by Molly Knight
With Lincecum deposed as ace, the Giants gave the opening day start to Matt Cain. Though Cain didn’t have his best stuff, he labored through six innings to match Kershaw scoreless frame for scoreless frame. The 0–0 tie was nothing unusual for Kershaw. The Dodgers had a difficult time scoring runs when he pitched, a fact that had cost him wins, and without them the Cy Young the year before. But it wasn’t as if Dodger hitters went into hibernation on purpose when he took the mound. It seemed as though every opposing pitcher Kershaw faced was inspired to pitch the game of his life, hoping he could one day tell his grandchildren he had beaten the best.
In the eighth inning, with the score still tied at 0–0, Kershaw had grown tired of the ineptitude of Dodger hitters. The Giants had replaced Cain with George Kontos, a right-handed reliever in his third year in the big leagues. Kontos knew the scouting report on Kershaw’s hitting: awful. In his five big-league seasons he had hit .146, with one extra-base hit in 332 plate appearances. Just after Kershaw stepped into the batter’s box, Kontos fired a 92 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. Early in games, Kershaw might take a couple of pitches to do his part to help tire the opposing starter out. But as the game reached the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, his typical strategy was to grab a helmet and run to the batter’s box before Don Mattingly could lift him for a pinch hitter. Then, if he led off the inning, he’d swing at the first pitch to end the at-bat as fast as possible. His energy was precious in crunch time, and he needed to conserve every ounce of it for the mound. Plus, there was something else. Cain had struck him out in his first two at-bats that day, and he was embarrassed. “I went up there swinging at the first pitch because I really didn’t want to strike out again,” Kershaw said afterward.
He started his swing almost as soon as the baseball left Kontos’s right hand. His bat whizzed through the strike zone and whack! The crowd knew it was gone before he did. Kershaw sprinted out of the box toward first base with his eyebrows raised in disbelief and his mouth hanging open. And when he rounded the bag and saw the ball clear the center-field fence to give the Dodgers the lead, he screamed and continued to race around the bases toward home, as if he had to cross the plate before they could take the home run away from him. He grinned the whole way round. It was the first time his teammates could remember seeing him smile during a game in which he was still pitching. It was his first career home run. The last time he homered was in a spring training game on his twenty-first birthday. On every birthday since, Ellis had wished him a happy anniversary of his last home run.
After he touched home and returned to the giddy mob of teammates waiting to pounce on him in the dugout, Kershaw did something else he was loath to do: he granted the crowd a curtain call. In the top half of the ninth inning, Kershaw returned to the mound and retired the defending champs in order on nine pitches. On the biggest day of his professional career to that point, Kershaw had tossed a four-hit shutout on ninety-four pitches and gave the Dodgers the lead with a late home run. He’d beaten the Giants in every way possible. After the game, before he went and found Ellen, talked to the media, or did anything else, Kershaw headed straight for the team’s weight room to ride a stationary bike alone. Nothing would interrupt his routine.
When Kershaw hit the home run, Magic Johnson jumped to his feet in the owners’ box next to the Dodgers dugout. After he rounded the bases and crossed home, Johnson turned and high-fived Mark Walter with both hands, then leaned toward him and yelled, “Wow!”
The next day, Kershaw was shagging balls on the warning track at Dodger Stadium during batting practice when the team’s traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, walked out onto the field from the dugout and waved at him. This was odd. Typically, the only time Akasaki ever flagged down a player during BP was when he was being traded or demoted. Neither scenario seemed possible. Curious, Kershaw jogged back toward the dugout and asked Akasaki what was up. Akasaki led Kershaw into a tunnel, saying that Ned Colletti wanted to see him. Colletti walked Kershaw back to a room under the stadium near the batting cages that he’d never seen before. The door swung open to reveal the secret owner’s bunker. Inside sat Walter, Stan Kasten, Todd Boehly, and Kershaw’s two agents, Casey Close and J. D. Smart. They wasted little time with small talk. On the table was an offer for $300 million.
4
IT’S TIME FOR DONNIE BASEBALL
The new owner’s bunker had been open for two business days when it became the setting for the biggest contract offer in American sports history. After Colletti led Kershaw down the tunnel for his impromptu sit-down with ownership and his agents, Colletti learned that he wasn’t needed for anything else. “That’ll be all, Ned,” he was told. The door closed. Despite being the team’s general manager, Colletti was shut out of the conversation. His loss of power was an open secret in the clubhouse.
The pressure to win was enormous. On opening day in 2013, the Dodgers’ payroll was $214 million, or about three times what Frank McCourt intended to pay players annually. When Kershaw took the mound to face the Giants, the southpaw ace led a team onto the field that was favored to win it all. Gonzalez jogged over to his position at first base and skipped the ball across the dirt to the club’s sure-handed second baseman, Mark Ellis. At thirty-five years old, Ellis was starting his eleventh season in the big leagues, and his second with the Dodgers. He’d spent most of his career in Oakland playing on excellent teams, and was a rookie on the famous Moneyball club. But he’d never won a championship. With his career winding down, this figured to be his best chance.
As the Dodgers’ best fielder with the least amount of thwack in his bat, Ellis stood out on a team that prioritized offense. He was different from many of his teammates in another fundamental way, too. Baseball was serious business for him. Though teammates agreed he was one of the nicest human beings ever to swing a bat, he played the game with a silent, gnawing intensity that made it seem like it was no fun for him at all. He didn’t like to make small talk with opposing catchers as he stepped into the batter’s box and tortured himself without mercy whenever he slumped. While many of his teammates enjoyed the never-ending spoils of being young and rich in Los Angeles, Ellis’s idea of a good time was hitting the ball to the right side to advance a runner. He batted second in a lineup crowded with superstars, and in many ways functioned as the club’s captain. He was as steady as he was respected, and his teammates wished he could be as kind to himself as he was to others.
To Ellis’s right was a plucky young man doused in tattoos and hair gel named Justin Sellers. At 160 pounds, Sellers skipped onto the field that day with a noticeable spring in his step, as a scrub occupying one of the glory positions on baseball’s most glamorous team while the Dodgers’ starting shortstop, the superlatively talented Hanley Ramirez, was off nursing a torn thumb ligament. (Sellers was sent to the minors weeks later and cut after the season.)
At third base stood Luis Cruz, a journeyman infielder who spent the better part of twelve seasons in the minor leagues with six different organizations, even taking a whirl through the Mexican leagues before earning a shot to make the Dodgers’ opening day roster. With the team’s regular third baseman, Juan Uribe, slumping in 2012, the unknown Cruz emerged from bush-league obscurity in the final three months of the season and hit .300. That he hailed from nearby Mexico endeared him to hometown fans even more.
Cruz had the inglorious distinction of taking the job of the most popular man in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. Like Jeff Kent, Uribe was another former Giant nearing the last licks of his career when Colletti rewarded him with a three-year contract before the 2011 season. His first two years in Los Angeles had been a disaster. Entering the 2013 season, his career batting average for the Dodgers sat at an abysmal .199; he’d hit just six total home runs. So feckless was Uribe at the plate that he was given just one at-bat in the last month of the 2012 season. But in the final team meeting of that tumultuous year, Mattingly singled him out for his leadership and his unselfis
hness. Addressing the group, he thanked Uribe for maintaining a positive attitude, and for showing up to work every day with a smile on his face despite all else. “He thanked him for being a professional,” Colletti said. “Even though his year hadn’t gone as he planned—or we planned—and even though September didn’t provide him many opportunities, he singled him out because of who he is.”
Uribe’s teammates loved him just as much as Mattingly and Colletti did. Because of significant language and culture barriers, baseball locker rooms are almost always segregated by race, with white players hanging with white players, Latinos with Latinos, African-American players with other black players, and Asians with their translators. Not Uribe. He had an easy way of mingling with everybody and making outsiders feel included. When the Dodgers signed starting pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu out of South Korea the previous off-season, Ryu showed up to spring training not speaking a word of English. “Coming over here I was worried about making friends,” Ryu said later, through a translator. “Like would my new teammates like me?” Uribe took care of that. He noticed Ryu sitting alone one day, and, not having any idea how to say “Come hang out with us” in Korean, he walked up to Ryu and slugged him on the shoulder. Ryu looked up at him, confused. Uribe smiled, and wrapped his arms around him. Then it was on. The two men began wrestling until Ryu pinned Uribe, to the delight of cheering teammates. “He understood that I wasn’t able to blend in and speak the language here, so he really reached out and accepted me for who I was,” said Ryu. “He’s got a great sense of humor and he’s just a great person to be around.” From that day forward the two men were inseparable, even though neither had any clue what the other was saying, ever.
A bear of a man, Uribe became the Dodgers’ unofficial mascot. Bored by talk of hitting mechanics, he summed up his approach in the batter’s box like this: “I see the ball, I hit the ball.” He could make anybody in the room laugh with his penchant for self-deprecating jokes, and he had a black belt in teasing teammates, knowing exactly how far he could push a joke before he ran the risk of hurting feelings. “He’s the best teammate I ever played with,” said Matt Kemp, a frequent target of Uribe’s ribbing. But as beloved as Uribe was, he still wasn’t hitting. And so on opening day he took his spot on the pine.
Rounding out the bench were veteran utility infielders Jerry Hairston Jr., Nick Punto, and Skip Schumaker. Along with Uribe, those four owned a combined five World Series rings, which gave the club a lift if championship experience meant anything, because no one in the Dodgers’ starting lineup had any. They weren’t the stars of the team, but they were the glue. Hairston was months away from retiring and taking a position as a broadcaster with the team’s new television network. Schumaker and Punto became close friends while playing together for the Cardinals and carpooled to Dodger Stadium together an hour up Interstate 5 from Orange County every day.
While Carl Crawford, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier took their places in left, center, and right, respectively, A. J. Ellis fastened his catcher’s mask to his face and squatted into a crouch behind home plate. Like Luis Cruz, Ellis had toiled in the minors for the better part of a decade before the Dodgers gave him a real shot at starting in the majors. The front office had teased him by calling him for various cups of coffee during the 2008, ’09, ’10, and ’11 seasons, but each time he felt like he was on the verge of winning the starting job, the team would sign a veteran or trade for someone else’s backup and he was blocked again. Because minor leaguers are paid in pounds of peanut shells, his wife, Cindy, had supported their family during the early years of their marriage by working as a pastry chef at a resort during the season and as a caterer in the off-season. When their second child, Luke, was born in May 2010, Ellis was in the midst of his first extended stint as a backup on the major-league roster. Big-league players are allowed to take a few days’ paternity leave after their children are born, and most do. But Cindy encouraged Ellis to stay with the team because she thought it was best for their family.
The next catcher on the Dodgers’ depth chart in the minors was twenty-five-year-old Lucas May, who the Ellises kept hearing was the next big thing. If Ellis took even a day away from the club to be with his family, May would be called up to replace him, and then who knows what could have happened. So, Ellis stayed, and didn’t meet his son until two weeks later. It was worth it. Two months after Luke Ellis was born the Dodgers traded May to the Royals. He appeared in twelve games for Kansas City at the end of the season and never played in the big leagues again. Ellis wouldn’t miss the birth of his third child, however. A few weeks after the 2012 season ended, Ellis was with Cindy in their home outside Milwaukee when her water broke. The two set off for the hospital within minutes but didn’t make it. Audrey Elizabeth Ellis was born in the front seat of the car they had borrowed from Cindy’s father while Ellis was doing 75 mph down the interstate. He didn’t even have a chance to pull over.
During his last few seasons in the minors, when a permanent promotion to the big leagues began to seem less and less likely, Ellis decided he would keep playing in the club’s minor-league system for as long as they’d have him, with the idea that he would transition into coaching when his knees gave out. What Ellis lacked in athleticism he made up for in instinct and intelligence. Knowing full well he couldn’t hit the ball as hard or as far as many of his teammates, he resolved to turn himself into a tough out. He began memorizing every opposing pitcher’s fastball release point, and studied the window and the trajectory the ball took toward the batter’s box. Then, based on where that fastball landed in the catcher’s mitt, he would look for the spin of the ball out of the pitcher’s hand to try to determine if it was a curveball, changeup, or slider, and calculate the likelihood that it would be a strike.
A standard home plate is seventeen inches wide. To be called a strike, the ball must pass over it somewhere between the bottom of the batter’s knees and the letters across the chest of his uniform (or wherever the home-plate umpire determines the strike zone to be). To save his career, Ellis decided that if a pitch was not a strike then he would not swing at it. It started when his Single-A manager told him to stop swinging at pitches when the count was 3-1, believing that Ellis had a better chance of walking than getting a hit. He got so good at separating balls from strikes that in his last season in the minors he reached base 47 percent of the time he stepped up to bat, walking fifty times in fifty-nine games. Even if he had to take strikes to achieve his objective he didn’t care. He became determined to see as many pitches as possible to make the opposing pitcher work hard. In 2012, he had led all of Major League Baseball in pitches seen per plate appearance, with an average of 4.44, because, he says: “There’s no worse feeling than taking a bad swing at a first pitch and making an out and wondering what could have been.” When opposing hitters faced Kershaw, Ellis marveled at how they seemed happier with a broken-bat first-pitch groundout to third base than striking out in an eight-pitch at-bat. He finally won the team’s starting catching job in 2012, at age thirty-one. While still a young man by any other standard, it was ancient for a guy getting his first crack at a starting job—especially at a position so physically demanding.
With Kershaw as his best friend, Ellis’s life’s work had in many ways become more about ushering along the Hall of Fame dreams of others than chasing his own personal accolades, which was fine with him. But he didn’t win the starting job on the super team because he was a nice guy. In 2012 he broke out and posted one of the best seasons of any catcher in the National League, hitting thirteen home runs to go along with a .373 on-base percentage—the best of any Dodgers regular. Still, entering the 2013 season Ellis knew that nothing was guaranteed. Should he falter, his backup, a twenty-five-year-old rookie named Tim Federowicz, felt more than ready to take his spot.
The Dodgers had a starting rotation problem. Following Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-Jin Ryu they employed five guys jockeying for the remaining two spots, each with his own set of problems. Josh Beckett was healt
hy and penciled in as the fourth starter when the Dodgers began the season, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before his body fell apart. Veterans Chris Capuano and Aaron Harang were interchangeable back-end-rotation types to whom teams gave $5 million a year in hopes that they’d give up fewer than five runs a game. Chad Billingsley, a talented young right-hander who came up through the Dodgers system, had spent the off-season nursing his injured pitching elbow, hoping to avoid the dreaded Tommy John surgery that would knock him out of the game for a year or longer. And at thirty-seven and already gray-haired, Ted Lilly was often mistaken for a coach by visiting reporters. Hitters had no trouble identifying his pitches and crushing them for home runs, however. He was injured, too. So while Billingsley and Lilly began the season on the disabled list, Harang became the club’s fifth starter after a figurative coin flip, and an annoyed Capuano was sent to the bullpen.
Joining Capuano in the pen was a motley tribe of elder statesmen, a converted catcher, and one kid just old enough to drink. At twenty-one years old, Paco Rodriguez was four years younger than everyone else on the roster. The Dodgers had selected the lefty out of the University of Florida with their second-round pick in the 2012 draft and called him up just three months later, making him the first player from his class to get promoted to the big leagues. The club had good reason for doing that: in addition to his stuff being deceptive because his unorthodox delivery hid the ball longer than usual, the time bomb in his arm ticked louder than most. The front office felt it was smarter to use the innings he had left in the majors rather than the minors.