The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (16 page)

Greinke insisted that hitting Quentin was an accident, but seemed annoyed he even had to dignify the accusation with a response, given that hitting a guy on purpose in that situation would have been pretty dumb. The Padres doubled down on blaming Greinke days later when their CEO, Tom Garfinkel, discussed the brawl during a meeting with season ticket holders, not knowing one of them was recording the session.
“He threw at him on purpose, okay? That’s what happened,” said Garfinkfel, on the audiotape leaked to a reporter. “They can say three-and-two count, 2–1 game, no one does that. Zack Greinke is a different kind of guy. Anyone seen
Rain Man
? He’s a very smart guy. He has social anxiety disorder. He doesn’t interact well with his teammates. He doesn’t really eat meals with his teammates. He spends his life studying how to get hitters out.”

Garfinkel was right about Greinke’s preparation, but he could not have been more wrong about the way Greinke’s teammates felt about him. While it was true he hated talking with strangers and it took a while for him to warm to a new face, when it came to people he knew and liked, Greinke was an impish chatterbox; his friends on the team had a hard time shutting him up. And in a game that often chokes on its own clichés, they found his candor hilarious and refreshing. While Kershaw would rather swan-dive into a vat of acid than shoot the bull on the days he starts, Greinke earned the nickname “Trader Zack” for his propensity to offer fantasy football trades to his teammates right up to the minute he took the mound.

Greinke was vindicated weeks later when Quentin called to apologize for injuring him. “That’s cool, man,” Greinke said.
“But just so you know, if you stand on the plate I’ll hit you again.” Quentin said he understood.

Major League Baseball suspended Quentin for eight games. The
Dodgers would lose Greinke for much longer than that. But it was more than the loss of a great player. Because it happened just a week into the season it felt like a terrible omen, as if their title dreams had been snapped right along with Greinke’s clavicle. It was so badly broken that doctors would have to cut the right-hander open and affix a metal plate to his collarbone to stabilize it. His estimated recovery was six to eight weeks, but that was if everything healed right. In the eyes of many, the brawl was just what the Dodgers needed to bring them together, to turn this wayward band of rich misfits into a team rallying around a shared goal.

Instead, it sent them into free fall.

A
ll winning teams are
alike. Each losing team loses in its own way.

Throwing a round object overhand at 90-plus mph, over and over again, is not something a human limb was ever intended to do. Calling baseball America’s pastime hides the violence of it. At its core the game is, quite literally, an arms race. The teams left standing in October are usually the ones who suffered the fewest elbow and shoulder injuries to their pitching staffs. The Dodgers’ trainers knew this. But they did not account for one of their star pitchers having his collarbone snapped in a brawl.

The San Francisco Giants had won the 2012 World Series because their five starting pitchers missed only two starts combined during the entire 162-game season. Both Colletti and Kasten were disciples of the church of You Can Never Have Too Much Pitching, Never Ever. So, they loaded up on starters.

The Dodgers entered spring training in 2013 with eight healthy starting pitchers, which was three too many in theory, but three too
few in practice. After a slew of injuries, on April 27 Los Angeles was forced to use its ninth different starter, the most the club had employed through twenty-three games in more than seventy years. Its revolving-door rotation could have been described as eclectic, which was a polite term for Frankenstein. By May 14, its disabled list resembled a triage unit in an emergency room: Greinke (collarbone), Billingsley (elbow), Lilly (rib cage), Beckett (groin), and Capuano (calf) were all too injured to pitch. And because the club took the field on opening day with such an embarrassment of riches at the starting-pitcher position, Colletti had traded Aaron Harang to the Rockies for Ramon Hernandez, a thirty-six-year-old backup catcher who would appear in seventeen games for Los Angeles, hit .208, get released, and never play in the big leagues again. The only starting pitchers to survive the first six weeks of the season intact were Kershaw and Hyun-Jin Ryu, and the twenty-six-year-old Korean was struggling to adjust to the schedule of American pitching.

Going into the season, Ryu was the team’s biggest question mark. The big lefty had pitched well for the Hanwha Eagles in South Korea over the past seven seasons, giving up an average of 2.8 runs per nine, and striking out a batter an inning. At six foot two and 255 pounds, Ryu looked a bit like a Korean David Wells. He raised eyebrows by showing up to his first spring training in the United States even heavier, and by throwing fastballs that topped out in the mid-80s. With the idea that he would become their third starter after Kershaw and Greinke, the Dodgers had paid the Eagles $25 million to buy Ryu out of his contract, then gave the pitcher another $36 million to play in Los Angeles for six years. Some baseball analysts who saw him pitch that spring chalked him up to another instance of the Guggenheim group’s lighting money on fire to watch it burn. The criticism caught Ryu off guard. Back home, players used spring training to get into game shape: that was the purpose of it. No one told him that he was supposed to show up to Dodgers camp already at his fighting weight. But there was something else he wasn’t used to that was far more challenging than carb-cutting his belly
away. In Korea, Ryu had pitched every six days. He would be expected to throw every five for the Dodgers, which meant one fewer day for his arm to recover from throwing one hundred pitches as hard as he could. Barring injury, the average MLB pitcher makes between 32 and 34 starts a year. Ryu hadn’t started more than 27 games in a season in six years.

As if losing five starting pitchers to injury and a sixth in a trade over the course of six weeks wasn’t devastating enough, two of them were wiped out by a single pitch. After Greinke broke his collarbone in the melee with San Diego, Capuano replaced him in the rotation. But in his first start, the veteran lefty gave up four runs in the first inning, and was pulled after two. After the game, Mattingly revealed that Capuano was removed because of a sore left calf muscle. Later, the lefty admitted he had injured it sprinting in from the bullpen in a futile attempt to stop Greinke from getting maimed by Quentin.

Chad Billingsley, a promising young righty the Dodgers drafted and developed out of high school, finished the previous year with a tightness radiating from the elbow of his throwing arm that almost always required Tommy John surgery, and its frustrating year-plus recovery time. Ever the optimist, Billingsley instead opted to undergo a relatively new procedure called PRP treatment, in which a patient’s own blood is drawn from his body, whipped and separated into its different components, enriched with an infusion of its own platelets, and reinjected into the problem area like some kind of super healing potion. It didn’t work. Billingsley made two starts, in pain, and then went under the knife, ending his season and his Dodger career.

After he was traded to Los Angeles in that Boston megadeal in 2012, the oft-injured
Josh Beckett told Mattingly that he did not appreciate being removed during the middle of an inning. If the skipper was going to pull him from the game, that was fine, but he didn’t like being yanked off the mound; he’d rather just not start the inning at all. During a game in Baltimore in late April, with the wheels already rattling off the Dodgers’ applecart and their starting rotation in shambles,
Mattingly left Beckett in the game to face Orioles wunderkind Manny Machado with two on and two out in the sixth, trailing 3–1. Machado homered, sealing the Dodgers’ sixth loss in a row.

Because he hadn’t pitched well in spring training, the Dodgers placed thirty-seven-year-old Ted Lilly on the disabled list so that he could toss a few tune-up games in the minors before joining the big club. An angry Lilly told teammates he was healthy, and that the Dodgers were just phantom DL’ing him to buy time to figure out what to do with their poorly constructed roster. But his body wasn’t right. And despite the aches in his back and the tightness in his side, he took the ball anyway—after Greinke, Capuano, and Billingsley went down—to prove a point. His first start, versus the Mets, went well enough. In his second start, the Rockies shelled him. Afterward, Lilly admitted to reporters that he had struggled because he was injured. Mattingly was livid. “It’s fine that he felt it, but he’s gotta say something,” said Mattingly, in one of the first times anyone could remember him blowing up one of his veteran players in the press.

But it wasn’t just the pitching staff that had a hard time staying healthy. One of the Dodgers’ best hitters, Hanley Ramirez, missed all but two games in April after injuring his thumb while playing for the Dominican Republic team in the World Baseball Classic before the season, then missed most of May with a hamstring strain. The club’s starting second baseman, Mark Ellis, sat out for three weeks with a bum quadriceps muscle. On May 8, the Diamondbacks completed a three-game sweep of the Dodgers, which sent Los Angeles to its seventh loss in a row, and a season-low .394 winning percentage (13-20).

The pressure was getting to everyone. Adrian Gonzalez was forced to leave one of those games against the Diamondbacks because his neck hurt. A few of his teammates questioned his toughness behind his back, and
one even put on Gonzalez’s neck brace and wore it around the locker room as a joke when the slugger wasn’t in the room. The criticism that Gonzalez was soft was unfair, as tests on his neck showed
a legitimate injury. But since many players looked to take out their frustrations on a new candidate every day, they ignored the facts.

Each defeat brought with it a new set of questions. The Dodgers had lost a flurry of men to the infirmary, sure, but were the uninjured playing their hardest? The farm system was bereft of international talent thanks to McCourt’s tightfistedness, yes, but where the hell were the young American-born reinforcements? It had been seven years since the Dodgers called up a position player they drafted who became a star (Kemp), and five years since they promoted a homegrown starting pitcher (Kershaw) who stuck in the rotation. In fact, only three pitchers called up to the big leagues post-Kershaw had made more than ten starts for the Dodgers over the previous four seasons combined: Nate Eovaldi, who was then traded for Hanley Ramirez, and Rubby De La Rosa, who was dealt to Boston in the megadeal for Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett, were two of them. (The other, John Ely, started nineteen games for the team from 2010 to 2012, and posted a dismal 5.70 ERA.) While McCourt could be blamed for many of the Dodgers’ deficiencies, the failure to draft and develop amateur players wasn’t all his fault. The club’s weak farm system left a void that could be filled only by aging, expensive free agents, many of them malcontents cast aside by their previous teams. And if those veterans got injured—which was one of the things players in their thirties did best—the Dodgers were toast.

By May 7, the most expensive team in baseball history sat in last place. A
Los Angeles Times
writer marked the occasion by noting that when the
Titanic
sank there was a Guggenheim on board. When the new ownership group took over, Stan Kasten had called the Dodgers a franchise worthy of being written about in all capital letters. Shipwreck headlines weren’t what he had in mind.

•  •  •

The Dodgers’ starting pitching woes wouldn’t have been as devastating if Matt Kemp had been playing like, well, Matt Kemp. But after
the brawl with the Padres, Kemp kept on scuffling, and hit just .182 through the club’s first fifteen games. It wasn’t just his batting average that was so alarming: his power appeared to be gone. “I don’t think he’s hurt,” Mattingly said to a group of reporters before an April game, but everyone knew that wasn’t true. Kemp used to stand upright in the box, tall and intimidating, and calmly wait for a pitch he could drive. Now his aching shoulder forced him to lean out over the plate so he could reach pitches on the outer half, with his bum sticking out behind him as if he were preparing to sit down. The hole in his swing became so pronounced that he even swung and missed at pitches lobbed at him by a machine during batting practice. When Mattingly removed him from the starting lineup to give him a mental day off on April 17, a frustrated Kemp told reporters, “I don’t ever want to sit out.” Mattingly inserted him into the game to pinch-hit with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh. Kemp struck out.

In Joe Torre’s last season as manager of the Dodgers in 2010, Kemp had gone from future of the franchise to chief resident of its doghouse. Colletti criticized his effort on local radio. Matt Kemp was, without question, the most talented offensive player in the organization. Yet many wanted him gone.

After that disastrous season ended, Kemp knew he had to get out of Los Angeles to clear his head. When he packed up his locker and headed to his off-season home in Phoenix to decompress,
he wondered if he would ever come back. Though he had two years remaining on his contract with the Dodgers, his agent did not shy away from suggesting to reporters that his client might be better off in another city surrounded by a supportive organization that could help him reach his full potential.
Potential.
Kemp couldn’t escape that word, which to whoever said it must have felt like a compliment, but to him felt like a euphemism for failure. And here he was, a young black man who could hit the stuffing out of the ball and run like hell, in a sport that was hemorrhaging talented young black men to football and basketball, and nobody seemed to know what to do with him.

Kemp had only ever played for the Dodgers, specifically for old white men, which made him particularly aware of his blackness, as if it were something he ever forgot when he was out on a baseball diamond anyway. Baseball had served as a daily reminder of his race ever since he was a child. Growing up just outside Oklahoma City,
he was always the token black kid on whatever Little League team he played for, unless he convinced his cousin to join the squad to hang out with him, and then there were two black kids. His mother, Judy Henderson, signed him up to play baseball because he needed something to do while she worked overtime as a nurse to support the two of them. That he wound up being good at it was a happy by-product. His Little League teammates nicknamed him “the Big Little Hurt,” after the Hall of Fame slugger Frank Thomas, who was known as the “Big Hurt” both for the number of home runs he hit and for his enormous thigh muscles. (Kemp believes that in retrospect his friends might have just called him that to tease him, because he was chubby.) But as Kemp reached adolescence, the baby fat melted from his frame like candle wax. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he was a smidge under six foot three and chiseled, with electric green eyes on a face that eventually earned him fashion endorsements.