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

by Molly Knight

  Portly Puig collected just eight hits in forty-eight chances during spring training, with no home runs or stolen bases. It was a small sample size, to be sure, but the Dodgers’ coaching staff wasn’t happy. How could a twenty-three-year-old baseball player whose game relied on his legs already weigh over 250 pounds? What did that say about his commitment to his career? Puig wanted to be the best player in the game, but he also hated working out. Could he ever achieve the former without the latter?

  His off-season had not been as quiet as his bosses had hoped, either. With a reckless driving charge from the summer already on his record, a few days after Christmas Puig was pulled over by a Florida Highway Patrol officer for doing 110 on Alligator Alley through Naples at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. He was contrite, but when the officer noticed he was speeding with three passengers including his mother, he went ballistic.

  “This is your mom? Oh, you’re going to jail. You are putting your mom in danger, oh hell no,” the trooper said to Puig in Spanish, in audio captured by a police recording of the incident. “Why were you driving that fast? You don’t care about anyone’s life in the car?”

  “Yes, I do care. I’m sorry,” Puig responded. “Please forgive me.” But the officer was unmoved.

  “Officer, I’m sorry. I’m begging you, sir,” Puig said. “I’ll do anything. I’ll never drive again. Please don’t take me to jail.”

  After placing Puig in his squad car, the officer returned to Puig’s vehicle to explain to his mother, his cousin, and another passenger why he was being arrested.

  “The reason why we’re in this situation is because he didn’t care about his mother’s life, or your lives, and he’s going to jail,” the cop said over Puig’s mother sobs.

  In the backseat of the squad car, Puig berated himself. “Why do you have to drive so fast, Puig?” he said. “You have to learn.” This marked Puig’s second arrest for reckless driving in eight months. He subsequently promised the Dodgers he would hire a driver.

  By the time the regular season started, Puig had dropped most of the off-season weight. The Dodgers opened the 2014 season in late March with a two-game series against the Diamondbacks in Sydney, Australia. The trip was supposed to help spread baseball fever to Oceania. But it was such a long haul to take on the eve of a grueling 160-game season that Dodger players didn’t want to go. Puig rebounded from his dismal spring, going three-for-ten with a couple of RBIs in two games to help the Dodgers sweep Arizona. His antics also returned to midseason form. After he struck out in the late innings of the second contest he grabbed his back and asked to come out of the game. When reporters inquired about his injury, Mattingly chuckled. He had protected Puig throughout his rookie campaign, but the young slugger’s flair for the dramatic was exhausting his manager’s patience. During the off-season the club had awarded Mattingly a three-year contract extension. He was now free to talk without worrying he’d get fired. “He grabs something every time he takes a swing and misses,” Mattingly said of Puig. “Shoulder yesterday, back today. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do. We may not do anything.”

  Puig’s baserunning blunders had also reappeared in game two. He tried to stretch a single into a double in the third inning and was easily thrown out. And when a pitch in the dirt rolled away from Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero in the sixth, Puig tried to steal third and was nailed again. After the game, reporters heard Puig and Adrian Gonzalez shouting at each other through the clubhouse walls. The chatter of Puig’s imminent implosion got louder, as beat writers began reporting on the rift between Mattingly and management on how to handle their young star. It became clear that Mattingly was ready to rein in his wild horse. But after a year of Puig doing as he pleased without consequences, was it too late?

  Two days after they returned from Australia the Dodgers held their first workout of the season at Dodger Stadium. It was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. Puig walked into the locker room in street clothes at 10:27. Most of his teammates had been there for hours. He muttered something about his back and disappeared into Mattingly’s office with the team’s vice president of medical services, Stan Conte. After Mattingly and Puig discussed Puig’s tardiness, the two men walked into the clubhouse together. Mattingly told Dodger players that Puig wanted to address them. The men fell silent. Puig walked to the center of the room. “Okay,” he said to his teammates, through a translator. “You guys tell me how you want me to play.”

  Juan Uribe went first. He told Puig to just show up on time. Then it was Hanley Ramirez’s turn. He shook his head. “I just don’t want your career to go the way my career went,” he said, of his time with the Marlins. “All my teammates hated me because of the way I played.” It was a profound admission from Ramirez, who despite his superstar status was still hurt by the way things had ended in Miami. Ramirez had spent his time in Los Angeles trying to undo his reputation as an aloof player who hustled only when it suited him and challenged teammates to dugout fistfights when they called him out on it. “I got a fresh start here. I got a chance to make things right,” he said. “This is a great place to play. This is a great place for you to start over.”

  New Dodger Chone Figgins was the next and final person to speak. He told Puig the season was long and that he couldn’t get too high or too low or he’d burn himself out and take his teammates down with him. When Figgins finished, and nobody else spoke up, Puig walked back to his locker. Then Mattingly grabbed him by the arm and said, “We’re all proud of you.” A few Dodgers said it was the strangest team meeting they’d ever been in. It seemed to other players that Mattingly had put Puig up to it, that the fourth-year skipper was trying to get his embattled young star to be more accountable to his teammates so none of them wound up punching him. But did Puig really care what the rest of the locker room thought of him? Some Dodgers talked it over afterward, and though they agreed the summit was awkward, they were optimistic that good could come from it. Many of them had wanted to talk to Puig about how to behave during his rookie season, but they were afraid of how he’d receive it. They hoped that Mattingly’s ploy had at least opened that dialogue.

  Skip Schumaker and Nick Punto had been two of Puig’s teammates most willing to get in his face when he acted like an ass during his first year, but they had both signed with other teams. Though Puig often rolled his eyes at them when they told him to clean it up, his friends said he secretly admired Punto and Schumaker a great deal. They had stood up to him and he respected them for it. Like Punto and Schumaker, Mark Ellis had been one of the most popular players in the clubhouse in 2013, and he too was gone. In exit interviews, the Dodgers’ coaching staff had told the front office how valuable those men were to keeping the locker room from combusting during the first three awful months of the 2013 season, and that they hoped at least two of them were re-signed. The front office let all three walk. That loss was felt deeply by the players.

  • • •

  There is a running joke among baseball writers that every player shows up to spring training proclaiming to be in the best shape of his life, every year. But for many of the 2014 Dodgers it was actually true; the bitter taste of a devastating playoff exit fueled long off-season hours of work. Kershaw spent the winter at home in Dallas adding muscle mass to his shoulders in hopes that the extra strength would give him more endurance in October. Knowing he’d be in a four-man fight for three outfield spots, Andre Ethier showed up as lean as he had been in years. Adrian Gonzalez and Hyun-Jin Ryu shed weight, too. With the end of his Dodger contract nearing and free agency on the horizon, Hanley Ramirez spent the winter months running and hitting and lifting more than usual. He showed up to camp trimmer in the waist and broader in the shoulders, motivated by the knowledge that a monster season could earn him a new nine-figure contract, and optimistic that Los Angeles would be the team to give it to him.

  The Dodgers were in a tough spot with Ramirez. After his turbulent time in Miami, the talented shortstop had found his footing in Los Angeles. He had been a
brilliant player and a good teammate in the year and a half he’d been a Dodger, and he was a favorite of Mark Walter, which was no small detail. Walter had locked up his other favorite player, Clayton Kershaw, to a $215 million deal weeks before spring training began. Ramirez made no secret of his wanting to play out the remainder of his career in Los Angeles. But he had just turned thirty, and his recent injury history was as frightening in its length as it was in its diversity: shoulder, thumb, back, hamstring, ribs. He’d missed seventy games in 2011 and seventy-six more in 2013. At the end of the previous season, he avoided telling reporters what hurt because everything did. Ramirez was seeking a six- or seven-year contract extension. The Dodgers preferred to overpay him for three or so years to save themselves risk on the back end. The two sides began the season at an impasse.

  Clayton Kershaw’s 2014 started out better than Puig’s. On the day he finalized that seven-year deal with an opt-out after five for $215 million, Kershaw explained his thinking. “Five years is the max for me that I could see myself competing at the highest possible level that I’m comfortable with,” he said. “Anything else I don’t think I could’ve—I think it would have been too overwhelming to know—oh my gosh I’ve gotta do it for this much longer. This helps me by knowing that it’s not a sprint by any means but it’s not a marathon, either. It’s probably a win for the Dodgers to some extent because they don’t have to worry about paying for ten-plus years. I think it worked out perfectly for both and I’m really excited about it.”

  Though the trip to Sydney messed with everyone’s biorhythms, Kershaw took the mound on opening day at 2 a.m. Los Angeles time and showed no ill effects, pitching into the seventh inning while allowing one run and striking out seven. But the following day, he felt pain in his upper back that he couldn’t shake. The Dodgers kept his injury quiet. With only two games in Australia and then a week off until their regular season resumed back in the States, club officials hoped Kershaw would heal before anyone found out.

  He didn’t.

  Even if Kershaw had not just signed the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, he would still have hated to start the season on the disabled list. The money just made it worse. Two days before the Dodgers’ stateside opener, Kershaw told Mattingly he was pain-free and wanted the ball. Mattingly was skeptical. The last thing he or anyone in the Dodgers’ front office wanted was for Kershaw to hurry back and hurt himself worse. The training staff had come under fire the year before for missing the severity of Matt Kemp’s ankle injury, and for letting him rush back too soon after shoulder and hamstring woes. The team’s poor physical health had sent it spiraling into last place and caused hurt feelings among training staff that lingered. Keeping a roster healthy over a 162-game season was a tall task. Preventing injury to a room full of veterans with dicey medical histories was damn near impossible. At the end of the 2013 season, the Dodgers fired their strength coach, and their beloved trainer, Sue Falsone, resigned.

  The Dodgers’ 2014 opening day roster cost $240 million to field, ending the Yankees’ fifteen-year streak of having the highest payroll in baseball. L.A.’s starting lineup was packed with talent again, and the principal cast remained the same. The only major change the club made was replacing sure-handed second baseman Mark Ellis with the speedy youngster Dee Gordon. Originally, that spot was supposed to go to power-hitting Cuban refugee Alex Guerrero, whom the Dodgers signed to a four-year, $28 million contract in the off-season. But the coaching staff was surprised to find during spring training that the club’s international scouting department had overlooked a key detail: Guerrero couldn’t field the position. So they called on the diminutive Gordon to take over second base full-time. Even though Gordon had struggled to hit major-league pitching in his brief stints with the club, the Dodgers had little choice as the organization’s depth remained shallow. It would still take years before the new ownership group could replenish the farm system depleted by the McCourt regime; their newfound cash infusion could provide only a Band-Aid. After Ricky Nolasco left L.A. to sign a multiyear deal with Minnesota, Josh Beckett returned from his injury-plagued 2013 season to replace him as the Dodgers’ number-four starter behind Kershaw, Greinke, and Ryu. The club also signed veteran starter Dan Haren to fill out its rotation. But if any of their starting pitchers got hurt, the list of potential minor-league replacements offered them very little in the way of a safety net.

  The day before the stateside opener, Kershaw played catch in the outfield at Petco Park in San Diego with head trainer Stan Conte, taking a few steps back after each throw so that he’d have to hurl the ball harder and farther each time. After toss number twenty-seven Kershaw felt a twinge in his back and stopped. The next day, a week after his twenty-sixth birthday, Clayton Kershaw was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his career.

  He fought the decision, but the Dodgers were right to be cautious. The left upper back muscle he strained was responsible for holding his rotator cuff in place. If he pitched with a weakened upper body and it allowed muscle or tendon to tear in his shoulder, the injury could jeopardize his career. Spring training lasts about six weeks. The Dodgers had been forced to cut their camp two weeks short to go to Australia. Some wondered if the abrupt spring coupled with the fourteen-hour flight to Sydney contributed to Kershaw’s injury, which made them even more bitter about the trip. The morning Kershaw was placed on the DL, he was the first Dodger to arrive at the ballpark. He jogged to the outfield grass by himself armed with a stopwatch. He couldn’t pitch, but he could time his sprints. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He was anxious to avenge the end of his previous season. To sit and do nothing but wait to heal was torture.

  For Matt Kemp, the wait had been long enough. Having to watch his team go on that record run the previous summer without him only to be eliminated by the Cardinals just two wins from the World Series (again without him) had been a nightmare. Feeling himself slip from being one of the stars of baseball to a mere afterthought on his own team had been worse. If there was one good thing that came out of his freak ankle injury it was that it gave his shoulder the rest it needed to heal fully. As the 2014 season approached, Kemp could finally swing the bat with his arms at full extension with no pain. Baseballs he hit once again screamed toward the outfield fence and over it. He was back.

  The same teammates who months before had pointed out that the Dodgers played .800 ball without Kemp were now buzzing about how great he looked at the plate in batting practice. To be extra cautious, the Dodgers held him out of their first five games of the season, but told him he would be back in the lineup for the home opener against the Giants. But when Kemp arrived at Dodger Stadium that morning for the one o’clock start, Mattingly summoned him into his office. He had Conte break the news: Kemp wouldn’t be starting after all. They blamed it on his ankle, and told him they wanted to work him back into the mix slowly to protect him from getting hurt again. Kemp would get a chance to pinch-hit that day, but the club’s medical team wasn’t yet comfortable with him running around in the outfield.

  Kemp was furious. He was convinced he was healthy and that the coaches and trainers knew it, too. He felt they were feigning concern over his ankle as a way to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they still had four starting outfielders. Some of his teammates wondered if he was right. The Dodgers were 4-1 so far without Kemp, and perhaps Mattingly didn’t want to tinker with the lineup that was working. Many of his teammates felt bad for him: after Kemp had waited months to play again, they didn’t think it was fair that Mattingly waited until that morning to tell him he wouldn’t be in the lineup. Kemp sat at his locker with his head down and thumbed through text messages on his phone. Ramirez saw him slumped down in his chair by himself and yelled: “Matt Kemp! Matt Kemp! Why you no talk today? In San Diego you wouldn’t shut up!” But Kemp ignored him. “What’s wrong with him?” Ramirez wondered aloud. Then Mitch Poole posted the lineup card next to Ramirez’s locker. The shortstop ran his index finger down the list o
f names, and saw Kemp’s wasn’t one of them. “Oh,” he said. “So that’s why he’s so sad.”

  As the team took the field to stretch at 9:40, Kemp sat by himself in the dugout for a few minutes to watch. The last two years had been filled with disastrous injuries. Now he was living a different kind of hell. The idea of watching the Dodgers’ home opener from the bench as a healthy bystander made him sick to his stomach. But the club had bigger problems than Kemp’s hurt feelings.

  Yasiel Puig had gone missing.

  When twenty-five players and a dozen coaches and trainers take the field to stretch before every game, it’s difficult to notice who isn’t there if you’re not looking for him. Puig usually hit in the first group with four of the other best hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup. Group One came and went. He was nowhere to be found, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Uribe pulled Kemp aside and told him that even if Puig did show up, Kemp would be starting in his place, so he had better get his head right.

  While all of this was going on, Mattingly—who had no idea that Puig wasn’t at Dodger Stadium—was busy describing to the media why Kemp was benched. Tim Wallach, the new Dodgers bench coach, jogged back into the clubhouse to find Mattingly. It had been only a week since Puig had stood in the center of the Dodgers’ locker room and asked his teammates to tell him how they wanted him to behave, and now he was late to opening day.

  At 10:30, Puig finally emerged from the dugout and jogged onto the field, some fifty minutes after batting practice had started. He apologized to his teammates as they shagged fly balls and asked Adrian Gonzalez what he thought. “I think,” Gonzalez said, “that you need to get your ass here on time.” Puig told Mattingly that he’d been confused about what time he was supposed to arrive at the field, as he thought the game started at 5 p.m. The Dodgers’ traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, had texted players with game-time information, as he always did. But Puig had changed his phone number after the Australia series and didn’t tell anyone. And even though it was his first home opener as a big leaguer, he hadn’t bothered to check what time the game started. Some of Puig’s teammates who worried about his safety had already wondered if this was the day the cartel got him. After he showed up in one piece, the coaching staff debated what to do with him. Mattingly yanked Puig from the lineup and replaced him with Kemp.