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

by Molly Knight

  Kasten knew the Dodgers’ malaise wasn’t Mattingly’s fault. He hadn’t hired these players, and he didn’t run around taking a mallet to their arms and legs. Mattingly wanted young players who were hungry; Colletti kept stuffing his roster with washed-up veterans. The disconnect between the two men became obvious in their stalemate over the club’s backup catcher. During the first week of the season, Colletti had traded Aaron Harang to the Rockies for the aging Ramon Hernandez with the idea that he would be A. J. Ellis’s backup. Mattingly preferred twenty-five-year-old rookie Tim Federowicz. Because Mattingly didn’t have the power to cut Hernandez, the Dodgers carried three catchers for nine games in May, instead of the usual two. Mattingly started Federowicz twice and used him as a pinch hitter in five other games. He didn’t play Hernandez once. Colletti responded by optioning Federowicz down to Triple-A, to the ire of the coaching staff.

  On June 22, the Dodgers sat in last place with an abysmal 30-42 record, nine and a half games out of first and trending downward. Mattingly woke up on that Saturday morning, the second day of summer, still the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  He did not know if he would last the weekend.

  7

  THE RUN

  On what Mattingly figured to be his day of reckoning, the ball found its way into Zack Greinke’s right hand, as it always seemed to in the season’s biggest moments. Though he’d been a Dodger for only three months, Greinke had already been at the center of mega-brawls with two division rivals. And now here he was, back on the same mound where his clavicle was snapped in one of those dustups just weeks earlier, pitching to save his skipper’s job. While Puig had been awesome in his three weeks with the Dodgers, smacking home runs and gunning down runners and generally playing like an inspired maniac fans couldn’t take their eyes off, he couldn’t stop the club’s free fall by himself. Heading into their June 22 contest at San Diego, Los Angeles had dropped six of its last eight.

  Players knew Mattingly’s job was at risk, so they scoured social media and texted their agents and traded gossip. One popular theory was that Gerry Hunsicker, whom Kasten hired in the off-season as senior advisor of baseball operations, would take over for Colletti and replace Mattingly with Rays bench coach Dave Martinez. Hunsicker had been the Astros’ GM from 2005 to 2014 before going to work as an executive for Tampa, and was thought to be close with the popular, bilingual coach. Martinez would have made sense. The Rays were respected throughout the industry as a model organization that made the most out of their limited resources by adhering to the sabermetric vision of their bright young general manager, Andrew Friedman. Plus, Tampa’s coaches and front-office executives had earned the reputation of being loyal to Friedman and to each other, which influenced the Rays’ strong clubhouse chemistry. When Mattingly spoke of the need to get his players to rally around each other he liked to use the analogy of a group of men tugging on the same end of a rope, even though he knew it was corny. The Rays were famous for doing just that; so deep was the organizational trust that Friedman worked without a contract, despite being one of the most sought-after executives in baseball. Though their payroll had never crossed the $100 million threshold, the Rays made it all the way to the World Series in 2008. The rich Dodgers, meanwhile, were spiraling into chaos, with their coaches, players, general manager, scouting department, and player development executives pointing fingers at each other in an effort to stay employed.

  Another rumor had both Mattingly and his bench coach Trey Hillman fired, with Tim Wallach promoted to interim manager. The veracity of the gossip didn’t matter: the point was, it was getting louder by the day. No one knew for sure what Kasten and Walter were waiting for, but many players and staff members thought that if the Dodgers failed to win both weekend games in San Diego, Donnie Baseball would be gone.

  While most of his players continued to like Mattingly, some covering the team wondered if the club might do better with another skipper in charge. Mattingly was a good man, but perhaps his innate kindness hurt his ability to lead. Maybe the club needed a screamer who didn’t suffer superstar egos. And perhaps a guy with a weaker conscience wouldn’t agonize over demoting a struggling player like Brandon League.

  Though he was no pushover, Kasten was notorious for hating to fire people, as if the potential to upgrade a position wasn’t worth giving off the impression that his organization was in turmoil. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Looking at the starting pitching matchup, the Dodgers had the clear advantage in sending Greinke to square off against the erratic Edinson Volquez on June 22. But in a testament to Mattingly’s rotten luck, Volquez took a no-hitter into the sixth inning. He then regressed to his usual self, however, walking the bases loaded and allowing a run to score on a Skip Schumaker groundout. The Dodgers hung four more on San Diego in the sixth behind an Adrian Gonzalez home run and two Padre errors. That cushion was more than enough for Greinke, who gave the Dodgers eight dominant innings, allowing just one run in his last frame of work. The next day Los Angeles beat San Diego 3–1 on back-to-back ninth-inning blasts from Gonzalez and Hanley Ramirez. Then they went home to play the Giants and won the next game and the game after that. And when Kenley Jansen fooled San Francisco’s pinch-hitter Brandon Belt with a cut fastball that caused him to pop out to short to end the game the following night on June 26, the Dodgers completed the series sweep and took their fifth game in a row. The home crowd erupted with full throats usually reserved for playoff victories, as if sweeping their rivals meant that after months of misery the season was not lost. Mattingly’s decision to make Jansen the closer had paid immediate dividends. Jansen had struck out twenty-eight since his last walk; he hadn’t walked a batter in six weeks.

  The mood in the Dodgers’ locker room seemed to lighten a tick with each victory, as if someone were controlling the dimmer switch where players dressed. Kershaw had started the June 26 game and gave up two runs in eight innings before turning the ball over to Jansen. The Dodgers’ ace had walked Giants second baseman Marco Scutaro to lead off the top of the fourth inning, then given up a home run to catcher Buster Posey. Under normal circumstances Kershaw would have berated himself post-game for walking a weak hitter before an opposing team’s best player. But after the game Kershaw stood in front of his locker and smiled. Because of how rotten the season’s first eleven weeks were, this winning streak felt better to him than a shutout ever did. “Winning does a lot,” he said. “It puts aside a lot of differences, it puts aside bad blood.” He caught himself and added: “Not that we had any of that.” By the time the Fourth of July rolled around, the club that had been left for dead had won ten of eleven. Meanwhile, the other teams in the division were collapsing. On June 22 the last-place Dodgers trailed the rest of the NL West by a combined 28.5 games. By Independence Day they had trimmed that deficit to 2.5.

  As the Dodgers starters began to get well, the club’s front office started cutting bait on players who weren’t performing. After Hanley Ramirez returned from the disabled list the day after Puig’s call-up, opening-day shortstop Justin Sellers played only one more game for the Dodgers’ big-league club. They released backstop Ramon Hernandez and third baseman Luis Cruz, installed rookie Tim Federowicz as backup catcher, and put Uribe back at the hot corner. They designated reliever Matt Guerrier for assignment, then traded him to Chicago for Carlos Mármol. That move surprised many around the team, since Cubs president Theo Epstein was thought still to be smarting over Colletti’s reneging on an agreement the two men made the previous summer to send pitcher Ryan Dempster to Los Angeles. Some insiders thought Epstein was so angry that he would try to avoid trading with Colletti again. But the Guerrier-for-Marmol swap was much smaller stakes, and it was executed at the behest of the Cubs’ catching coach and Joe Torre’s godson, Mike Borzello—the same guy who had encouraged Kershaw to throw a slider years earlier when he worked for the Dodgers.

  Then, on July 6, the Dodgers traded three minor-league pitching prospects to the Marlins for starter Ricky Nolasco. That mo
ve turned out to be deft. After trotting out middling bush leaguers to replace injured members of their rotation only to watch them get torched during the first few months of the season, the Dodgers were much better with Nolasco on the mound as their number-four starter. The club won ten of his first twelve starts. To help things along, the Dodgers got Matt Kemp and Carl Crawford back, too. Kemp’s return was short-lived, however. After just ten games back from his hamstring injury, he felt something in his left shoulder pull, and landed back on the disabled list. But this time the Dodgers kept winning.

  A month after their brawl with the Diamondbacks the Dodgers flew to Arizona on July 8 with a newfound swagger in their step. Perhaps Puig’s confidence was rubbing off. He had good reason to be cocky. That day, he became only the second player since 1950 to hit over .400 through his first 130 major-league at-bats. When he collected his second hit of the game in the fifth inning, his average stood at .415. Each time Puig stepped into the batter’s box at Chase Field, the Arizona faithful booed him louder than they cheered any of their own players.

  • • •

  While hecklers had no problems shouting Puig down, nobody in the Dodgers’ organization wanted to be the bad cop. He often arrived to the ballpark late and wasn’t punished for it. He made reporters stand by his locker and wait an hour to interview him, only to tell them through a PR person that he wasn’t talking that day. He tested limits of behavior like a small child, and was smart enough to learn quickly that he could get away with a lot. Team rules became optional because breaking them brought no consequences. Some Dodger players who were frustrated with Mattingly’s reluctance to discipline Puig wondered if he was not free to do so without the approval of the front office. Puig, it seemed, was Kasten’s baby. After all, it was Kasten who gave the go-ahead to sign him for a hefty sum that was mocked by the rest of the league in what was turning out to be a genius move. Puig was the feather in the new ownership group’s cap. Did the Dodgers really want to bench a guy they were building a marketing campaign around?

  Mattingly had good reason to avoid being a disciplinarian when it came to Puig. He had witnessed firsthand what happened with Matt Kemp when Joe Torre went all tough love on him, and he couldn’t afford to alienate Puig in the same way. “He’s not a bad kid,” Mattingly said before a game during that series in Arizona when a reporter asked him for a character assessment. While Mattingly’s affection toward Puig seemed genuine, that warmth was no doubt influenced by the fact that the kid had helped him keep his job. As Mattingly defended Puig that day in the Chase Field dugout, Puig was taking batting practice some thirty feet away and launching home runs off the scoreboard.

  Did it fall on Colletti, himself a former public relations man, to tell Puig to show up on time? One of the biggest misconceptions about Puig was that he was a dumb, naïve kid thrown into a new culture without a clue of how to handle himself. In reality, despite the language barrier, Puig was able to read situations well and manipulate those around him to get his way. Most rookies do what they are told because they’re worried about making waves. But Puig never acted like a rookie in the clubhouse. When the Dodgers’ PR staff asked him to do interviews, he often shrugged, knowing they were optional for him. He also seemed to have a photographic memory, especially when it came to slights. When an out-of-town reporter lobbed a question he didn’t like at him after a game at Dodger Stadium, Puig looked at the man and said: “You asked me that question at Yankee Stadium a few weeks ago.” It had been six weeks. He had not forgotten.

  One reporter who had covered famous players on the Dodgers beat for decades—from Valenzuela to Piazza and Nomo and Manny Ramirez—said he had never seen anything like Puig’s distaste for reporters. In fairness to Puig, the media demands were so excessive that if he had honored every request he would not have had time to eat or sleep or hit. But the club did him no favors with the press by allowing him to make up rules as he went along. When Fernando Valenzuela was a rookie, to help him deal with the onslaught of reporters the Dodgers made him available via press conference before the first game of every series, and after each of his starts. The media was to leave him alone the rest of the time, so that he might have room to breathe. This worked out well for everyone involved. If a writer complained about Valenzuela’s unavailability, the club could say, “Well, you should have been there Monday when he talked.” The Dodgers set no such parameters with Puig. But even if their public relations staff had tried to fix a schedule like that, it seemed questionable that Puig would do what they told him to. Most fans don’t care if an athlete gets along with a newspaper reporter, and that’s reasonable. But because Puig was now the most talked-about player in the game, and his past was such a question mark and he shared nothing about himself, the people he blew off were left scrambling to fill in the blanks. Puig’s fear that the media would bury him became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  This became evident when a national television reporter went to San Francisco the weekend before the Arizona series to film an interview with Puig about his first month in the big leagues. Whether Puig had agreed to do it or club officials just hoped he might, when Puig backed out, the reporter was understandably upset. Later that day, Uribe chided Puig within earshot of reporters, saying he should be forthright with media so they could get what they need and leave the locker room. Every clubhouse is open to the press three and a half hours before the game until the team goes to stretch, and then again after the game. Players understood that reporters had to invade their space to do their jobs, but what they hated more than anything was when media stood around in there forever. “Who are you waiting for?” a team’s PR person would ask a lingering scribe, as if to say, If you aren’t waiting to speak to someone in particular and are just loitering then get the hell out. Puig making media wait by his locker for an hour after each game irked the rest of the team, who preferred being naked around as few strangers as possible.

  The conversation between Puig and Uribe had been lighthearted, as Uribe usually took a humorous tack when trying to get his point across. The men were shocked when they learned that the journalist Puig blew off reported that Dodger players were tired of Puig’s act, as evidenced by the affable Uribe screaming at him. The story gained traction because Puig had been involved in a shouting match with the Giants’ fiery closer, Sergio Romo, earlier that day. Romo had retired Hanley Ramirez to end the previous day’s game, and mocked the Dodgers’ shortstop by mimicking the celebratory hand gesture Ramirez made to teammates after someone did something good. Puig took notice. The next day, Puig flipped his bat after singling off Romo in the ninth inning, then taunted him five batters later as he jogged home to score the go-ahead run off an A. J. Ellis double. The drama between Romo and Puig was, for the most part, benign. Though both men often let their emotions get the better of them on the diamond, their actions toward each other were more annoying than malicious. The story about Puig and Uribe was different. Puig heard the report and was hurt by it. The reporter was fluent in Spanish, so he had understood the conversation with Uribe. Puig’s friends say the incident ended any possibility of mending his relationship with the press.

  The young right fielder’s tiff with the reporter continued into Arizona, and got even more personal. Before the first game of the series, Puig was standing behind home plate waiting his turn during batting practice when a group including retired Diamondbacks great and Cuban American Luis Gonzalez walked up. Puig shook Gonzalez’s hand and said hello, then walked off. Gonzalez was not impressed by Puig’s lack of interest in chatting with him. The reporter then went on TV and said that some felt Puig had disrespected his legendary countryman. The “arrogant” narrative marched on. The Dodgers didn’t hire a professional translator for Puig; they asked one of the farm system’s English teachers, Tim Bravo, to do the job. Bravo became a guardian to Puig, living with him, teaching him how to order American food in a restaurant, grocery shop, and use an ATM. While Bravo was off working with Puig, his seven-year-old son, Zechariah, was back h
ome in New Mexico battling a rare type of cancer. Puig was so grateful for Bravo helping him transition to life in the United States that he offered to pay for the boy’s treatments and the family’s living expenses. During the televised report about Puig disrespecting Gonzalez, the reporter also said that Puig often dispatched Bravo to collect phone numbers from women in the crowd during games. Bravo’s wife saw the report and was furious. Though his family needed him during his son’s illness, his wife was okay with him being away to help this extraordinary player assimilate. She knew her husband loved Puig, and that Puig loved him. Plus, it was his job. But now she was hearing on national television that part of that job was to be Puig’s pimp? No. If that’s what you’re doing you have to come home, she told him. So Bravo quit.

  The report about the phone numbers created even stickier problems for Puig, who had quietly been in an on-off relationship with the daughter of a Dodgers minor-league instructor for most of his year in the United States. The young woman was pregnant with his child. Whether or not Puig was carousing didn’t matter. Puig’s teammates thought the dispatch was unfair. Even those around the team who thought Puig’s relationship with a coach’s daughter was a potential train wreck agreed the report was unnecessary and offside. To Puig, this story hurt worse than the fastball he took off the nose from Ian Kennedy. Losing Bravo devastated him. What little trust he had left in the media was gone. The Dodgers beat writers paid the price. His petulance baffled many on the beat who felt they’d done nothing but praise him since his call-up. And it was true. While it would be hard to blame a guy for not wanting to talk about being in a slump, Puig was having the best first month for a rookie since the Great Depression, yet he seemed to detest the very people who reached for superlatives to describe his stellar play.