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

by Molly Knight

  Opposing teams who saw how big and strong he was—how he could fling his bat at a baseball traveling 95 mph and three feet out of the strike zone and send it over the outfield fence—swore he was thirty years old. People who engaged him in conversation wondered if he was fifteen. His loud, booming voice entered rooms before he did. It wasn’t uncommon for him to sit in his corner locker and yell “Pow! Pow! Powpowpow!” like machine-gun spray in a video game when he thought that he was not getting enough attention.

  Though he hit the ball better than anyone else on their squad during spring training, the Dodgers had no intention of putting Puig on their opening day roster because he wasn’t mature enough emotionally. In a perfect world, the young outfielder would have stayed in the minor leagues for the entire 2013 season so that he could make whatever mistakes he needed to make as far from the limelight as possible and arrive in L.A. the following April a year wiser for it. Some players could handle the pressure of being called up while they’re still young enough to be playing college ball. Kershaw had made his major-league debut in 2008, two months after he turned twenty. But the self-possession Kershaw displayed as a teenager was exceptional; he handled pressure better than many players who were ten years older. Puig was still a kid: his favorite television show was the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. During the first week of the season, Don Mattingly was asked why Yasiel Puig didn’t make the Dodgers’ opening day roster despite his obvious talent. “I heard a guy say one time, you feed babies baby food,” Mattingly said. “You don’t give them steak when they’re six months old.”

  A Dodger executive explained it this way: “Go to YouTube and type in ‘Puig bat flip’ and you’ll see why.”

  He was talking about the way Puig disposed of his bat after he hit a baseball with positive results. When he smacked home runs (or sometimes even singles), Puig flipped his bat high in the air behind him, handle up, barrel down, like a Spanish exclamation point. Opposing pitchers hated the way he celebrated his success against them and often retaliated by buzzing him with high fastballs during his next at-bat. The Dodgers saw it as an annoying extension of the youthful exuberance that made him great. Their tricky task was to get him to cool off the showboating without watering him down into a lesser player. But there was an even greater challenge when it came to Puig, with more serious ramifications: his joy turned to rage at a terrifying rate that he seemed unable to control. When opponents vented their exasperation with his antics, Puig puffed out his chest and hollered back. In the minors, he even dropped his bat to the ground in disgust after a called strike two. He was a man of high highs and low lows, the kind of player whose changing moods terrified coaches. It didn’t help his cause that he pouted when he was assigned to Double-A out of training camp.

  But with their backs to the wall and their season already circling the drain, the Dodgers in their desperation considered promoting Puig just weeks after Mattingly compared him to an infant. Team officials decided to delay his call-up, however, after he was arrested in the early morning hours of April 28 for doing 97 in a 50 mph zone, and charged with reckless driving, speeding, and driving without proof of insurance. The next day the Dodgers were embarrassed by the Rockies at home, falling 12–2 in the game that Skip Schumaker pitched in relief. Almost a month had passed since Puig’s brush with the law when Colletti went to see him, and perhaps he had endured enough overnight bus rides and Double-A cold-cut spreads to atone for his transgression. While Puig might have done his penance, the Dodgers’ front office was reluctant to promote him unless he was in line for significant playing time. What the young right fielder needed most were at-bats; a warm seat on major-league pine would just delay his maturation by another year.

  • • •

  That’s where Mike Trout came in. In the year and a half he had been in the big leagues, Trout had already established himself as the best player in baseball. In his first full season with the Angels, the twenty-year-old center fielder became the first player in MLB history to hit 30 home runs, steal 45 bases, and score 125 runs in a season. He reminded many of Mickey Mantle. But at six foot two and 230 pounds, Trout was three inches taller and thirty-five pounds heavier than the Mick. As if his personal accomplishments weren’t enough, he also collected the hit that forced the Dodgers to call up Yasiel Puig.

  During the last week of May, the Dodgers and Angels played four straight games, two in Los Angeles then two in Anaheim. The Dodgers had taken the first two games of the series at home, but were trailing in the seventh in the third game, 3–1, when Trout stepped into the batter’s box to lead off the inning.

  Maybe it was because Trout was up to bat, or maybe it was just a coincidence. But while Kemp was slowed for most of 2012 with injuries, Trout had established himself as the best center fielder in Southern California, winning the American League’s Rookie of the Year award and finishing second in MVP voting. When Trout whacked a 1-2 fastball from Dodgers reliever Javy Guerra toward the wall in right-center field, Kemp took off sprinting after it with more ferocity than usual. His first two steps toward the ball were fine. But when he took his third stride he pulled up lame and slowed into a trot. At first glance it wasn’t clear what was wrong with Kemp; his face registered no pain, and he didn’t grab at any part of his body. The ball ricocheted off the top of the wall and bounced into his glove, and he chucked it back into the infield well after Trout had arrived at second base. It wasn’t until Guerra was removed from the game two batters later that anyone knew Kemp was injured. He motioned toward the dugout, and one of the Dodgers’ trainers jogged out to talk with him during the pitching change. After some discussion, Kemp left the field, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him. Someone in the Dodgers’ dugout yelled out to Schumaker, who was playing second, that they needed to move him to center, so he had better grab an outfielder’s glove.

  “What happened?” Schumaker asked Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire as Schumaker approached the dugout.

  “I don’t know,” said McGwire as he handed him a bigger glove. Schumaker shook his head. If Kemp’s injury was bad enough to require a trip to the disabled list, he would become the twelfth Dodger to land on the DL in the club’s first fifty-one games. The team had only twenty-five men on its roster: the wounded almost outnumbered the well. The Angels held on to win the game, 4–3. The Dodgers remained in last place, trailing the division-leading Arizona Diamondbacks by seven and a half games.

  When the club announced that Kemp pulled a hamstring, yet again, the postgame locker room gave off an even more morose vibe than usual. “It’s not as bad as last year,” Kemp said after the game, and he may have believed it. “But you’ve got to take it easy and make sure you’re careful with it because it can get worse. I’d rather maybe miss a couple days or whatever and not miss a month like I did last year.” When Kemp hurt himself chasing down Trout’s hit, he could not have imagined it would trigger a sequence of events that threatened his job.

  • • •

  At first, Mattingly tried to deny Puig was on the way to L.A. by suggesting instead that the Dodgers needed someone who could fill Kemp’s position. “Obviously we’ll need a player who can play center,” Mattingly said. That was true: the loss of Kemp meant Los Angeles didn’t have a true center fielder on its roster, as Puig’s natural position was right. The Chattanooga Lookouts also featured a young center-field prospect named Joc Pederson, who had been the Dodgers’ eleventh-round pick in the 2010 draft out of high school. He was better than where he was selected, though, and the club gave him the second-highest bonus of any of the players they drafted that year, hoping he would sign with them instead of going to play ball at the University of Southern California, as his father had. A year and a half younger than Puig, Pederson entered the 2013 season as the Dodgers’ fourth-best prospect according to Baseball America, and the youngest member of the Lookouts. Pederson was a better defender in center than Kemp was, and his arm was just as good. But he appeared overmatched in the batter’s box and was strik
ing out in 25 percent of his plate appearances versus Double-A pitching. To give themselves more time to mull their decision on Puig, the Dodgers promoted outfielder Alex Castellanos from Triple-A Albuquerque as a stopgap and headed off to Colorado for a series with the Rockies on the first weekend of June.

  Privately, the front office had settled on Puig. The week before the club called him up, Kasten flew to Chattanooga and pleaded with the young outfielder to behave. “Please,” said Kasten. “Do it for me.” While there were doubts that Puig was ready to become a starting outfielder in the big leagues, the club had little choice but to rush him. The Dodgers were not only losing, they were playing the kind of snoozy, uninspired ball that horrified their new owners, whose main objective was to showcase stars on their upcoming multibillion-dollar cable network. Puig was raw, sure, but he played like he had bumblebees in his pants. Even if he failed, he would not be boring. The front office had hoped he would roust the club from its season-long dirt nap. The decision to promote Puig was made even easier three days later when Carl Crawford reached out and slapped a ball down the left-field line at Coors Field, sprinted around first base, and grabbed the back of his right leg on his way to second. Hamstring injuries were now spreading through the Dodgers’ clubhouse like a nasty flu bug. On the morning of May 29, there had been no roster spot for Puig. But in the span of seventy-two hours, the Dodgers lost both Kemp and Crawford to the disabled list. Puig flew in to Los Angeles while the club was still in Colorado, and was told to keep his promotion a secret until it was made public the following day. For the next twenty-four hours, Puig referred to himself as “El Secreto.” As an homage to the secrecy surrounding his call-up, when he was asked to pick a song that would play in the stadium whenever he walked up to bat, Puig chose a tune by Dominican musician Secreto El Famoso Biberon.

  Three hours before his first major-league game on June 3, Puig stood behind home plate during batting practice and fastened white batting gloves tight on his hands as he took in the scene with Mark McGwire. Dodger Stadium hadn’t yet opened its turnstiles to the public for that evening’s game, which meant he was still a mystery to fans. But by the time the last out was recorded, few in the crowd would remember the Dodgers before Puig existed. He had come a long way since Logan White first saw him on that field in Mexico a year earlier when he was overweight and out of shape. Where his body used to contain curves, there were now right angles. The fat around his belly, thighs, and backside had fallen away and been replaced by muscle.

  McGwire, who would become a sort of father figure to Puig over the course of the season, quickly ran through basic English with him, making sure the young Cuban knew how to say “fastball,” “change-up,” and “curve.” As the two sluggers conversed in a language they cobbled together on the fly, Mattingly addressed the media and admitted he had lied about Puig’s call-up. “I was basically bullshitting the whole time,” Mattingly said of his comments the previous week that the team would promote a center fielder instead.

  A few hundred thousand people may one day boast that they attended Yasiel Puig’s first game, but the truth was the club had been playing so badly that Dodger Stadium was only half full that night. At first pitch, about 75 percent of the seats were empty. A reporter joked that there were as many media members in attendance for Puig’s debut as there were spectators. It was hard to fault Dodger fans for staying home. Until Puig’s call-up the team’s lineup consisted of a hodgepodge of bench players thrown into starting duty in place of injured regulars. When Puig was promoted, the Dodgers had $87 million worth of players on the disabled list. (Fifteen teams had opened the season with payrolls lower than that.) As such, the Dodgers’ lackluster line-up for Puig’s first game looked like this:

  RF Yasiel Puig (first major-league game ever)

  2B Nick Punto (subbing for the injured Mark Ellis)

  1B Adrian Gonzalez (regular starter)

  C Ramon Hernandez (Subbing for the injured A. J. Ellis. Hitting cleanup. Would be cut eleven days later and never play in the big leagues again.)

  LF Scott Van Slyke (subbing for the injured Carl Crawford)

  CF Andre Ethier (Subbing for the injured Matt Kemp. Only third game in his eight-year career that he started in center.)

  3B Jerry Hairston (Subbing for Luis Cruz, who had to move over to shortstop to fill in for Hanley Ramirez. Four months from retirement.)

  SS Luis Cruz (Subbing for the injured Hanley Ramirez. Hitting .120. Three weeks from being cut.)

  P Stephen Fife (Called up from Triple-A earlier that day to replace injured Chris Capuano in rotation. Making seventh career start.)

  Mattingly opted to bat Puig leadoff for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to get Puig as many at-bats as possible, especially given how decimated the Dodgers’ lineup was. Second, he was wary of a roadkill situation. Puig was so fast around the bases that the skipper worried that if he batted a slower runner in front of him, the young right fielder might run over him. Guys who hit first in a major-league lineup tend to be quick and small, with their primary job being to get on base so the power hitters slotted third, fourth, and fifth can drive them in. Puig was one of the largest leadoff hitters in the game’s history. If he was nervous, he hid it well. But that didn’t mean he knew what he was doing.

  His first at-bat was straightforward, but the Dodgers’ coaching staff had to remind him to take his time walking up to the plate before his second at-bat so that he might give the pitcher, who hit in front of him when the lineup turned over, a chance to get back to the dugout. They also told him not to argue with umpires. After running through the simple vocabulary with McGwire during batting practice, Puig went and stood on first base while a member of the club’s coaching staff mimicked the pickoff move of Eric Stults, the Padres’ starter that night. Even though Puig was fast, he lacked basic survival instincts, punctuated by his inability to slide. Watching him run the bases reminded some in the organization of handing the keys of a Ferrari to someone who couldn’t drive stick. The coaches did not rehearse Stults’s move so that Puig might try to run on him. Stealing bases was too advanced. The objective was just to help him avoid getting picked off.

  • • •

  Vin Scully told listeners that night that Puig’s pregame pickoff tutorial was something he’d never seen before in his sixty-four seasons on the job. Scully, eighty-five, had been around the game his whole life. Born in the Bronx, he played center field for Fordham University and once even suited up against a Yale squad that featured George H. W. Bush at first base. “I could run, I could throw, but I couldn’t hit,” Scully would say about his ballplaying career. Upon graduation he began his career as a fill-in for a CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., focusing on college football. Impressed by his professionalism, legendary Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber invited Scully to join him and Connie Desmond in the booth a year later, in 1950. Like Puig, Scully was just twenty-two years old when he began his Dodger career. When Barber left the club for the Yankees three years later, Scully became the team’s lead announcer, at age twenty-five. Going into the 2013 season he was the second-longest-tenured team employee, after former manager Tommy Lasorda, who became a vice president, then a special advisor to the chairman after he retired.

  As Scully put on his gray sport coat and fixed his silver and white striped tie before leaving for Dodger Stadium for Puig’s first game, even he could not have imagined what was about to unfold. Vin Scully loved baseball, but what he loved even more were the stories of the men who played it. If a player’s mother’s cousin was a descendant of John Wilkes Booth or related to the astronomer who had discovered Pluto, Scully would figure out a way to weave that fact into the broadcast. One of the best stories he told was about racing Jackie Robinson on ice skates. The two men, along with Robinson’s wife, Rachel, had gone to a resort in the Catskills one winter and Scully told them he was going to go skate. The couple asked if they could come along. “When we get there I’d like to race you,” Robinson said.

  �
��Jack, I didn’t know you skated,” Scully said, knowing Robinson had grown up in Southern California.

  “I’ve never skated in my life,” Robinson replied. “But I want to race you because that’s how I’m going to learn.”

  Sure enough, when Robinson laced up his skates he could barely stand on the ice. He raced Scully anyway, running on his ankles.

  Scully told this story, some fifty years after it happened, with the same sense of wonder that must have overtaken him on the day it took place. The legendary announcer was blessed with the rare combination of a child’s enthusiasm and a poet’s tongue.

  Hours before Puig’s first big-league game, Scully and his wife of forty years, Sandi, ducked into the car that waited outside their home in Thousand Oaks and began the forty-mile ride to Dodger Stadium. When he was younger, Scully drove himself to the park every day. But as he grew older a chauffeur shuttled him. During the drive to the stadium, which could take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, Scully and his wife liked to listen to show tunes and standards. Sometimes on the ride home he’d berate himself over mistakes he made during the night’s broadcast. Though he was in the middle of his seventh decade working for the Dodgers, because of his advancing age he approached his job like a man employed on a year-to-year basis. For decades, he did every Dodger game, home and away. Then he began to scale back. First by calling away games only within the division, then by not traveling any farther east than Phoenix. Each August, he would announce whether he would return the following season. In 2012 he got so sick during one of the team’s trips to San Diego that he thought it might be time to walk away. But he recovered and kept on going.