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

by Molly Knight

  The Scullys’ driver would arrive at Dodger Stadium around four o’clock every day and drop the couple off at the players’ entrance near the top of the park. Like Puig, Scully’s voice usually entered rooms before he did. He could be heard saying hello to every security guard and usher he passed, calling each of them by name on his way to the elevator, or whistling a standard like “Singin’ in the Rain,” his all-time favorite song. He and Sandi would then descend three floors to the media level and enter the press box named after him. He’d go over his game notes, film any pregame spots that were needed, then retreat to the press dining room for dinner with his wife. After he finished eating, he would often sidle up to the table with the writers on the Dodgers beat and trade stories about baseball and current events. Young reporters would ask him about watching Sandy Koufax in his prime, and he would never tire of telling them what a marvel he was, how it was impossible to compare any modern-day pitchers to Koufax because he took the mound every four days instead of five, and how he threw twenty-seven complete games in each of his final two seasons because there was no such thing as a pitch count. He would also say that out of everyone he saw in all the games he covered or attended as a fan, watching Willie Mays patrol center field at the vast Polo Grounds was perhaps the most remarkable.

  Red Barber had told Scully when he began his career to refrain from being partial to the home team. And though Dodger fans claimed him as their own, Scully never referred to the Dodgers as “we,” as in “We need to score some runs,” or “We need to not get blown out tonight.” He was so good at remaining impartial while broadcasters from other towns descended into homer-ism that it wasn’t uncommon to hear a Dodger player wonder if Scully was in the tank for the other team. Scully, of course, was not, but it was the best possible testament to the fairness of his calls. His wife used to watch the games from the owners’ suite, but in recent years had taken to sitting behind Scully during his broadcasts because he liked her company. Aside from the odd tech engineer and producer, Scully worked alone. Within sixty seconds of the final pitch of every home game, the Scullys were whisked out of the press box by security, through a crowd of fans hoping to catch a glimpse or a wave, and into the elevator, which was held for them. Then their driver took them home.

  Vin Scully had called thousands of Dodger games before Yasiel Puig came into his orbit. In that time, he’d witnessed fourteen Rookies of the Year, ten Cy Young winners, and eight MVPs. But after watching Puig run and hit and throw and revive the energy around Dodger Stadium for two weeks, Scully was just as dumbfounded as everyone else. “He is not to be believed,” Scully said. “Because this game is not that easy.”

  The buzz surrounding Puig was defeaning, but no one knew what to expect. Though the Dodgers desperately needed to change the course of a disastrous season to give fans something to cheer about, club officials asked the team’s social media coordinator, Josh Tucker, not to hype Puig too much on the team’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, because they didn’t want to put even more pressure on the kid.

  The Dodgers were playing San Diego at home on June 3, just eight weeks removed from the brawl that had cost them Greinke. They sat in last place in the NL West, with a 23-32 record. Only the Brewers, Mets, Marlins, and Astros had fewer wins—and the latter two clubs entered the season with the lowest payrolls in MLB, at $39 million and $24 million, respectively. When Puig ran onto the field, his crisp white uniform appeared brighter than those worn by his teammates, having not yet been muddied and ripped and colored by dirt and grass stains. He stood in right with the manufacturer’s sticker still stuck to the underside of his blue cap. As he stepped up to the plate for his first major-league at-bat, the sparse crowd granted him a valiant ovation. Greinke and Kershaw moved toward the end of the dugout nearest the plate and leaned over the railing to get a better look. Kershaw worked on an enormous wad of bubble gum while Greinke spit sunflower seeds into a paper cup.

  Puig stepped up to the plate carrying a two-toned bat with a wood-colored handle, the barrel painted black, and his name carved into it in capital letters. How many hits would it have in it? So many prospects advanced to the major leagues with breathless hype they never lived up to. Would Puig be one of them? He looked out at Eric Stults on the pitcher’s mound as though he was already mad at him. One of the most terrifying things about Clayton Kershaw was that his face remained kind while he dominated hitters, like that of a sneaky executioner. Puig more closely resembled Greinke on the diamond: he glared at his opponent with cold eyes that steeled against any human inclination toward empathy. The young Cuban took the first pitch he saw from Stults low for a ball. He was fooled by the next pitch, swinging way ahead of a changeup as if he were trying to hit the ball to the moon. He took Stults’s third offering for a ball, then fouled off another changeup. With the count even at two, Stults delivered the perfect pitch to any anxious rookie in his first major-league at-bat: soft, low, and away. Puig surprised everyone by waiting on it, and then reaching out and extending his bat until it almost touched the dirt to hit it. The ball looped over the shortstop Everth Cabrera’s head and dunked into left-center field for a single. It wasn’t a home run, but he was happy to take the hit. Puig rounded first, shrugged, and smiled. He was erased from the base paths a batter later when Nick Punto grounded into a double play. Up next was Adrian Gonzalez, who yanked a home run into the right-field bullpen, close to the spot where he had hit the ball in his first at-bat with the Dodgers eight months earlier. Gonzalez circled the bases and ran down the length of the dugout looking for Puig, to congratulate him on his first hit. When he found him, he pointed at the kid. They embraced.

  In Puig’s third at-bat, he hit a chopper to the right side of the infield that deflected off first baseman Kyle Blanks’s glove and bounced into the outfield. Puig sprinted to first out of the box, rounded the base, and took an enormous turn toward second, daring the Padres’ right fielder, Will Venable, to choose which base to throw to. It was a reckless move that Puig would employ over and over again in his first year with the Dodgers. Sometimes it would result in a rushed throw that sailed into the stands and awarded Puig two extra bases. Other times, he’d be thrown out by thirty feet. Puig played the game the same way he lived his life: gambling on his ability to stay one step ahead of whatever was chasing him.

  • • •

  Like many of his baseball-playing countrymen, Yasiel Puig had tried several times to defect from Cuba before he made it to the United States, including an attempt in April 2012 that was foiled by the U.S. Coast Guard on an open stretch of water between Cuba and Haiti. To finally make it out, he relied on a powerful Mexican drug cartel called the Zetas to smuggle him by speedboat from Cuba to Isla Mujeres, a four-mile-long island near Cancún, just off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Miami investors who had heard of Puig’s talents and wanted to cash in on his potential agreed to pay the smugglers $250,000 to get the young Cuban to Mexico, where he could establish residency and then be eligible to sign a free agent contract with an MLB team.

  But according to a lawsuit filed against Puig by one of his traveling companions, a boxer named Yunior Despaigne, when the group landed in Mexico the smugglers changed their minds and decided Puig was worth $400,000. Puig, Despaigne, and three others were then held hostage in a Cancún hotel room for a month while the two sides haggled. According to Despaigne, Puig’s Miami advisors solved the standoff by finding another group willing to whisk the young slugger to Mexico City, where he could hold that open tryout for interested MLB teams. If Despaigne was telling the truth, Puig’s journey to the United States began with stiffing the drug dealers who had snuck him out of Cuba. Despaigne alleged in his lawsuit that he feared for his life because a smuggler named Leo found him in Miami, held a gun to his stomach, and told him to tell Puig that if he didn’t pay the Zetas the money they were owed they would kill Despaigne and Puig both. A month later, Despaigne discovered that Leo, whose real name was Yandrys Leon, had been shot to death in Cancún.

 
This story wasn’t unique to Puig. Rare is the Cuban Major League Baseball player who didn’t face the possibility of death, or worse, while fleeing the communist regime. When Puig signed with the Dodgers, no reporters knew for sure how he had gotten to Mexico, though the drug cartel rumors flew around him from the start. His teammates were aware of that theory; they spoke of it to each other in hushed tones, but most thought of it as one of the tall tales that added to the lore that surrounded him. The seriousness of his situation didn’t hit them until later, when a team meeting was called in Pittsburgh ten days after Puig’s call-up, in mid-June, and players were told that they were going to begin traveling with private security. No one ever told them that the added guards were for Puig, but his teammates soon noticed that the four hired men who took turns sweeping hotels before they arrived seemed concerned only with the young right fielder.

  Puig never discussed with teammates or reporters his terrifying journey to the United States. In fact, in his first year in the big leagues he mostly stonewalled the media altogether. “I don’t really like the press,” he explained in one of the rare one-on-one interviews he gave. It was hard to blame him. Back in Cuba journalists were government spies. Puig didn’t trust anyone whose job was to uncover truths, especially now that he was harboring dark secrets about how he had escaped his home country. At the end of Puig’s first week, Luis Cruz took a roll of masking tape and cordoned off a small section of carpet in front of their adjoining lockers. Puig got down on his hands and knees and wrote “No Reporters” in Spanish with a blue Sharpie pen on the tape. “He likes playing,” said Cruz. “He doesn’t like all the attention.”

  But that attention was inevitable after the way his first game ended. In the bottom of the ninth the Dodgers were leading the Padres 2–1 when they brought in Brandon League to close out the game. Colletti had traded two middling prospects to Seattle for League at the deadline in 2012, and the twenty-nine-year-old right-hander did well in the final two months of the season for Los Angeles, posting the best numbers of his career. As a reward, Colletti gave him a three-year contract for $22.5 million. Despite his success in Dodger blue, the deal looked like a mistake from the day it was signed, just like the contract Colletti had given Andre Ethier months earlier. The influx of cash Colletti had to play with was not without its downside. Outbidding everyone else for superstars like Greinke and Kershaw was one thing. Overpaying guys like Ethier and League was another. Each club had only twenty-five roster spots. It was much easier to cut underperforming players who weren’t still owed eight figures. If a guy making the minimum struggled, the club could ax him from the roster with no real skin lost. But if a guy making a lot of money floundered, the Dodgers were hurt not only by his play on the field but also by the fact that they were stuck with him.

  One of the most curious things about baseball is that men who pitch the ninth inning are paid way more than those who pitch the sixth, seventh, or eighth—even though they’re responsible for the same number of outs. This is because most general managers believe that a player must possess a certain type of bravery to be a closer, because the last three outs of a game are the hardest to get, even when facing the bottom of a lineup. Colletti, in particular, had an affinity for pitchers who had amassed a pile of saves in the past, so much so that a player’s career save total seemed to trump better, more accurate measures of his ability. First and foremost, closers need to strike out hitters. This is because when a batter makes contact with a baseball, even when he is fooled, it has a chance of falling in for a hit. A strikeout neutralizes bad luck. In 2012, the National League’s most dominant closer, Atlanta’s Craig Kimbrel, fanned 116 batters in 62 innings. In the four months with Seattle before he was dealt to Los Angeles, League had struck out just 27 batters in 44 frames. While League excelled at inducing ground-ball double plays with his sinker, he didn’t make batters miss. And because of this, the Mariners had replaced him as closer with the second-year fireballer Tom Wilhelmsen.

  What made League’s contract even more perplexing was that the Dodgers had a twenty-five-year-old homegrown reliever who was much better. In 145 career innings, Kenley Jansen had struck out an incredible 236 batters, which was 41 percent of the men he faced. He did this while posting a 2.22 earned run average. And he did it with one pitch that everyone knew was coming. Jansen’s cut fastball reminded many of the brilliant Yankee closer Mariano Rivera’s, except that Jansen threw it harder. He stood six foot five and weighed 265 pounds. At nearly seven feet, his stride toward home plate when he threw a pitch was one of the longest in the majors and had the effect of making his 97 mph fastball seem even faster. But heading into the 2013 season, the Dodgers’ front office didn’t feel comfortable moving him into the closer’s spot, as if he would somehow combust under the weight of it. Perhaps that was because they had signed Jansen—who hailed from the tiny Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao—as a catcher, and converted him to pitcher only after they discovered he couldn’t hit. In 2009, at age twenty-one, he had even served as the starting catcher for Team Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic. Jansen entered the 2013 season with only two and a half years of experience as a major-league pitcher, a statistic Colletti seemed to value more than his strikeout rate. The Dodgers’ GM preferred League to close games.

  That decision had been a disaster. On May 31, League owned a 5.31 earned run average and had blown three wins the struggling Dodgers could not afford to give away. Jansen pitched a clean eighth inning in Puig’s debut game on June 3, striking out two. When Mattingly brought in League in the ninth, he fell behind to Padres second baseman Jedd Gyorko, before getting him to ground out to shortstop. Then, with one away, he walked the right fielder, Chris Denorfia, on pitches that weren’t close to being strikes. Many fans in the stadium began to boo. League grimaced and paced behind the rubber, looking about as comfortable on the mound as if he were walking barefoot on cactus needles.

  Kyle Blanks was on deck, which was significant, because with Carlos Quentin out of the lineup that day, if any Padres hitter could tie the game with one swing it was the six-foot-six, 265-pound Blanks. League’s best skill was getting batters to hit ground balls, and a ground ball in this situation would likely result in a game-ending double play. League knew that to get the result he wanted he needed to keep the ball down, so his first two pitches were low and out of the strike zone. His third pitch was belt high. Blanks went with it, and hit it deep toward the right-field wall, over Puig’s head. Puig sprinted back toward the fence, running an awkward banana route toward the ball. It looked like a home run off the bat. But before the ball could clear the fence the night sky knocked it down. With his momentum carrying him backward, Puig caught the ball one-handed on the warning track, took two steps to his left, and fired it toward first base across his body. Denorfia had been off with the pitch and now he was sprinting back toward first. The ball arrived a split second before he did for an improbable game-ending double play.

  That game-winning throw from the wall was Puig’s career highlight for less than twenty-four hours. In his second game he hit two home runs and drove in five. Most young players come up to the big leagues trying to pull everything, and opposing pitchers use that tendency to their advantage by feeding them a steady diet of pitches away. Puig surprised them by driving those pitches over the right-field fence. When Puig hit his third homer of the week in just his fourth game, a stunned Scully delivered this call: “And a high drive into deep right field—I don’t believe it! A grand slam home run!” Then he stayed silent for ninety seconds through Puig’s curtain call and two replays, letting the crowd’s euphoric screams narrate the scene. “I have learned over the years that there comes a rare and precious moment where there is absolutely nothing better than silence,” Scully said afterward. “Nothing better than to be absolutely speechless to sum up a situation. And that was the moment.”

  The mechanics of Puig’s swing were as gorgeous as Logan White had described to Kasten back when he first saw him taking batting practice o
n that field in Mexico City. His arms were long and strong enough to cover the outer part of the plate. And because his hands hung particularly close to his body when he swung, he could stay back on inside pitches rather than flail over them. This meant that there weren’t very many places where a pitcher could get away with throwing the ball to him. “If you catch too much of the plate you’re basically fucked,” said one NL West starter. For all the emotion with which he played the game, Puig was quiet in the batter’s box and held his bat still until he began his swing. “Puig is a stud!” tweeted Braves perennial all-star third baseman Chipper Jones the day after Puig’s grand slam against his former team on June 6. “Bat stays in the zone a long time.”

  Puig became the second batter since 1900 to hit four home runs in his first five games. For his efforts, he was named the National League’s player of the week. A pitcher who gave up one of those home runs was heard saying after the game, “There’s no way that guy is twenty-two.” But it wasn’t just his stats that got the rest of the sport talking. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball, but he went about his business on and off the field in such a calm and composed manner that he was almost boring. Puig was a human backflip. He stood in the batter’s box and admired his home runs; he stared at pitchers who threw inside. He showed up to the ballpark when he felt like it, and ran through stop signs held up by the Dodgers’ third-base coach, Tim Wallach, because he thought he knew better. Opposing players could not stand him. “If he’s my teammate I probably try to teach him how to behave in the big leagues,” said Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero a month into Puig’s career. “He’s creating a bad reputation around the league, and it’s unfortunate because the talent he has is to be one of the greatest players in the big leagues.” When told of Montero’s comments before a game in Arizona, a Dodger pitcher nodded in agreement. “He’s right,” he said. “But I don’t really care because he rakes.”