The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (12 page)

A bear of a man, Uribe became the Dodgers’ unofficial mascot. Bored by talk of hitting mechanics, he summed up his approach in the batter’s box like this:
“I see the ball, I hit the ball.” He could make anybody in the room laugh with his penchant for self-deprecating jokes, and he had a black belt in teasing teammates, knowing exactly how far he could push a joke before he ran the risk of hurting feelings.
“He’s the best teammate I ever played with,” said Matt Kemp, a frequent target of Uribe’s ribbing. But as beloved as Uribe was, he still wasn’t hitting. And so on opening day he took his spot on the pine.

Rounding out the bench were veteran utility infielders Jerry Hairston Jr., Nick Punto, and Skip Schumaker. Along with Uribe, those four owned a combined five World Series rings, which gave the club a lift if championship experience meant anything, because no one in the Dodgers’ starting lineup had any. They weren’t the stars of the team, but they were the glue. Hairston was months away from retiring and taking a position as a broadcaster with the team’s new television network. Schumaker and Punto became close friends while playing together for the Cardinals and carpooled to Dodger Stadium together an hour up Interstate 5 from Orange County every day.

While Carl Crawford, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier took their places in left, center, and right, respectively, A. J. Ellis fastened his catcher’s mask to his face and squatted into a crouch behind home plate. Like Luis Cruz, Ellis had toiled in the minors for the better part of a decade before the Dodgers gave him a real shot at starting in the majors. The front office had teased him by calling him for various cups of coffee during the 2008, ’09, ’10, and ’11 seasons, but each time he felt like he was on the verge of winning the starting job, the team would sign a veteran or trade for someone else’s backup and he was blocked
again. Because minor leaguers are paid in pounds of peanut shells,
his wife, Cindy, had supported their family during the early years of their marriage by working as a pastry chef at a resort during the season and as a caterer in the off-season. When their second child, Luke, was born in May 2010, Ellis was in the midst of his first extended stint as a backup on the major-league roster. Big-league players are allowed to take a few days’ paternity leave after their children are born, and most do. But Cindy encouraged Ellis to stay with the team because she thought it was best for their family.

The next catcher on the Dodgers’ depth chart in the minors was twenty-five-year-old Lucas May, who the Ellises kept hearing was the next big thing. If Ellis took even a day away from the club to be with his family, May would be called up to replace him, and then who knows what could have happened. So, Ellis stayed, and didn’t meet his son until two weeks later. It was worth it. Two months after Luke Ellis was born the Dodgers traded May to the Royals. He appeared in twelve games for Kansas City at the end of the season and never played in the big leagues again. Ellis wouldn’t miss the birth of his third child, however. A few weeks after the 2012 season ended, Ellis was with Cindy in their home outside Milwaukee when her water broke. The two set off for the hospital within minutes but didn’t make it. Audrey Elizabeth Ellis was born in the front seat of the car they had borrowed from Cindy’s father while Ellis was doing 75 mph down the interstate. He didn’t even have a chance to pull over.

During his last few seasons in the minors, when a permanent promotion to the big leagues began to seem less and less likely, Ellis decided he would keep playing in the club’s minor-league system for as long as they’d have him, with the idea that he would transition into coaching when his knees gave out. What Ellis lacked in athleticism he made up for in instinct and intelligence. Knowing full well he couldn’t hit the ball as hard or as far as many of his teammates, he resolved to turn himself into a tough out. He began memorizing every opposing pitcher’s fastball release point, and studied the window and the
trajectory the ball took toward the batter’s box. Then, based on where that fastball landed in the catcher’s mitt, he would look for the spin of the ball out of the pitcher’s hand to try to determine if it was a curveball, changeup, or slider, and calculate the likelihood that it would be a strike.

A standard home plate is seventeen inches wide. To be called a strike, the ball must pass over it somewhere between the bottom of the batter’s knees and the letters across the chest of his uniform (or wherever the home-plate umpire determines the strike zone to be). To save his career, Ellis decided that if a pitch was not a strike then he would not swing at it. It started when his Single-A manager told him to stop swinging at pitches when the count was 3-1, believing that Ellis had a better chance of walking than getting a hit. He got so good at separating balls from strikes that in his last season in the minors he reached base 47 percent of the time he stepped up to bat, walking fifty times in fifty-nine games. Even if he had to take strikes to achieve his objective he didn’t care. He became determined to see as many pitches as possible to make the opposing pitcher work hard. In 2012, he had led all of Major League Baseball in pitches seen per plate appearance, with an average of 4.44, because, he says:
“There’s no worse feeling than taking a bad swing at a first pitch and making an out and wondering what could have been.” When opposing hitters faced Kershaw, Ellis marveled at how they seemed happier with a broken-bat first-pitch groundout to third base than striking out in an eight-pitch at-bat. He finally won the team’s starting catching job in 2012, at age thirty-one. While still a young man by any other standard, it was ancient for a guy getting his first crack at a starting job—especially at a position so physically demanding.

With Kershaw as his best friend, Ellis’s life’s work had in many ways become more about ushering along the Hall of Fame dreams of others than chasing his own personal accolades, which was fine with him. But he didn’t win the starting job on the super team because he was a nice guy. In 2012 he broke out and posted one of the best seasons of any catcher in the National League, hitting thirteen home runs
to go along with a .373 on-base percentage—the best of any Dodgers regular. Still, entering the 2013 season Ellis knew that nothing was guaranteed. Should he falter, his backup, a twenty-five-year-old rookie named Tim Federowicz, felt more than ready to take his spot.

The Dodgers had a starting rotation problem. Following Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-Jin Ryu they employed five guys jockeying for the remaining two spots, each with his own set of problems. Josh Beckett was healthy and penciled in as the fourth starter when the Dodgers began the season, but
everyone knew it was only a matter of time before his body fell apart. Veterans Chris Capuano and Aaron Harang were interchangeable back-end-rotation types to whom teams gave $5 million a year in hopes that they’d give up fewer than five runs a game. Chad Billingsley, a talented young right-hander who came up through the Dodgers system, had spent the off-season nursing his injured pitching elbow, hoping to avoid the dreaded Tommy John surgery that would knock him out of the game for a year or longer. And at thirty-seven and already gray-haired, Ted Lilly was often mistaken for a coach by visiting reporters.
Hitters had no trouble identifying his pitches and crushing them for home runs, however. He was injured, too. So while Billingsley and Lilly began the season on the disabled list, Harang became the club’s fifth starter after a figurative coin flip, and an annoyed Capuano was sent to the bullpen.

Joining Capuano in the pen was a motley tribe of elder statesmen, a converted catcher, and one kid just old enough to drink. At twenty-one years old, Paco Rodriguez was four years younger than everyone else on the roster. The Dodgers had selected the lefty out of the University of Florida with their second-round pick in the 2012 draft and called him up just three months later, making him the first player from his class to get promoted to the big leagues. The club had good reason for doing that: in addition to his stuff being deceptive because his unorthodox delivery hid the ball longer than usual,
the time bomb in his arm ticked louder than most. The front office felt it was smarter to use the innings he had left in the majors rather than the minors.

Rounding out the staff was Brandon League, a closer about to post the worst season of his life; Ronald Belisario, a Venezuelan whose sinker ball was almost as unpredictable as his
visa issues; J. P. Howell, a jolly redhead who never had an unkind word for anyone until a memorable altercation three months later; veteran Matt Guerrier; and Kenley Jansen, a Caribbean Dutchman who switched positions from catcher to pitcher just four years earlier and was better than all of them.

The men on the Dodgers’ roster owned twenty-six All-Star Game appearances—but more Bentleys and Rolls-Royces than World Series rings.
Only four of them were drafted by the Dodgers, while two additional players were
signed as international prospects. The rest were hired guns, leading one executive to quip that those men looked more like a collection of fancy baseball cards than an actual team. They were also,
to paraphrase Dodger legend Don Drysdale, twenty-five guys who took twenty-four different cabs to the ballpark. The man in charge of player personnel knew they weren’t all going to be friends and he was okay with that. But did they have to figure out a way to get along to win?

“ ‘Getting along’ is probably not the right way to say it, but there needs to be a climate that provides acceptance,” Kasten said of his roster. “You’re not my kind of guy, I’m not your kind of guy, but we can coexist. We have a lot of different guys. We don’t have twenty-five guys going to dinner.”

But it wasn’t Kasten’s job to make this new Dodger team get along. That task fell on Don Mattingly.

•  •  •

For Don Mattingly it had all been a fever dream.

One minute, he was managing a punch-drunk team that was forced to file for bankruptcy because its debt-riddled owner didn’t have the cash to write players checks that wouldn’t bounce. The next, he was penciling in a lineup card full of multimillionaires bought and paid for by multibillionaires who seemed to be handing out gold bars to everyone.

Everyone except him, that is.

Capitalizing on the merriment of McCourt’s departure, the Guggenheim group sold 31,000 season tickets before the 2013 season—an all-time franchise record. Over the course of the next six months the Dodgers would average 46,000 fans every home game, five thousand more than the St. Louis Cardinals, who hosted the second-most spectators. The Dodgers were Major League Baseball’s biggest draw on the road, too, besting the popular Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs. In 2013, MLB averaged 30,514 fans per game across the board. The Dodgers played in front of an average of 40,782 a night.

It wasn’t just McCourt’s exodus that had the viewing public excited, though. The Boston mega-trade for Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett followed the team’s July 2012 acquisition of all-star shortstop Hanley Ramirez, which preceded the signing of superstar starting pitcher Zack Greinke. All this caused Dodger fans to lose their minds.

Mattingly knew what Kershaw would give the Dodgers, so his opening day shutout wasn’t surprising. The southpaw continued his dominance in his second start against the Pirates, tossing seven innings of shutout ball, striking out nine, and giving up two singles. But Kershaw could pitch only every five days. For Los Angeles to make it deep into the playoffs, they would need at least one more starting pitcher who had the stuff to fluster elite teams. That’s why Greinke was so important. His six-year, $147 million contract gave him the highest average annual salary for a pitcher in the game’s history. That figure was made even more remarkable by the fact that the Dodgers intended him to be their number-two starter.

Going into 2013, Kershaw and Greinke made up the most formidable one-two punch of any rotation in the game. But there was a problem. During spring training, Greinke’s throwing elbow started to bark. After tests revealed the damage wasn’t significant enough to warrant surgery, the Dodgers’ front office opted to rest him for a few weeks and cross its fingers. This hiccup meant that Mattingly couldn’t send Greinke out behind Kershaw to face San Francisco for the second
game of the season as he had wanted. He pitched Hyun-Jin Ryu instead, and the Giants shut out the Dodgers 3–0 behind their fantastic young starter, Madison Bumgarner. San Francisco roughed up Josh Beckett to take the rubber game of the series, and the new-look Dodgers ended their first week right where they had finished the previous year, looking up at their rivals. Greinke was activated right after San Francisco left town, and Mattingly handed him the ball to make his Dodger debut at home against the Pirates. The twenty-nine-year-old rightie was terrific in his first game in blue, pitching six and one-third innings of shutout ball, striking out six and walking none. While Mattingly was excited about Greinke’s performance, he knew enough about arm injuries to temper his expectations. The real test would come in Greinke’s second start. After throwing ninety-two pitches at max effort, would his elbow recover enough to do it again five days later?

In many ways Mattingly’s composed temperament was the perfect antidote to Ned Colletti’s mood swings. As good cop to Colletti’s bad cop, the preternaturally patient Mattingly didn’t believe he had to scream to get his point across. When Colletti walked through the locker room the players stiffened, as if they were young boys caught misbehaving by the teacher.
“It’s not the greatest working environment when Ned’s around,” one player said, after the second loss to San Francisco. “The stress is definitely felt from the top down.” But the guys relaxed around Donnie, who felt like one of their own.

That was the other thing: no one called Mattingly “Don,” except for his son Preston, who did so as a joke. To friends, opponents, and his players he was always Donnie. Mattingly had earned the nickname Donnie Baseball during his legendary fourteen-year career with the Yankees, which included a batting title, an MVP, nine Gold Gloves, an impeccable mustache, and his coronation as the most famous player of a generation. But none of those accomplishments mattered as much as what he didn’t have. Like most of the Dodger players he managed, Mattingly had never won a ring. Though the Yankees have won twenty-seven championships—the most in the four major U.S.
sports—Mattingly’s career in pinstripes had wedged cruelly into the club’s longest title drought. In 1981, the year before Mattingly arrived in New York, the Yankees had made it all the way to the World Series before losing to the Dodgers in six games. They would not make the playoffs again until 1995, his last season. They lost to the Mariners in five games in the first round that year, but it wasn’t Mattingly’s fault. In the divisional series he hit .417 with a home run and six runs batted in. Perhaps his best shot at a championship had been the year before. The Yankees led the American League with seventy wins and just forty-three losses when the players went on strike in August, ending the season. It was the first time in ninety years no World Series was played. For Mattingly it was rotten luck. Despite hitting .288 in 1995 and walking more than he struck out, Mattingly retired after the season ended. The Yankees hired Joe Torre as manager the following year and kicked off a run that saw them capture four titles in the next five seasons. Mattingly missed it all.