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

by Molly Knight

  Next to the framed lineup card of Kershaw’s first game was the lineup card for his first win. Another wall hoisted his framed all-star jerseys. The ball he hit for a home run on opening day in 2013 sat among other treasures behind a glass case. One of those mementos was a Don Mattingly autograph he acquired as a child, one of the first signatures he ever collected. He opened a closet with binders full of childhood memories his mom had put together for him, and pointed out a fancy desk he had never once used. On that desk sat a poster board Ellen was using to run a pool with her friends to pick the winner of The Bachelor television show. Life for Kershaw went on.

  Though they didn’t yet have children of their own, the Kershaws loved living across the street from that school. It was two blocks from Ellen’s parents’ home, and half a mile from his mother’s. When the lot next door went up for sale they scooped it up, too, thinking it would make for a perfect yard for their future family. Kershaw pointed out a spot where they might add a pool. “All of my friends from home are single but in baseball everyone has kids,” he said. Because he’d been in the league for six seasons it was often difficult to remember he was still just twenty-five years old. Sometimes Kershaw ventured across the street to shoot hoops on the school’s playground. He didn’t think any of the children knew who he was, or if they did, they weren’t impressed. It was Dallas, after all. He had been a little boy here once, too, and had cheered his heart out for the Rangers. As an adult, he wore number 22 as an homage to his favorite player, former Texas first baseman Will Clark.

  As he stood in his backyard and watched the kids play, the enormity of the contract he just signed seemed to hit him. In a few hours, Ellen would return and some high school buddies would come over and barbecue to help him celebrate. Twelve months later he and Ellen would welcome a child of their own, a daughter they named Cali Ann.

  “I hope to never take for granted the amount of money I was given and hope I can help a lot of people with that,” he said as he walked me out. “That’s ultimately what you’ll be judged for at the end of your career—how much of an impact you made off the field.”

  He continued.

  “As far as on the field, nobody cares about how much money you’re making if you perform,” he said. “Mike Trout made five hundred thousand dollars last year and he’s the best player in the game. Nobody really cares how much money you’re making if you win a World Series. That’s what the fans want, that’s what we want, that’s what ownership wants, and I think that’s why I signed on. We have a good chance to do that.”

  I asked him how his life had changed since he woke up that morning. He smiled. The money wouldn’t change anything, he said. It wouldn’t make him soft.

  “Obviously it’s a huge, huge gift and responsibility and I’m really excited about it,” he said. “But at the end of the day it doesn’t change the fact that I have to go out and dominate.”

  1

  THE BILLIONAIRE BOYS’ CLUB

  When Clayton Kershaw hung up the phone $215 million richer on that January day, it was nothing short of a fiscal miracle. The Dodgers hadn’t been to the World Series in twenty-five years, and, even worse, the club had spent most of the past decade owned by Frank McCourt, a man who forced the storied organization into bankruptcy. Though the Guggenheim Partners had paid $2.15 billion for the Dodgers twenty-two months earlier, what they got was a glorified fixer-upper.

  Dodger Stadium may have been one of baseball’s crown jewels, but it was in desperate need of repair. The fifty-year-old ballpark was the third oldest in the major leagues after Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field and it showed. Cracks in its thirteen-story façade seemed to deepen with each passing season, and when the warm summer breeze blew through the concourses, its concrete bones rattled and sighed. During playoff games when fifty-five thousand fans screamed and stomped, it often felt like the old press box, wedged right into the stadium’s heart, would collapse on itself. Flickering bulbs on the video board made replays difficult to see. Overwhelmed concession stands not equipped with twenty-first-century technology meant that during sellouts hungry customers had to wait in line up to forty-five minutes for a Dodger dog. Even the players suffered along with the masses. The tiny home clubhouse smelled of dirty feet and rotten tobacco, and the air-conditioning often kicked during the dog days of July and August. Manager Don Mattingly’s office was the size of a broom closet. Even worse, the visiting team had no batting cage or weight room of its own, which meant rival players had to walk through the home clubhouse to share facilities with Dodger players before and after games. This led to awkward moments of subterfuge when anyone was working on anything he didn’t want the opposition to know. “It was just really, really weird,” Mattingly said.

  After taking over, the new owners vowed to pour a hundred million dollars into stadium improvements right away as a show of good faith to fans. With that kind of cash in the hole, they thought they’d be able to dazzle patrons and players alike with state-of-the-art upgrades and fancy new fan attractions. (Or at the bare minimum, fix the cell phone towers behind center field so that it was possible to send a text message during a well-attended game.) But then they got reports back from the engineers who inspected the place. Their holy cathedral on the hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles had biblical sewage and electrical problems. “Dodger Stadium is historic—which is great—but when you use that word to refer to plumbing and wiring, historic is not a good word,” said team president Stan Kasten. “I wanted to do all these things and they told me, ‘Stan, if you plug in one more toaster the whole stadium will blow up.’ ” The Guggenheim group realized that despite its fancy high-tech ambitions the first round of renovations would have to go toward replacing lightbulbs and toilets.

  But the new owners were in it to have fun. So after replacing the scoreboard and constructing bigger batting cages, weight rooms, and a centrally air-conditioned home clubhouse that was twice the size of the old one, they built themselves their own private bunker under the stadium and fortified it with liquor and flat-screen televisions. They planned to celebrate many championships there.

  The town’s beloved Lakers had won five titles in the past twelve seasons under the twinkling eye of the benevolent Dr. Jerry Buss, a man whose penchant for trotting out championship team after championship team led many to argue he was the best professional sports team owner ever.

  Just winning, however, wasn’t enough for Guggenheim. The Lakers had captured the attention of a city where actual movie stars roamed free in their natural habitat by showcasing the game’s biggest superstars year in and year out. The “Showtime” era of the eighties and early nineties featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson gave way to the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal “Lake Show.” Supermodels, pop stars, and Oscar winners became courtside fixtures because nothing validates famous people more than being around other famous people.

  Since the Lakers were already a global brand synonymous with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the new Dodger owners had the blueprint already laid out for them. To win over the citizens of the entertainment capital of the universe and surpass the Yankees as Major League Baseball’s premier franchise they would first have to field a team with enough star power to impress folks in Hollywood. In doing so, they hoped to captivate a nation obsessed with celebrity and attract millions of new fans with their winning ways. And if becoming the loathsome Big Bad Wolf to millions more was the tax they paid on the path to glory, then so be it. They wanted to become the Lakers on grass. Only three miles separated Dodger Stadium from Staples Center, the Lakers’ home court. Under McCourt, that gap would have taken light-years to cross. The Guggenheim group set out to bridge it immediately. But before the Dodgers had any prayer of competing with the Lakers, they had to dig themselves out of an even bigger hole.

  • • •

  When Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles before the 1958 season, he was called a traitor in New York and a crazy person ever
ywhere else. At the time O’Malley won the approval to relocate his team to L.A., the Dodgers’ closest opponent would have been the St. Louis Cardinals, some sixteen hundred miles away. O’Malley convinced the Dodgers’ archrival, the New York Giants, to move from upper Manhattan to California, too, and the two clubs launched Major League Baseball on the West Coast. Relocating the Dodgers three thousand miles away was a huge gamble, but O’Malley had long seen opportunity where others were tripped up by uncertainty. After all, he had been part of the group in 1945 that risked the franchise by signing Jackie Robinson. In addition to breaking the color barrier for generations of black baseball players to come, the iconic Robinson also went on to become a six-time all-star and National League MVP, and helped lead the Dodgers to their first-ever World Series title in 1955.

  O’Malley’s Los Angeles gamble paid off as well. Some seventy-eight thousand fans attended the Dodgers’ first game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, shattering all-time Major League Baseball attendance records. For his efforts, O’Malley was put on the cover of Time magazine and christened the unofficial commissioner of baseball. His enormous success further perpetuated the fairy tale that the West was full of endless promise and possibility. The Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles mirrored the flight of millions of displaced Americans who set out for California in search of better lives—or at least better weather. In 1950 the state’s population was just over ten million. By 1990 that number tripled to thirty million. Even the Dodgers’ traditional uniform colors now seemed to suggest the idea of the sky being the limit. Jaime Jarrin, the club’s legendary Spanish broadcaster, once paraphrased the poet Pablo Neruda when describing what a jubilant home game celebration looked like after a Dodger victory. “Blue is the most beautiful color,” he said. “It is the color of the infinite.”

  Angelenos were ready. They had tasted quality baseball with the Pacific Coast League, and had been teased by the Cubs holding their annual spring-training camp on nearby Catalina Island, which was owned by William Wrigley Jr. himself. In 1958, Dodger games became a social event, with movie stars mixing with legendary athletes. Southern Californians no longer had to wait to read about yesterday’s games in the newspaper. For the first time, they got to breathe the same air as Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, and Stan Musial. It was heaven.

  The O’Malley family ran the Dodgers for more than fifty years until Walter O’Malley’s children sold the team to Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group in 1998. At that time, O’Malley’s son Peter was quoted as saying they had little choice but to unload the Dodgers because they felt that with player salaries skyrocketing, they would not be able to compete with the deep pockets of corporate ownership as the twenty-first century dawned. In Peter O’Malley’s mind, nine-figure contracts marked the end of the golden era of family-run ball clubs. (A heartbroken O’Malley wound up regretting letting the Dodgers go, however. Fourteen years later he gathered some investors in an unsuccessful attempt to buy the team back. When his efforts failed, he bought the San Diego Padres instead.)

  The truth was Fox never wanted to own a baseball team. Its main reason for buying the Dodgers was so its local cable television network, Fox Sports West, could continue to show the club’s games. At that time, ESPN was rumored to be gearing up to build its own regional TV networks around the country. Compounding matters even more, Disney, ESPN’s parent company, had just purchased the California Angels, some thirty miles down Interstate 5. If ESPN did launch those regional TV networks, then Fox would lose the Angels, making the rights to broadcast Dodger games even more critical. After all, they had to fill their airwaves somehow. But the idea of entering a bidding war with the sports programming giant for the ability to show Dodger games terrified Fox. So in a move that foreshadowed the thinking that would come to define the franchise and stun the rest of the league fifteen years later, Fox bought the Dodgers not so much for the team itself but for its media rights.

  But when ESPN’s regional television channels never materialized, Fox no longer cared about owning the Dodgers—not least because it had no idea how to run a baseball team, and the club was hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars a year. When Fox sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt in 2004, the team had been on the market for almost as long as Fox had owned it. Desperate to cut its losses, Fox created a bargain-basement clearance sale that allowed McCourt to buy the Dodgers without contributing one penny of his own money. In what would wind up becoming one of the most lucrative sports business deals of all time, McCourt financed his $430 million purchase of the Dodgers with nothing but borrowed cash. In fact, Fox wanted to get rid of the team so badly it lent McCourt a big chunk of the money.

  Frank McCourt had also bought into the myth that to make his fame and fortune he needed to go west. A real estate developer from Boston, McCourt had tried, and failed, to buy his hometown Red Sox two years before he purchased the Dodgers. His local claim to fame was that he owned a large waterfront parking lot in South Boston, and his plan to buy the Red Sox hinged on tearing down hallowed Fenway Park and building a new stadium on his site. But he didn’t appear to have the money to buy a ball club, much less run one. The same year he bid on the Red Sox, his company’s chief operating officer, Jeff Ingram, sent an email to McCourt and his wife saying that they were in danger of running out of money in six to eight months. “Stock smelling salts in the office,” wrote Ingram. “At this rate, I’m going to need them.”

  When McCourt announced his intention to purchase the famous franchise with no money down in 2001, he was laughed out of the city. Instead, financier John Henry bought the Sox. That transaction worked out well for Boston. Three years later under Henry’s direction, the Red Sox reversed the famous curse of the Bambino and won their first World Series title in eighty-six years. After enduring one of the most inglorious championship droughts in the history of sports, the resurgent Red Sox would go on to hoist three World Series banners in Henry’s first twelve seasons as owner.

  McCourt’s parking lot was more than just a piece of vacant land, though: it was his biggest asset, seemingly the crux of his empire. When he strode into Los Angeles as the new owner of the Dodgers, he touted himself as a developer who knew how to build from the ground up. But in divorce filings five years later, his estranged wife described him as someone who sued people for a living. Despite countless assurances about plans to construct waterfront complexes with shops and condominiums, his parking lot sat vacant for the entire time he owned it. Before buying the Dodgers with other people’s money, McCourt’s previous business highlights included nearly being thrown out of a high-rise window by a rival developer who claimed he stole that parking lot out from under him. While the idea of standing in front of a judge in court might make the average person squirm, McCourt seemed to thrive in litigation when his livelihood hung in the balance. “He was more stubborn than an army of cockroaches,” said one Dodger executive who worked under him. But McCourt was as smart as he was obstinate. He put up his parking lot as collateral against the $145 million loan he got from Fox to complete the sale of the Dodgers. And when McCourt defaulted on that loan, Fox foreclosed on the lot and sold it to be done with him. In the end, McCourt traded a parking lot for one of Major League Baseball’s flagship franchises.

  It took him eight years to bankrupt it.

  • • •

  Frank McCourt looked harmless enough. When he stepped up to the podium on the day he took over the Dodgers, he bore all the markings of a man who was thrilled with his lot in life. Clutching a custom-made Dodgers jersey with his name on the back, flanked by a wife who seemed proud to be standing next to him, McCourt told the crowd of assembled reporters and well-wishers that after the impersonal Fox era, the Dodgers were returning to their roots of family ownership. Trim in the waist for a man approaching middle age, McCourt wore his Irish heritage in his curly gray hair and rosy cheeks. He showed up in Los Angeles in a suit and tie, with a softness in his gait and a huge smile on his face. But the years in Hollywood h
ardened him, and by the end of his time as owner he hid behind aviator shades and pink collared shirts as stiff as he was. His reed-thin lips were usually pursed into a frown, and when he spoke, the vowels that left his tongue were stretched haaaaaahd by a lingering Boston accent that hung on like a nagging cough. His Dodgers were the Daahjuhs.

  A few years into his reign he installed his lawyer wife, Jamie, as CEO of the team. In a lengthy profile written on the nuclear dissolution of their marriage, Vanity Fair magazine likened the diminutive Jamie to a tense, skinny chihuahua. College sweethearts since they met during their freshman year at Georgetown University when Jamie was seventeen and Frank was eighteen, they eloped and married in her New York apartment in 1979. Her parents were so unhappy with her choice that they boycotted the wedding. But Frank and Jamie seemed to be a good match—at least on the surface. By many accounts, the McCourts had been happy for most of their marriage, buoyed by their shared Clintonesque relentless professional ambition. But after they moved to Los Angeles their aspirations morphed into an insatiable obsession with status and material possessions. By 2009 the couple turned on each other, with Frank testing the limits of the amount of money he could borrow, and Jamie instructing a Dodger executive to draw up a battle plan for her eventual ascendance to the office of president of the United States. “They were equally delusional but Jamie was better at parties,” said another Dodger executive.

  During the eight years McCourt owned the Dodgers, the club won the National League West division three times and advanced to the NLCS twice. McCourt clung to those statistics as he was thrown out for bankrupting the team, and even sent club employees a crystal clock with a list of his accomplishments as a holiday gift just months after the commissioner of baseball kicked him out for gross negligence. (“The best part is it arrived the day after Christmas,” said the executive. “Frank obviously got a cheaper rate from UPS for December twenty-sixth delivery.”) Though he liked to take credit, the Dodgers’ success during McCourt’s tenure was due to the strength of the club’s drafts before he owned the team, and taking the malcontented superstar left fielder Manny Ramirez off Boston’s hands for free during their 2008 playoff run. While the Dodgers’ homegrown, cheap young players like Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Russell Martin stabilized the team’s everyday lineup, McCourt cut funding for scouting in Latin America, choking off an international player development pipeline that had long been one of baseball’s strongest. It was especially puzzling because the Dodgers had been pioneers in looking beyond American borders for talented ballplayers, from Mexico’s Fernando Valenzuela to Japan’s Hideo Nomo to South Korea’s Chan Ho Park. In 1987 the club established the first American baseball academy in the Dominican Republic, the country that has since produced the most baseball stars in the world outside the United States despite being roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Even though the academy had nurtured future stars like Pedro Martinez, Raul Mondesi, and Adrián Beltré, McCourt decided it wasn’t worth the investment.