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

by Molly Knight

  Entering 2013 with a surgically repaired shoulder, Kemp told reporters he was healthy, confident, and ready to go. But on the inside he was terrified. He could not lift his left arm above his head to reach the top shelf of his locker, let alone extend his heavy wooden bat high enough to drive a baseball with any authority. His new teammate Adrian Gonzalez had undergone the same surgery for a torn labrum two years earlier, and afterward declared that he was no longer a power hitter. Kemp approached Gonzalez and confided his fear that he would never hit another home run.

  It only got worse for him. In mid-May the Dodgers were in Atlanta to face the Braves, and Kemp still had only one home run on the season. An opposing fan began heckling him, telling him that he was horrible at baseball. After a couple of innings of enduring his taunts, Kemp sassed the fan back, retorting that, basically, he was laughing his way to the bank. A few of Kemp’s teammates heard this and became enraged. It wasn’t just that he was struggling at the plate. Even the best hitters go through slumps, and everyone knew he was coming off a major injury that impacted his ability to hit. It was his effort in center field that drove them nuts. He’d fallen back on old habits, and his terrible at-bats were bleeding into the next half inning and poisoning his ability to concentrate in center field. Some coaches wondered if he just didn’t care about defense. Since repeatable pitching and hitting mechanics are an important key to success, every team’s video department offers playback that can be broken down into milliseconds, so that players can pinpoint the tiniest of hitches that can derail an at-bat, or, in some cases, a career. To amuse themselves, when Dodger pitchers watched game film they began counting the number of clicks it took Kemp to move when a ball was hit in his general direction.

  His response to that Braves fan made a bad week worse. The Dodgers were in last place, and struggling to field nine healthy players each night. And now Matt Kemp, the supposed face of the franchise, was pointing out to some drunk guy that sticks and stones would never break his bones because he would always be rich. A teammate yelled at Kemp to shut up. Kemp did not. More words were exchanged. At a loss for how to curb their center fielder’s downward spiral, the Dodgers’ front office dispatched a club executive to speak with Kemp’s mother, who attended almost every home game, about what the team might do to help her son. Was he having girl problems? they wondered. Was there something else going on? Whatever it was, they just wanted to help. When his mother told him that a team employee had approached her, Kemp exploded. “You don’t know me!” he screamed at the executive, in front of stunned teammates. “You don’t fucking know me! Don’t go talking to my mom!” In their attempt to support Kemp, the front office had poked at his deepest, most paranoid fear: that he was alone and the world was against him. With the situation deteriorating fast, the Dodgers panicked. Magic Johnson was in New York fulfilling his duty as a television analyst for ESPN during the NBA playoffs. Feeling that perhaps Johnson was the only one who could calm Kemp down, the team flew him to Los Angeles to meet with the brooding slugger.

  After getting swept during that disastrous Atlanta series, the Dodgers set off for Milwaukee looking to turn things around. “Hopefully we’ll get drunk on the plane and tell each other how we really feel,” said one player. Don Mattingly felt sick. His job was to facilitate a winning season by keeping the locker room from imploding, and that wasn’t going very well. It didn’t help matters that after each loss Mattingly knew he would have to return to the stadium the following afternoon, sit in the dugout surrounded by cameras fixed on his face, and answer questions from reporters about whether he thought he was going to be canned. It reached a boiling point when a respected national columnist wrote a piece speculating that Mattingly’s firing was imminent. Even members of Mattingly’s own family thought he was out. The injuries weren’t Mattingly’s fault; the ghost of Earl Weaver couldn’t have led this wounded club to a championship. But the Guggenheim group did not spend billions on a baseball team to watch it flounder in last place.

  Mattingly had proven he could keep his team from rioting during the upheaval of the franchise under McCourt, but his in-game decisions baffled observers. He and Hillman seemed so transfixed by the double switch that they employed it as much as possible, often pulling bats from games that weren’t yet decided to move a relief pitcher down a few slots in the batting order, only to watch it backfire later. As the noise around his potential firing grew louder, Joe Torre called to console him.

  Mattingly had been around the game long enough to know that any day he pulled on his Dodger uniform could be his last. Milwaukee was his make-or-break series, and he knew it. Colletti flew to Wisconsin, and many wondered if he packed his hatchet in his carry-on. Dodger players felt awful. They loved their skipper and didn’t want him to be punished for their poor performance. With Mattingly’s job hanging in the balance, Kershaw took the mound. The southpaw tossed a complete game, giving up just three hits and a run. Kemp homered for the first time in weeks, and Ethier added another solo shot and a triple.

  Then the Dodgers got an unexpected lift. When Greinke hurt himself, the training staff told him he’d miss eight weeks. He replied that he’d be back in two. They split the difference. While Greinke admitted he wasn’t 100 percent, he returned to the mound after being away for just four and a half weeks because he knew the Dodgers needed help. He took the ball in the second game of the Milwaukee series, but wasn’t sharp, giving up five runs on nine hits in just four innings. “I just had no feel out there,” Greinke said afterward. “I made no adjustments. It started out bad and never really got better.” The Dodgers lost, 5–2.

  After the game, Colletti huddled with Mattingly and the rest of the coaching staff at Miller Park until 1 a.m. The men agreed the Dodgers had sleepwalked through the first seven weeks of the season, and that it was time to shake things up. Maybe it was because he knew his job was at risk, or perhaps he was just sick of watching his guys go through the motions with little regard for the consequences, but Mattingly showed up to the field for the final game of the Brewers series seething with anger. His $214 million roster had won eighteen games and lost twenty-six. If their malaise was going to cost him his job, he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Lou Piniella had left a lasting impression on him when he managed him in the Bronx. Despite his placid demeanor, Mattingly liked to think that when the situation called for it, he could conjure a little Piniella. When he filled out his lineup card, he penciled in reserve Scott Van Slyke for Andre Ethier. It was a puzzling move. Van Slyke, son of former Pirates star Andy Van Slyke, feasted off left-handed pitchers, while Ethier struggled against them. But the Dodgers were facing righty Wily Peralta that day. A reporter asked Mattingly why Ethier was out of the lineup. “I just want to put a club on the field that is going to fight, to compete the whole day,” Mattingly replied. His answer was somewhat surprising. While his outfield mate Kemp had taken criticism for his lack of hustle in the past, this was a new knock on Ethier. The right fielder had homered and tripled in the first game of the series on Monday, but he’d also been ejected from the game in the eighth inning for arguing balls and strikes. The following day, he missed the sign for a safety squeeze play and was thrown out at home.

  With Ryu on the hill, the Dodgers clobbered the Brewers in Mattingly’s tantrum game, 9–2. Some players attributed their offensive outburst to the spark Mattingly lit before the game, saying that for the first time all season those seated on the bench seemed fixed on every pitch, and those on the field played with a sense of urgency. Maybe it was Ethier’s benching that woke them up. Or maybe they knew they had to play better to save Mattingly’s job. After the game, Ethier was asked about his manager’s comments: “Yeah, I take offense to that, without approaching me first,” he said. “Other than that, I show up every day and find ways to compete, to work hard whether I’m going good or bad.”

  It wasn’t just Ethier’s miscues during the Milwaukee series that chafed Mattingly, however. His frustration with his right fielder had been bubbl
ing for at least ten days. When Ethier showed up to a Sunday matinee game versus the Marlins on May 12 and noticed his name written on the lineup card, he complained to his skipper that, at thirty-one years of age, he was too old to be playing in day games after night games. The banged-up Dodgers had lost seven straight entering their series with Miami, and had dropped their first game against the Marlins. With Gonzalez nursing his neck strain, Mark Ellis shelved with an injured quad, and Kemp dealing with a sore shoulder, the Dodgers needed Ethier more than ever. Mattingly was incensed that Ethier, one of the club’s few starters who was still able to stand upright—who had also gone 4-for-4 the day before—would ask for a break while the team was melting down. Especially when he’d be facing Tom Koehler, a young righty making his second career start in the major leagues. So Mattingly left Ethier in the lineup, and he went 0-for-3. After popping out to third base in the fifth inning, an irked Ethier could be heard saying that everyone knew he didn’t hit well during day games, because it was too bright for him. Whether it was a coincidence, or there was something to his theory that the sun blinded him, Ethier wasn’t wrong: his career batting average was thirty-five points lower in day games than in night games, while his on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) was eighty points worse.

  • • •

  Andre Ethier had always played with a chip on his shoulder, real or imagined. Hailing from Phoenix, Ethier signed on to play baseball at Arizona State out of high school. But when his coaches told him after his freshman season that he wasn’t talented enough to play Division I ball, he was forced to transfer to a nearby junior college to keep playing. And though he proved them wrong by smashing the ball at the JC level, reenrolling at ASU, and continuing his torrid hitting there before being drafted in the second round by the Oakland A’s, that feeling that he was always being underestimated and overlooked never left him. In one of Ned Colletti’s better moves as GM, he traded troubled outfielder Milton Bradley to Oakland for a twenty-three-year-old Ethier a month after he was hired. Ethier was called up to the big leagues with a crop of young hotshots—including Kemp, Billingsley, James Loney, Jonathan Broxton, and Russell Martin—who were all projected to be better than he was. He used the bitterness he felt about being an afterthought as motivation, and it worked. Ethier hit thirty-one home runs and finished sixth in NL MVP voting in 2009, and made the 2010 and 2011 all-star squads.

  Some hitters’ postgame moods were determined by whether their teams won or lost; others were dictated by how they did at the plate that day. Some saw Ethier as a guy who seemed to be in a better mood after a loss in which he’d collected three hits than after a win in which he’d gone 0-fer. In late July 2008, the Dodgers were a game back of the Arizona Diamondbacks for first place in the NL West, and tied 0–0 with the Giants in the bottom of the sixth inning. Kemp led off the inning with a single, then stole second base. Up next, Ethier worked a nine-pitch at-bat before grounding out to second. Kemp hustled over to third. When Ethier returned to the dugout, his teammates lined up to high-five him for advancing the go-ahead run ninety feet in such a crucial game. But Ethier was angry. “That’s not gonna help me in arbitration,” he said, as he slammed his bat into the rack. Veteran third baseman Casey Blake had just been traded to the Dodgers from the Cleveland Indians earlier that week when he heard Ethier’s remarks. At first he thought his new teammate was joking. When he realized Ethier was serious, he couldn’t believe it.

  Blake shouldn’t have been surprised. Though teams that stick together are praised as ideal, the reality is that baseball is the most individual of any of the four major team sports. The 2013 Dodgers were less a team than they were twenty-five separate corporations. Assuming he is healthy, an everyday player notches somewhere in the vicinity of six hundred plate appearances each season. “So at that number, you’re looking at about five hundred and fifty at-bats for yourself, and fifty for the team,” said Diamondbacks pitcher Josh Collmenter, who had given this issue a lot of thought. In close games, a walk, a long fly-out, or a ground ball to the right side can be critical to victory. This, in Collmenter’s estimation, would qualify as an at-bat for the team. In these situations, a hitter might be better served shortening his swing so he has a better chance to make contact and advance the runner, rather than aim for the fences and risk striking out. This calculated approach was one of the reasons Adrian Gonzalez was so good at driving in runs year after year. With the bases empty, Gonzalez and Ethier were almost identical hitters over the course of their careers entering the 2013 season:

  Ethier: .283 batting average/.348 on-base percentage/.478 slugging/ .825 OPS in 1,921 at-bats

  Gonzalez: .283 batting average/.345 on-base percentage/ .493 slugging/.838 OPS in 2,410 at-bats

  But with runners in scoring position, Gonzalez was much better:

  Ethier: .290 BA/.385 OBP/.482 SLG/.868 OPS in 937 at-bats

  Gonzalez: .329 BA/.437 OBP/.559 SLG/.996 OPS in 1,080 at-bats

  Why? Old-school analysts might call Gonzalez more “clutch,” and it was true he had a gift for focusing in high-leverage at-bats. But a better explanation might lie in their differing approaches. With no runners on, Gonzalez considered it his duty, as one of the Dodgers’ butter-and-egg men, to hit a home run or a double. “And when you try to hit home runs sometimes you pop out,” said Gonzalez. But with runners on second or third, he simplified his approach and focused on roping line drives to knock them in. Runs batted in have become a controversial success metric in baseball, since a hitter has no control over whether he comes to the plate with a runner on base. But Gonzalez loved to use RBIs as a measuring stick, and cited it at the end of the 2013 season as one of the reasons why Arizona first baseman and Collmenter’s teammate Paul Goldschmidt should win the MVP award over Pittsburgh center fielder Andrew McCutchen. The irony was that when Gonzalez didn’t try to do too much he did more than usual: his career slugging percentage with runners in scoring position (when all he needed was a single to plate a run) was sixty-six points higher than it was with the bases empty (when he swung out of his cleats in hopes of parking one in the bleachers). “I think that’s because when you’re not thinking home run it’s easier to square the ball up,” said Gonzalez. “So yeah, in that sense it might be easier to hit a home run when you’re not trying to.”

  Perhaps it was the constant pressure Ethier felt to prove himself that led him to be less willing to sacrifice his own at-bats for the team, at least earlier in his career. And who could blame him? All he had heard was that Kemp was a future MVP and Loney was a future batting champion. Could he really afford to give away outs to keep up? Regardless of his success against right-handed pitching he often felt like his struggles against lefties was all anyone ever talked about.

  But while Kemp tended to bristle whenever an authority figure called him out, Mattingly’s words worked like smelling salts for Ethier. He began hustling out every ground ball and showing up early to take extra batting practice and reps in the outfield. And after Kemp reaggravated the hamstring strain that derailed his 2012 season, Ethier shifted over to center and handled the difficult position admirably even though he’d never played it in the major leagues before. With Kemp on the DL, Mattingly didn’t have a true center fielder on his roster. Ethier stepped up, and his teammates loved him for it. His rejuvenated attitude and effort won over the locker room. Perhaps Ethier felt he had a bigger, more important role on the team as the new captain of the outfield. In terms of status, center field was like the aisle seat on an airplane. Right field was the window, and left was the middle. Switching positions in the middle of a season can be mentally exhausting, and many players hate doing it. Ethier accepted his new assignment with a positivity his teammates hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t as athletic as Kemp, but he appeared to make more of an effort, to the delight of the Dodgers’ pitching staff, who did not count the clicks it took him to move when a ball was hit to him. Ethier started hitting better, too. In his seventy-four games as the club’s center fielder, his batting average an
d on-base percentage were each more than forty points higher than when he was in right, and his slugging percentage was eighty points better.

  The scapegoating of Ethier one minute and praising him as a team savior the next underscored just how fickle a baseball locker room can be. The amount of time these grown men spent in closed quarters with each other was so unnatural that every loss made otherwise harmless habits, from grooming tendencies to music preferences, that much more grating. That claustrophobia extended off the field, too. The lives of Dodger players were so intertwined that it wasn’t uncommon for one player’s family to rent a home that his teammate’s family had lived in the year before.

  Nevertheless, Ethier’s move out of right field was supposed to be temporary. No one knew that he would never be the Dodgers’ starting right fielder again.

  • • •

  After the Dodgers left Milwaukee, they flew home for a series versus the St. Louis Cardinals, the National League’s model organization. Though the size of their media market limited their payroll, the Cardinals had won two world championships in the past seven seasons by hoarding young talent via the amateur draft, which their analytics department seemed to crush each year. It wasn’t just that their top picks panned out—many of the guys who wound up being stars were snagged by the Cardinals in the lower rounds of the draft after being overlooked by everyone else. They selected their second baseman, Matt Carpenter, in the thirteenth round of the 2009 draft and signed him for a thousand bucks. He would finish fourth in the 2013 MVP balloting. In that same draft, they picked pitcher Trevor Rosenthal in the twenty-first round. When his fastball began touching triple digits he became the club’s dominant closer.

  When the Cardinals took the field to stretch before the first game of that series at Dodger Stadium, a clutch of L.A. players watched them stream out of the visitors’ dugout with envy. Nick Punto and Skip Schumaker had played for the Cardinals team that won the World Series in 2011, and Colletti brought both utility players to Los Angeles to help build a winning culture. St. Louis had selected Schumaker in the fifth round of the 2001 draft, and he spent twelve years in that organization before coming over to the Dodgers in a trade the winter before. He remained close to many of his former teammates, especially to ace Adam Wainwright, who convinced him to turn his life over to God.