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

by Molly Knight

  It was an unnecessary headache for the Dodgers’ skipper. He’d angered Kemp by benching him earlier under the premise that the training staff didn’t think his ankle was strong enough to patrol the outfield. And now that Puig was grounded, Kemp’s ankle was fine? Kemp was upset with Mattingly, Mattingly was mad at Puig, and it was only opening day. If Mattingly couldn’t get Puig to change, he was determined to change the way he managed him. A year earlier Puig had shown up late for stretch before that game in Miami and Mattingly benched him only to sub him into the late innings and watch him hit the game-tying home run. Because the incident obviously hadn’t taught Puig anything, Mattingly told his coaching staff that this time he intended to keep the young right fielder on ice the entire game to send a message. If management got mad at him for holding Puig out on opening day, Mattingly didn’t care. The kid was still the prize signing of the new ownership’s group tenure, and a symbol of how smart they had been to sign him when other teams balked. They had built a marketing campaign around Puig, and millions of dollars were at stake. But management supported Mattingly’s decision to bench him. At some point, regardless of his talent, he was going to have to learn to abide by the rules. The next day, Puig apologized to Mark Walter on the field during batting practice.

  The Giants jumped out to an 8–0 lead. Kemp misplayed a ball hit to him in center in the first inning, allowing a run to score. An inning later, he attempted to make a running catch, but the ball jarred loose as he crashed into the wall. Fans in the left-field bleachers began chanting “We Want Puig.” But Mattingly kept Puig on the pine. It was the first time ever that all four outfielders were healthy for a whole nine innings, and Puig didn’t figure to be the odd man out for long. After the game, Kemp affirmed his stance. “I want to play every day,” he said.

  Two games later, Kemp clubbed two home runs off Giants starter Matt Cain during a nationally televised Sunday night game. After the game he didn’t mince words. “I know I can hit,” he said. “Opposing pitchers know it, too.” Uribe chimed in with his textbook ribbing: “Hallelujah, Matt! Hallelujah! It was time for you to do something for this team.”

  With four healthy outfielders, Mattingly was now juggler-in-chief. He told the media that he believed the best three players would eventually distinguish themselves, and he was right. With Puig entrenched in right field and not going anywhere, and Matt Kemp hitting well enough to nail down the job in center, Crawford and Ethier began sharing time in left. It was an expensive platoon. The two men were paid $36 million combined in 2014, which was more than any single player in the league earned. Their time-share might have worked if they could spell each other against left-handers and righties. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, neither of them hit lefties. The coaching staff settled on Crawford as the starting left fielder because he was faster and more dynamic, and they thought he put together tougher at-bats. To Mattingly’s relief, Ethier showed exceptional class in handling his new bench role, telling reporters he wanted to do whatever he could to help the team win, and in not undermining the clubhouse with a sour attitude.

  Then, on May 22, with Zack Greinke on the mound in Queens versus the Mets, Kemp let two balls sail over his head in center and misplayed a third into a triple. The coaching staff knew that after devastating injuries to his ankle and both hamstrings, Kemp had nowhere near the speed he used to possess in center field. They didn’t expect Willie Mays—but they did hope he would put in the work to improve. The previous year when Hanley Ramirez was coming back from his right thumb injury he took dozens of extra ground balls at shortstop every day with his good hand to stay sharp. Kemp had often struggled to read the ball’s trajectory off the bat, but in the past he had enjoyed the luxury of speed to compensate when he was slow reacting. With bum wheels he was a different player.

  After the game, Mattingly called Kemp into a closed-door meeting and informed him he was no longer the team’s center fielder, and asked him to start shagging balls in left. Kemp was angry. Mattingly stressed to him that this change wasn’t permanent, that he’d have the opportunity to earn back his job, but Kemp didn’t take any solace in those words. Had the compromised bone in his ankle been found right when he injured it he could have had surgery in July instead of October and already be back at full strength. He had sacrificed his body by smashing into walls for this team and this is how they were repaying him? He felt stranded on his own little island again; he didn’t want to play in left.

  The standoff began. Los Angeles played three games in Philadelphia and then headed home to take on the Reds on May 26. Kemp stayed on the bench. After he entered his second series in the doghouse his agent, Dave Stewart, aired his frustrations to the press. “In my opinion, not playing for four straight days is a little harsh,” he said. “Two years ago this guy ran into a wall, literally, for the ball club. He came back and injured his hamstrings, then his ankle. They feel he’s missing a step. When I played if you gave one-hundred percent and got hurt you have the right to come back and play your position.” At that point in the season, the Dodgers weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great, either. They had posted a 28-24 record and sat in second place behind San Francisco, five games out.

  Kemp might have remained on the bench even longer had Carl Crawford not sprained his ankle. But on May 28, Kemp was back in the lineup in left field. He had faced many watershed moments during his nine-year career, but perhaps none was as critical to his future with the club. “It could be his last chance to prove us right or wrong,” one Dodger staff member said before the game. “If he doesn’t step up, I guess it’ll be time to move on.”

  When Kemp shifted over to left field he was stuck in an 0-for-20 slump. The Dodgers lost three in a row and the Giants kept winning. San Francisco had cruised out to a 36-19 record, the best in baseball. And unlike the Diamondbacks team that the Dodgers overtook the previous year, this Giants squad didn’t appear to be smoke and mirrors. After all, they had won two World Series championships in the last four years. The Dodgers would need vintage Kemp to catch them.

  • • •

  They would need Kershaw, too.

  He had returned from the disabled list on May 6 and appeared healthy, shutting out a very good Nationals team over seven innings and striking out nine. Though he downplayed the damage his NLCS collapse inflicted on his psyche, that failure seemed to change his demeanor on the mound. Before, he was content to best hitters with his creativity. Now he pitched mad. In his third start back from the disabled list on May 17, he tossed the worst game of his career, giving up seven earned runs in an inning and two-thirds of work against the Diamondbacks. He was so irritated afterward that he vowed to A. J. Ellis that he would never hang another breaking ball again. In the first 75 innings he pitched in 2014 he struck out 100 batters and walked just 9. It was the fewest walks issued against 100 strikeouts in franchise history. (The previous record was 19, set by Sandy Koufax in 1965.)

  On July 4, Kershaw’s ERA dipped below two and would remain there for the rest of the season. Only eight pitchers in history had won three or more Cy Young Awards. Kershaw was hoping to become the ninth. At one point, he had a streak of forty-one consecutive scoreless innings. Ellis described how Kershaw had gotten even better. “He used to throw maybe ten pitches or so a game that a hitter could actually do something with,” he said. “Now he maybe throws three.” The left-hander did not load the bases until August 27, his twenty-second start of the season. He escaped the one-out jam without giving up a run.

  On June 18, an otherwise unremarkable summer evening at Dodger Stadium, Kershaw nicked the corners of the strike zone with fastball after fastball, and used his slider and curve to knock the legs out from under Colorado hitters. Despite everything he had achieved in his young career, Kershaw had never come close to throwing a no-hitter. He took one into the ninth that night, and Ellis called the pitches behind home plate with tears in his eyes. When Kershaw struck out Corey Dickerson to end the game, he stood on the mound with his arms raised to the sky. His f
inal line read nine innings, no runs, no hits, no walks, and fifteen strikeouts. It was the second-best nine-inning game score from a pitcher in major-league history, trailing only Kerry Wood’s twenty-strikeout one-hitter in 1998. Kershaw had needed only 107 pitches.

  It would have been a perfect game, too, had Hanley Ramirez made a play on a ground ball hit to him in the seventh. Ramirez fielded the tough hop in plenty of time but threw the ball away, which drew an error. It wasn’t an easy play, but it was one most major-league shortstops would have made. By many statistical measures, Ramirez was the weakest defensive shortstop in the game, and the myriad injuries he had sustained during his first two seasons with the Dodgers did not help his fielding range. To his credit, Ramirez told club officials he was willing to move off the position and over to third base as long as he didn’t have to keep shifting back and forth. But the Dodgers still had Uribe at the hot corner, and the veteran infielder was quietly excelling at the position and hitting well. “I just want to get my four at-bats every day,” Ramirez said before the season. The Dodgers wanted that, too. They needed Ramirez’s bat in the lineup, but in reality he was probably best stashed in left field or at designated hitter. And since the Dodgers didn’t get the benefit of a DH in the National League and were already trying to cram four outfielders into three spots most of the time, they were forced to keep Ramirez at short.

  Ramirez’s defensive deficiencies would perhaps not have been as bad if he were the only weak link in the field. But the Dodgers were paying their five outfielders (including backup Scott Van Slyke) a combined $62 million for 2014—and they still didn’t have a true center fielder. The bottleneck would have been best solved by an off-season trade of one of the outfielders, but the big contracts of Kemp, Ethier, and Crawford scared off potential suitors. Because of this mess, the team ranked last in fielding in center, too, which meant their defense up the middle was horrendous. It was especially frustrating because Los Angeles was paying its starting pitchers $64 million in 2014 and fielded a weak defense behind them.

  Hanley Ramirez, it was becoming clear, was a shadow of his former self. The Dodgers had shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars since Ramirez was traded to the team in the summer of 2012, and now that his contract was expiring, they had suddenly tightened their purse strings. When it became obvious the Dodgers didn’t want him back, Ramirez sulked and often refused to speak to the media. He isolated himself from teammates, too, preferring to shuffle between the training room and sitting alone at his locker. Gone were the inspirational “Attitude is everything” quotes he had posted all over his social media accounts the year before. “I wish I could play one day without pain,” he said in a rare revealing moment. Sometimes he would smile and joke before games like the Hanley of 2013. Other times a person might say hello and ask how he was doing and get snapped at. Ramirez’s mood swings exhausted teammates and staff, and Mattingly admitted his contract uncertainty had created a distraction in the clubhouse.

  Because of the knock on him that he couldn’t stay healthy, Ramirez vowed that in his last season before free agency he would try to play in as many games as possible. While on the surface it was an admirable endeavor, it wound up hurting the team. Ramirez kept getting injured almost as often as he had the year before, but he balked at going on the disabled list, in hopes that whatever ailed him wouldn’t take the full fifteen days to heal. If Ramirez was unavailable but not on the DL, that left Mattingly with one less able body on the bench—sometimes for up to a week. When Ramirez did play, many around the club didn’t think he gave maximum effort in the field, since diving for a baseball might result in injury that might hurt him in free agency. Skip Schumaker had signed with the Reds in the off-season, and when his new club played the Dodgers he gave a Cincinnati paper a telling quote. “That lineup is very good,” Schumaker said. “When certain guys want to play it’s even better.”

  Schumaker wasn’t wrong. It was obvious Ramirez was playing hurt or with hurt feelings, and he just wasn’t the same guy he had been the year before. Through the first two months of the 2014 season, Ramirez’s on-base plus slugging was .772, some 270 points lower than his 2013 output. An unhappy Ramirez had hit .240 in his final two seasons with the Marlins. Some wondered if his good mood during 2013 was just an act, and if his Miami malaise was who he really was.

  On June 3, a year to the day after his call-up, Puig was named the National League’s Player of the Month. During the month of May, he had led the league in batting average, home runs, RBI, on-base percentage, and slugging. Dee Gordon excelled, too. Though he wasn’t even expected to make the opening day roster when he first showed up to spring training, Gordon seized the opportunity when the job became open and flourished. Batting leadoff, he posted a .360 on-base percentage during the first six weeks of the season and terrorized opposing pitchers on the base paths. He was named to the NL all-star team and would finish the season with a major-league-leading sixty-four stolen bases and twelve triples. Puig was named to his first all-star team, too. He had a star shaved into the side of his head to mark the occasion.

  The day after Puig won player of the month, the Dodgers trailed the Giants in the NL West by eight and a half games, despite their rotation and their lineup being better than San Francisco’s. Mattingly was angry. “I’m sick of talking about individual players,” he said before the game. “It seems like we keep talking about one guy or two guys instead of how we can win the game as a team. Last year when we got rolling it felt like we had a true team focus. Like we were a collective group.”

  He continued: “The focus needs to just be on winning, and we haven’t felt that. I can’t pinpoint what it is, but the feeling just isn’t here,” he said. “I want guys to have a great season. I tell them that. There’s nothing wrong or selfish about wanting to have a great season because it helps everyone. Just take a walk. Swing at strikes. No matter who gets the game-winning hit it doesn’t matter.”

  When asked for his thoughts on why the Dodgers had already fallen so far behind the Giants, Mattingly was blunt: “It’s just being basically shitty,” he said. “We’re just not that good.”

  • • •

  With Kemp moved to left, Mattingly inserted Ethier into center field and hoped for the best. But Ethier didn’t belong there, either. And after a particularly rough day in the field in Detroit, Mattingly fired Ethier from the position as well. The coaching staff wanted the front office to call up Joc Pederson, the organization’s top prospect, to play center. Pederson was not only the best defensive center fielder in the Dodgers’ organization, he was also tearing through Triple-A. In 2014, the twenty-two-year-old lefty would become the first player in the Pacific Coast League in eighty years to hit thirty home runs and steal thirty bases.

  But Pederson still struck out too much. Also, there was a general sense among the Dodgers’ coaching staff that Colletti remained terrified of youth even though Puig had helped save their season the year before. Mattingly had tried to force the front office into calling Pederson up by starting the club’s fifth outfielder, Scott Van Slyke, in center even though he wasn’t used to the position, either. The coaching staff thought about playing Puig in center, too, but they worried that if they made him captain of the outfield he would run over teammates. They were especially concerned for the survival of Gordon, who weighed ninety pounds less than Puig. But when the front office stalled in calling up Pederson, Mattingly moved Puig to center, Kemp to right, and Crawford back to left.

  Then, some luck.

  The Giants went into free fall, thanks to a couple of key injuries and some atrocious play. The Dodgers caught them by mid-July and went into the all-star break with the best record in the National League. “It doesn’t feel that way, though, does it?” Stan Kasten said of his team’s place at the top of the NL at the time. He was right. While the 2013 team had rolled off a 42-8 stretch of baseball where they had seemed invincible, this club had quietly worked its way to the top, never losing more than three games in a row but never
winning more than three in a row, either. Kemp was still unhappy, and Dave Stewart said his client would prefer to be traded to a team that played him in center. But Kemp eventually settled into his new position, and began mashing the ball as he did before his injuries. In the sixty-four games after the all-star break, Kemp hit .309 with an on-base percentage of .365 and slugging clip of .606. His seventeen home runs over that span would have put him on pace for forty-three over a full season—four more than he had hit during his runner-up MVP campaign in 2011. “He would never admit it, but I think he’s comfortable in right,” said one teammate.

  But to recapture his form at the plate Kemp had to swallow his pride. During the first half of the season, he was still having trouble driving the ball with any consistency because of the bad habits he had developed to overcompensate for his injuries. So when the Dodgers returned from the all-star break with a series in St. Louis on July 18, Kemp went to the team’s hitting coaches and asked for help. Mark McGwire and John Valentin had noticed that back when Kemp was one of the most feared hitters in the National League his batting stance was much more upright. His leaning over the plate made it difficult for him to hit inside pitches, and also forced him to yank his elbow back farther than optimal when he swung, which sapped his power. McGwire and Valentin urged him to widen the distance between his feet and change the line from his head to his feet from eleven o’clock to five o’clock back to 12/6. It worked. In a way, Kemp looked as if he had unclenched his stance; his more relaxed approach helped him wait on the ball, which put him in a better position to drive it. On August 4, Kemp was named the National League’s player of the week. On August 6, he hit his sixth home run in nine games.