asked, he would be traded. He even hinted that the club’s pitching coach, Charles Nagy, was fired because his staff didn’t do it enough. Whether it was jealousy of the Dodgers’ new financial freedom, personality clashes, or a little of both, the Diamondbacks’ front office seemed to resent the way the Dodgers
did business. That anger trickled down to their coaches and players. Puig would push them over the edge.

The Diamondbacks were managed by Kirk Gibson, the man who had enjoyed the most famous at-bat in Dodgers history. Forget just Dodger history: the image of a hobbled Gibson limping around the bases after hitting that improbable ninth-inning pinch-hit home run off the Oakland Hall of Fame closer Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series was one of the more enduring moments in the history of baseball. It was so sweet a memory in Los Angeles that Gibson could have lived off it there for the rest of his life, like his manager, Tommy Lasorda. But Gibson wasn’t the type. While his teammate Orel Hershiser allowed himself to be embraced by Dodger fans after his playing days were over by returning as a broadcaster, Gibson was never comfortable with the sentimentality of hanging around. He later sold his World Series trophy and NL MVP award from the 1988 season, and also his bat, jersey, and batting helmet from the at-bat that made him a Dodger legend. And when the Dodgers decided to do a Kirk Gibson bobblehead giveaway when the Diamondbacks came to L.A. in 2012, Gibson refused to be shown on the video board and tried to hide from the camera. “I think it’s totally ridiculous,” he said at the time.

The Dodgers should not have been surprised when Puig stepped into the box on June 11 and was greeted with a fastball to the nose. As Puig sat on home plate, team trainers ran through a concussion test, before stopping halfway through and realizing they needed a translator. The Diamondbacks’ pitcher, Ian Kennedy, had not meant to hit Puig in the face but showed no remorse. Perhaps he meant to brush him back. The ball had left his hand in a straight line for Puig’s head, and it was traveling too fast for the young right fielder to duck out of the way. Puig was lucky the ball glanced off the cartilage covering the tip of his nostrils. Had it tailed a quarter inch to the right the bones in his cheek and eye socket might have been shattered, similar to what would happen to Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton a year later. Puig stayed in the game and took his base.

When Greinke hit Miguel Montero in the back with a fastball the following inning in retaliation, the Dodgers thought it was over. The Diamondbacks disagreed. After Greinke stepped up to the plate in the bottom half of the inning, Kennedy threw a first-pitch fastball at his neck. Greinke held his ground and shrugged his shoulder high so that the ball hit it instead. The force of the blow was so hard that it knocked his helmet off. Greinke stood expressionless in the batter’s box, then smirked as if to say,
Great, I’m going to be in the middle of a brawl again.
And instantly it was on. Every player and coach from both teams emptied onto the field until five dozen men were shoving each other near the visiting on-deck circle. Puig roundhouse-punched Arizona utility man Eric Hinske in the back of the head. Dodger reliever J. P. Howell pushed Diamondbacks assistant hitting coach Turner Ward over the railing that divided the crowd from the field, as if he were a WWF wrestler. Schumaker pushed his way into the middle of the scrum, looking for Kennedy.
“I’d never seen a pitcher throw at two different batters’ heads before,” he said after the game. “He ran to the bench right after he hit Greinke.” It had taken Puig only a week in the majors to incite a riot. But Puig was just a subplot in the bizarre drama that was taking place on the field. It seemed unlikely that Ian Kennedy thought of hitting Greinke all on his own, and after the game he didn’t seem to care that he got Puig in the face.
“He plays with a lot of arrogance,” Kennedy said later of the Dodgers’ young right fielder. But even if Puig’s beaning had been an accident, that fastball to Greinke wasn’t.
There was no doubt in Mattingly’s mind it had come from Gibson.

It wasn’t the fact that Dodger batters were being hit that enraged Mattingly. The culture of the game dictated that if a player was plunked, his teammate had the right to retaliate and hit a batter on the other team. Macho tough-guy stuff was not only tolerated, it was celebrated. Anything from the backside down the legs was fair game. But Mattingly believed that if a guy couldn’t throw inside without hitting someone on or near his head, then he shouldn’t throw inside. In
1920, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman had been killed by a beanball to the temple. Today’s batters wore helmets but they weren’t indestructible. Besides, the ball thrown at Greinke was headed for his neck, which could have severed an artery.

An angry Mattingly wanted Gibson. As he ran toward the D-Backs’ manager, he pushed Arizona’s bench coach, former Tigers great Alan Trammell, out of his way and to the ground. He felt bad about that later, saying he didn’t even realize he had steamrolled his friend Tramm. Fights were not uncommon in the sport, but it was rare to see opposing coaches scrap. By the time Mattingly reached Gibson, McGwire had already grabbed a fistful of Gibson’s jersey at the neck, and was screaming and cursing at him. When the Diamondbacks’ third-base coach, Matt Williams, tried to intervene, McGwire grabbed him by the collar, too, and held them both by the throat at the same time. After both teams were separated, the Dodgers came back and won the game 5–3. Jansen pitched a perfect ninth to close it, striking out two. Some predicted that after two months of mediocrity, maybe the second brawl would be the catalyst to help the Dodgers turn the corner. It wasn’t. Los Angeles dropped six of its next eight games.

Making matters worse, the following week news leaked that Kershaw had turned down a record-breaking contract extension.
Kershaw was furious. The report lacked key details about the terms of the contract, including the fact that the Dodgers had wanted to lock him up for the next fifteen years plus an additional personal services contract after his playing days were over. He had not declined to sign the deal because he thought $300 million was too low a figure; he said no because the idea of signing a lifetime contract at twenty-five years old was terrifying. What if something went wrong? What if he tore his labrum or snapped his ulnar collateral ligament during the second year of a fifteen-year deal and could no longer pitch and was still owed all that money and his salary obligation hurt the team and the fans hated him for it? What if the Dodgers were terrible and he never got his shot at a ring? What if Colletti and Kasten filled the locker room
with megalomaniacs who didn’t care about winning? Kershaw thought about these things more than he thought about the money. He hated that the report made him seem greedy. But what he hated even more was the idea that someone had leaked the news to a reporter to make him look bad. Kershaw didn’t play games through the media. He was as private a man as he was proud. The report felt like a betrayal. Some of Kershaw’s teammates wondered if this was the sort of thing that would drive him to free agency. Between this leak and the way the team was playing, it was beginning to look as though Clayton Kershaw would walk when his contract expired at the end of the 2014 season.