by Molly Knight
As if losing five starting pitchers to injury and a sixth in a trade over the course of six weeks wasn’t devastating enough, two of them were wiped out by a single pitch. After Greinke broke his collarbone in the melee with San Diego, Capuano replaced him in the rotation. But in his first start, the veteran lefty gave up four runs in the first inning, and was pulled after two. After the game, Mattingly revealed that Capuano was removed because of a sore left calf muscle. Later, the lefty admitted he had injured it sprinting in from the bullpen in a futile attempt to stop Greinke from getting maimed by Quentin.
Chad Billingsley, a promising young righty the Dodgers drafted and developed out of high school, finished the previous year with a tightness radiating from the elbow of his throwing arm that almost always required Tommy John surgery, and its frustrating year-plus recovery time. Ever the optimist, Billingsley instead opted to undergo a relatively new procedure called PRP treatment, in which a patient’s own blood is drawn from his body, whipped and separated into its different components, enriched with an infusion of its own platelets, and reinjected into the problem area like some kind of super healing potion. It didn’t work. Billingsley made two starts, in pain, and then went under the knife, ending his season and his Dodger career.
After he was traded to Los Angeles in that Boston megadeal in 2012, the oft-injured Josh Beckett told Mattingly that he did not appreciate being removed during the middle of an inning. If the skipper was going to pull him from the game, that was fine, but he didn’t like being yanked off the mound; he’d rather just not start the inning at all. During a game in Baltimore in late April, with the wheels already rattling off the Dodgers’ applecart and their starting rotation in shambles, Mattingly left Beckett in the game to face Orioles wunderkind Manny Machado with two on and two out in the sixth, trailing 3–1. Machado homered, sealing the Dodgers’ sixth loss in a row.
Because he hadn’t pitched well in spring training, the Dodgers placed thirty-seven-year-old Ted Lilly on the disabled list so that he could toss a few tune-up games in the minors before joining the big club. An angry Lilly told teammates he was healthy, and that the Dodgers were just phantom DL’ing him to buy time to figure out what to do with their poorly constructed roster. But his body wasn’t right. And despite the aches in his back and the tightness in his side, he took the ball anyway—after Greinke, Capuano, and Billingsley went down—to prove a point. His first start, versus the Mets, went well enough. In his second start, the Rockies shelled him. Afterward, Lilly admitted to reporters that he had struggled because he was injured. Mattingly was livid. “It’s fine that he felt it, but he’s gotta say something,” said Mattingly, in one of the first times anyone could remember him blowing up one of his veteran players in the press.
But it wasn’t just the pitching staff that had a hard time staying healthy. One of the Dodgers’ best hitters, Hanley Ramirez, missed all but two games in April after injuring his thumb while playing for the Dominican Republic team in the World Baseball Classic before the season, then missed most of May with a hamstring strain. The club’s starting second baseman, Mark Ellis, sat out for three weeks with a bum quadriceps muscle. On May 8, the Diamondbacks completed a three-game sweep of the Dodgers, which sent Los Angeles to its seventh loss in a row, and a season-low .394 winning percentage (13-20).
The pressure was getting to everyone. Adrian Gonzalez was forced to leave one of those games against the Diamondbacks because his neck hurt. A few of his teammates questioned his toughness behind his back, and one even put on Gonzalez’s neck brace and wore it around the locker room as a joke when the slugger wasn’t in the room. The criticism that Gonzalez was soft was unfair, as tests on his neck showed a legitimate injury. But since many players looked to take out their frustrations on a new candidate every day, they ignored the facts.
Each defeat brought with it a new set of questions. The Dodgers had lost a flurry of men to the infirmary, sure, but were the uninjured playing their hardest? The farm system was bereft of international talent thanks to McCourt’s tightfistedness, yes, but where the hell were the young American-born reinforcements? It had been seven years since the Dodgers called up a position player they drafted who became a star (Kemp), and five years since they promoted a homegrown starting pitcher (Kershaw) who stuck in the rotation. In fact, only three pitchers called up to the big leagues post-Kershaw had made more than ten starts for the Dodgers over the previous four seasons combined: Nate Eovaldi, who was then traded for Hanley Ramirez, and Rubby De La Rosa, who was dealt to Boston in the megadeal for Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett, were two of them. (The other, John Ely, started nineteen games for the team from 2010 to 2012, and posted a dismal 5.70 ERA.) While McCourt could be blamed for many of the Dodgers’ deficiencies, the failure to draft and develop amateur players wasn’t all his fault. The club’s weak farm system left a void that could be filled only by aging, expensive free agents, many of them malcontents cast aside by their previous teams. And if those veterans got injured—which was one of the things players in their thirties did best—the Dodgers were toast.
By May 7, the most expensive team in baseball history sat in last place. A Los Angeles Times writer marked the occasion by noting that when the Titanic sank there was a Guggenheim on board. When the new ownership group took over, Stan Kasten had called the Dodgers a franchise worthy of being written about in all capital letters. Shipwreck headlines weren’t what he had in mind.
• • •
The Dodgers’ starting pitching woes wouldn’t have been as devastating if Matt Kemp had been playing like, well, Matt Kemp. But after the brawl with the Padres, Kemp kept on scuffling, and hit just .182 through the club’s first fifteen games. It wasn’t just his batting average that was so alarming: his power appeared to be gone. “I don’t think he’s hurt,” Mattingly said to a group of reporters before an April game, but everyone knew that wasn’t true. Kemp used to stand upright in the box, tall and intimidating, and calmly wait for a pitch he could drive. Now his aching shoulder forced him to lean out over the plate so he could reach pitches on the outer half, with his bum sticking out behind him as if he were preparing to sit down. The hole in his swing became so pronounced that he even swung and missed at pitches lobbed at him by a machine during batting practice. When Mattingly removed him from the starting lineup to give him a mental day off on April 17, a frustrated Kemp told reporters, “I don’t ever want to sit out.” Mattingly inserted him into the game to pinch-hit with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh. Kemp struck out.
In Joe Torre’s last season as manager of the Dodgers in 2010, Kemp had gone from future of the franchise to chief resident of its doghouse. Colletti criticized his effort on local radio. Matt Kemp was, without question, the most talented offensive player in the organization. Yet many wanted him gone.
After that disastrous season ended, Kemp knew he had to get out of Los Angeles to clear his head. When he packed up his locker and headed to his off-season home in Phoenix to decompress, he wondered if he would ever come back. Though he had two years remaining on his contract with the Dodgers, his agent did not shy away from suggesting to reporters that his client might be better off in another city surrounded by a supportive organization that could help him reach his full potential. Potential. Kemp couldn’t escape that word, which to whoever said it must have felt like a compliment, but to him felt like a euphemism for failure. And here he was, a young black man who could hit the stuffing out of the ball and run like hell, in a sport that was hemorrhaging talented young black men to football and basketball, and nobody seemed to know what to do with him.
Kemp had only ever played for the Dodgers, specifically for old white men, which made him particularly aware of his blackness, as if it were something he ever forgot when he was out on a baseball diamond anyway. Baseball had served as a daily reminder of his race ever since he was a child. Growing up just outside Oklahoma City, he was always the token black kid on whatever Little League team he played for, unless he convinced his
cousin to join the squad to hang out with him, and then there were two black kids. His mother, Judy Henderson, signed him up to play baseball because he needed something to do while she worked overtime as a nurse to support the two of them. That he wound up being good at it was a happy by-product. His Little League teammates nicknamed him “the Big Little Hurt,” after the Hall of Fame slugger Frank Thomas, who was known as the “Big Hurt” both for the number of home runs he hit and for his enormous thigh muscles. (Kemp believes that in retrospect his friends might have just called him that to tease him, because he was chubby.) But as Kemp reached adolescence, the baby fat melted from his frame like candle wax. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he was a smidge under six foot three and chiseled, with electric green eyes on a face that eventually earned him fashion endorsements.
But Kemp never wanted to be a professional baseball player. No. He was going to play in the NBA. Baseball may have been cool for suburban white boys, or Latin American kids looking to move their families to the United States to enjoy a better life, but it was not Matt Kemp’s first choice. Besides, he was always better at basketball than he was at baseball, and starred for Midwest City High next to future Duke and NBA player Shelden Williams. He thought he had a good shot at making it just as far as Williams. But Williams grew to be six foot nine in high school, while Kemp graduated at six two and a half. So unlike Mattingly or Kershaw or even Ned Colletti, Matt Kemp didn’t choose baseball as much as baseball chose him. Or, more specifically, the Dodgers chose him in the sixth round of the 2003 MLB draft, and offered him $130,000 to sign. That was more money than he and his mother had ever seen. Years later, after he became an all-star and companies fell over themselves to get him to use their products, he sat at his locker thumbing through boxes of nonslip astronaut-ish socks that an eager sales rep had dropped off for him, unsolicited, and shook his head: “It’s only after you’re rich that people start giving you free shit,” he said. “There wasn’t nobody around to give me stuff when I was a kid when we couldn’t afford anything.”
Kemp finished his 2005 season with the Dodgers in high-A ball. But his development was so rapid that two months into the following season he was promoted to the big leagues—a remarkable achievement for someone who had been playing baseball full-time for only three years. In 2009, he hit twenty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases, earning himself a Silver Slugger, winning a Gold Glove, and finishing tenth in National League MVP voting.
Then everything fell apart.
Even though Kemp had proven he was good enough to make it to the big leagues and emerge as a star, in his darkest moments during that nightmare 2010 season, he started to feel again as though he had never belonged. His caliber of play in center field seemed to be affected by however he’d done in his last at-bat, making it even more difficult to shake things off. When he struck out, the sting of it seemed to linger in his eyes until his next at-bat, clouding his vision in the outfield until he could somehow redeem himself on offense. That blindness caused him to fall deeper into the abyss. Sometimes, Kemp forgot to back up second base when the Dodgers’ catcher attempted to throw out a runner from stealing, and he appeared to sulk after fly balls he misjudged, allowing them to sail over his head. He spent his days standing alone in the center of a huge field of grass, painfully exposed, as if the handsome man who now posed for Gap ads was still the pudgy, self-conscious boy. Baseball is a meditation on failure. Even Ted Williams, the best hitter in the game’s history, failed to make it to a base more often than succeeded. Besides a bat and a glove, the other tool the game requires most is a short memory. Matt Kemp didn’t have that. “So many nights I just went home and cried,” Kemp said later, of that season. He couldn’t shake the boos. He cared too much what others thought.
It was true that a change of scenery might have done the young outfielder some good. While Kemp hadn’t yet reached his full potential on the field, as the boyfriend of the global pop star Rihanna he needed no help realizing the full scope of what playing in Hollywood had to offer. As his relationship with Torre soured and Colletti blasted him publicly, his agent could have demanded a trade, all but forcing Colletti’s hand. But Kemp had a warm relationship with Mattingly, whom he affectionately called Donnie B., and when the Dodgers brass reassured Kemp’s inner circle that Mattingly would succeed Torre, Kemp breathed a sigh of relief.
When Colletti ultimately decided to stick with Kemp and ownership promoted Mattingly, the new skipper knew one of his main objectives was to save the troubled slugger from himself. For outsiders, it was difficult to figure out what the problem was. Kemp was a good-looking, healthy, twenty-five-year-old man dating one of the most beautiful women in the world, getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to play center field for a famous baseball team. But he was miserable. And when Matt Kemp was upset, there was no hiding it. When he played well, he was a great teammate, all smiles and high-fives, perched on the top step of the dugout, snapping off enormous chewing gum bubbles night after night. But when he struggled his misery had a unique way of infecting everyone around him, like some kind of hellacious airborne virus resistant to antibiotics or pep talks. He was not an easy man to read. One night, he might notice a sick child in the stands, jog over to him unannounced after the game ended, and hand him his cap, cleats, and the jersey off his back. The next day, he might stroll into the clubhouse, notice his name wasn’t written on the lineup card, and yell: “Trade me to the fucking Astros!” in frustration in front of his teammates.
Still, Mattingly’s relaxed presence and exhausting patience had a better chance of soothing Kemp than shouting him down did. Kemp returned to spring training in 2011 with a renewed focus, having spent the entire off-season in Phoenix—some four hundred miles from the clubs on the Sunset Strip—hitting, lifting, and running every day. It worked. Kemp obliterated National League pitching that year, leading the league in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and total bases. Any pitch thrown to him on the inner half of the plate was a mistake. That year, twenty-two different pitchers looked at him standing there in the batter’s box and thought, To hell with this, and intentionally walked him, figuring that giving him a free base was better than risking surrendering four. Kemp also stole forty bases, and finished the season just one home run shy of forty homers and forty steals—a feat that has been accomplished only four times in the game’s history.
• • •
After his huge 2011, Colletti rewarded Kemp with an eight-year, $160 million contract extension before the 2012 season. And even though it was the largest deal in the club’s history up until that point, at the time it seemed that the Dodgers were getting a hometown discount. He had just turned twenty-seven, and Los Angeles had sewed up the rest of his prime. A few months after Kemp signed that contract, the Guggenheim group bought the Dodgers. Kemp had grown up idolizing Magic Johnson and was ecstatic. At the start of the season, the two men appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated together, announcing the triumphant liberation of the Dodgers from bankruptcy.
In 2012 Kemp picked up right where his 2011 campaign left off, homering on opening day and clubbing a Dodger-record twelve home runs in April, on his way to being named the NL’s Player of the Month. Around that time, Scott Boras stood in the front row at Dodger Stadium during batting practice and watched Kemp hit; he marveled at his prowess. But Boras turned to a reporter and mentioned how the Dodgers ought to consider moving him out of center field or they’d run the risk of his legs crumbling underneath him, like Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Griffey had enjoyed one of the best decades ever to start his career, and seemed poised to shatter Henry Aaron’s all-time home run record, before a series of hamstring injuries robbed him of the chance. Of course, it was also possible that Boras’s concern for Kemp’s health was really just a clever way to clear a position for his client Jacoby Ellsbury, Boston’s center fielder, who was about to hit the free agent market. Boras knew the new Dodger owners were rich, but he had yet to taste that Guggenheim dollar. A few weeks later he was
proven right. In the Dodgers’ thirty-fourth game of the season, Kemp hit the ball to short and pulled up lame on his way to first base. Mattingly removed him from the game with a left hamstring injury. Despite his protests, he was placed on the disabled list, snapping his consecutive-games-played streak at 399, the longest in baseball. Unable to handle being sidelined, he sat out for the minimum of fifteen days before returning. But it was too fast. He came back for two games, injured it worse, and missed another five weeks. He returned in mid-July, but he wasn’t the same player. The club kept him in center field, and on August 28 he crashed into the outfield wall at Coors Field in Colorado so violently he writhed on the ground for several minutes. The team called it a knee contusion. Kemp sat out for two games, then played nearly every day in September. But he endured lingering shoulder pain from the collision, and hit .220 in the season’s final month. The Dodgers knew his shoulder was injured. But when they cut him open after the season ended, they discovered a torn labrum and rotator cuff damage. Kemp was stunned. He should not have been playing at all.