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

by Molly Knight

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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.

  After months of failed negotiations, it took Kasten and Henry just fifteen minutes to agree to the most expensive trade in baseball history. When the deal was done, Kasten returned to the lobby and flashed a thumbs-up to Walter, who was in the middle of his interview and snuck a glance at his lieutenant over the reporters’ shoulders. The two journalists had no idea what had just gone down.

  Ned Colletti wasn’t even in the state of Colorado.

  Eleven days after the Denver summit, after medical records were reviewed and the Red Sox finalized the list of young prospects they wanted from the Dodgers, the two sides announced the trade. In the nine-player deal, the Dodgers got Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Nick Punto in exchange for James Loney and a package of minor leaguers that included pitcher Allen Webster, outfielder Jerry Sands, infielder Ivan DeJesus, and, the gem of the deal, the Dodgers’ top right-handed pitching prospect, Rubby De La Rosa. To complete the trade, Los Angeles also took on a staggering $250 million in player
salary. In Gonzalez, the Dodgers got the slugging first baseman they craved to anchor their lineup. In Beckett, they landed a veteran starting pitcher whose brilliant early career included being named the World Series MVP at age twenty-three after leading the Marlins to an improbable championship over the mighty Yankees. They also got an injury-prone player on the wrong side of thirty who had posted a 5.23 ERA in Boston that season. Beckett was owed a cool thirty-five million bucks over the next two years, and it was doubtful he’d be worth half that.

  Crawford, a speedy left fielder, had also been miserable in Boston. After he had spent his entire career in Tampa Bay, the Red Sox had signed him to a massive contract following an intense round of free agent bidding before the 2011 season. And like Gonzalez, he never fit. A tremendous high school athlete in Houston in the late nineties, Crawford received a scholarship offer from the University of California, Los Angeles, to play point guard for its basketball team, and an offer from Nebraska to run the read option at quarterback. After mulling his options, Crawford chose to skip college when the Devil Rays took him in the second round of the 1999 draft and offered him a $1.2 million signing bonus to play baseball instead.

  For the most part, life in Tampa was good for Crawford. The Rays had called him up at age twenty and made him their full-time left fielder and leadoff hitter when he was just twenty-one. By twenty-two he’d made his first All-Star team, and led the American League in stolen bases (55) and triples (19). He stole six bases in a game against the Red Sox in 2009, tying the modern major-league record. For someone so fast his bat had a noble amount of pop in it, too. During his last year in Tampa, Crawford hit a career-high nineteen home runs. That off-season he was considered to be one of the best players on the free agent market, and the Angels were among the teams that had courted him. Still, when the Red Sox signed him that December to a seven-year deal worth $142 million—the second-richest contract ever for an outfielder—it was a bit of a surprise. Boston’s lineup was already full of expensive talent, and the club had traded for Gonzalez just two days earlier.

  The Red Sox didn’t part with that money freely. In an interview with a local radio affiliate during Crawford’s first spring training with the team, Epstein divulged that the club had conducted a thorough background check on the left fielder before backing up the Brinks truck to his door. “We covered him as if we were privately investigating him,” Epstein told listeners. “We had a scout on him literally the last three, four months of the season at the ballpark, away from the ballpark.”

  That revelation unnerved Crawford. “I’m from an area where if somebody’s doing that to you they’re not doing anything good,” Crawford told Boston reporters. “I definitely look over my shoulder now a lot more than what I did before. The idea of him following me everywhere I go, was kind of—I wasn’t comfortable with that at all.”

  Being watched by anyone was something Crawford wasn’t used to in Tampa. In his first six seasons with the Rays, the club finished last in the American League in attendance. Those Tampa squads were terrible, but it’s not as if the city embraced baseball as soon as the team started winning. In 2008 the Rays rode an incredible season all the way to the World Series. Their stellar play was rewarded with a third-to-last-place finish in attendance in the AL. For almost a decade, Carl Crawford was the human embodiment of a tree falling in the woods and making no sound: he was the best baseball player that no one saw.

  Crawford liked to tell a story about an experience that summed up the anonymity afforded to a player who stars for the Tampa Bay Rays. One day he was hanging out with teammates in the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field when members of the Tampa police department turned up looking for him.

  “Carl Crawford?” one asked.

  “Yeah,” Crawford said.

  “We need to talk to you about the Navigator,” said the officer.

  “What Navigator?” asked Crawford.

  “Well, earlier today a man walked into a dealership in town and said his name was Carl Crawford and asked to test-drive a Navigator and never came back,” said the officer.

  Crawford was confused. He told the cops he’d never driven a Navigator in his life. As it turned out, a crafty car burglar wearing Crawford’s jersey had taken a gamble on a Tampa Lincoln dealer having no clue what the best player on the city’s baseball team looked like. It worked.

  That sort of caper would never fly in Boston. Even the thickest thief in the state of Massachusetts wouldn’t be dumb enough to pose as a member of the vaunted Red Sox. When he signed with Boston, Crawford knew he was going to go from playing in an empty stadium to suiting up in front of a packed house of die-hard fans every night. Realizing how uneasy the revelations about Crawford’s private life had made his new star player, Epstein backtracked and insisted he misspoke; that the team acquired information in the same way it did on every free agent in its sights. But the damage was done. Crawford’s tenure in Boston began on a sour note, and in the season and a half he spent with the Sox he never grew comfortable.

  In some ways, however, Crawford might have gotten too comfortable. He later told a teammate that he felt like the Rays strung him along for years toward a big payday that never came. His desire to earn the huge money that many of his peers enjoyed drove him to play hard every day. But as soon as he signed his fat contract with Boston he confided in friends that he found it difficult to keep his edge. Crawford still wanted to be great but his motivation was buried somewhere, deep under his millions. He didn’t like that about himself, but it was the truth. “That guy used to terrorize us with his bat and his speed when he was in Tampa,” said one player who faced Crawford when he was with the Rays and later became his teammate. “But after he went to Boston it was like, how is this the same player?”

  A career .300 hitter, Crawford hit just .255 while he battled a wrist injury during his first year with the Red Sox. His on-base percentage plummeted from .356 in 2010 to an awful .289 the following season, and his slugging percentage also fell ninety points. While the number of times he struck out (104) remained identical to the season before, the number of walks he took halved from 46 to 23. More troubling: his stolen base total nosedived from 47 to 18. Every ballplayer’s speed declines as he ages, but this drop-off was staggering. Crawford was just twenty-nine years old when he signed with the Red Sox. His legs were his livelihood.

  The 2012 season brought even more injury trouble. And after appearing in only thirty-one games, Crawford was shut down for the rest of the year with a torn ligament in his throwing elbow. Of this time in Boston, Crawford said: “For two years I was afraid to smile. Everyone was so uptight.”

  “I started growing grey hairs on my face from the stress,” he told USA Today. “Deep down, it’s like I know I can still play baseball but after being told how much you suck for two years straight, it kind of messes with your mind.”

  But for as much as he wanted out of Boston, Crawford knew the odds of that happening were slim. Not only was his body battered, but he was also still owed $109 million on his current contract. Even if he were healthy and back to torturing other teams with his power and speed, there were only a few clubs in baseball that could afford to take on such a salary commitment, and everyone knew he was no longer worth the money he was due. The severity of his injury meant that in order to be liberated from Boston, Crawford would have to find a team that was both rich enough to pay his fee and crazy enough to want to. Had the Dodgers not been so hell-bent on getting Gonzalez, Crawford might not have gotten out. “I was completely shocked,” Crawford said, of when he was told he was traded. “I thought I was gonna be stuck in Boston for seven years.”

  Forty-eight hours before the trade was announced, Crawford had Tommy John surgery to repair his elbow. The estimated recovery time was six to nine months.

  • • •

  After the Boston deal was finalized, a giddy Walter was so excited to bring the players he just bought to Los Angeles that he sent a private jet to Boston to retrieve them. The trade with th
e Red Sox had added a quarter of a billion dollars in salary to the team’s payroll through the 2018 season. Walter didn’t look at it that way. “I broke it down into years and just saw it as thirty-five million over seven years,” he said. “Which really isn’t that bad.” Still, if he was going to pay that much to get Gonzalez, then by God his bat was going to be in the starting lineup that night.

  Walter, Kasten, and Colletti were just as surprised as the players that the trade went through. Crawford and Beckett posed no real threat to wrecking the deal because their contracts were too enormous for teams to want to take on. But for the Dodgers to be able to successfully claim Gonzalez, every single American League team had to pass on the chance to pluck him off the waiver wire, and then so did all the NL clubs with a worse record than Los Angeles’s. Though Kasten knew that only a handful of teams would be able to afford the money left on Gonzalez’s deal, if one of those clubs did claim the first baseman then the entire trade would be blown. He told Walter he thought the Dodgers had a 50 percent chance. When Colletti sent an email to Walter with the final word on whether their waiver claim of Gonzalez had been successful, Walter was so nervous that he let it sit unread in his inbox for half an hour. The news was good.