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

by Molly Knight

  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.

  In a strange twist, he succeeded Torre as manager in Los Angeles, after coming over with him from New York and serving as the Dodgers’ hitting coach. By the time Torre landed in Hollywood, he’d won four World Series rings and was in the gloaming of his storied career. In that respect, though Mattingly was bitten by inexperience, some felt his hunger made him a better fit to run a team that was so desperate for a championship. There was no question Mattingly wanted a ring as much as his players did, maybe even more. His pedigree had earned him the skipper’s cap, but he knew the goodwill he enjoyed as a bygone icon would wear thin if he didn’t win. On the day that he sent Greinke out to face San Diego to find out if his arm was all right, he was not Donnie Baseball. In his mind, he was Donnie Lameduck.

  In 1990, Mattingly had been the highest-paid player in the game, earning $3.8 million. In 2013, the Dodgers would pay twenty-one players more than that. Only twenty guys across both leagues would earn more than $20 million that season. Los Angeles employed four of them. Though Mattingly was entering his third season as the Dodgers’ manager, he was no
t guaranteed a contract beyond 2013. The Guggenheim group hadn’t hired him, and no one knew how long they intended to keep him around. That gnawing uncertainty bugged Mattingly. To keep his job, he knew he had to win the NL West, and probably go deep into the postseason. To do that, he had to inspire players who would be paid ungodly amounts of money even if they lost—and who perhaps would be there long after he was gone—to care about winning as much as he did. Some never would, no matter how hard he tried to convince them otherwise. He knew that.

  It wasn’t as if any of these Dodgers wanted to lose. Evolution dictates that, on a primal level, human beings are hardwired to want to beat nearby competition as a matter of life and death. (And being rich didn’t make striking out any less embarrassing.) But most of these players had never won anything, and trying to describe the magnificence of something they’d never experienced was like trying to sell chocolate to someone with no taste buds. While baseball can be fraught with deep, tortured attachment for lifelong fans, some of these players had been Dodgers for a matter of weeks and had no emotional investment in the team or the city of Los Angeles. They weren’t all like that, but to the mercenaries baseball would always be just a job.

  Before Greinke’s April 11 start in San Diego, Mattingly arrived at his office in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Park and fiddled around with his lineup card before posting it on a wall in the locker room:

  Crawford

  LF

  M Ellis

  2B

  Kemp

  CF

  Gonzalez

  1B

  Ethier

  RF

  AJ Ellis

  C

  Cruz

  3B

  Sellers

  SS

  Greinke

  P

  Matt Kemp was struggling in his return from shoulder surgery and had collected just five hits in thirty at-bats in the first week of the season, with eight strikeouts. But it was way too early to consider dropping him from third in the batting order. Gonzalez was entrenched behind Kemp in the cleanup spot. But other than those two slots, Mattingly was juggling: every other spot in the batting order had already seen more than one name.

  In some ways, managing less talented, younger players under the dysfunctional pall of bankruptcy was easier for Mattingly than culling through his new roster of high-profile veterans. “We had a lot of guys making less money that were fighting as they were reaching free agency,” Mattingly said of his years managing under McCourt. “We didn’t have quite the resumes in our clubhouse, so we had to do the little things better than everyone else. Play to the top of our capabilities, basically, and get some breaks along the way to be able to compete.”

  The new Dodgers would not be out-talented by anyone. But Mattingly worried they could be outplayed every night. Motivation was something that couldn’t be taught. Mattingly knew Kershaw was in talks to sign a contract extension for hundreds of millions of dollars, but he also understood that Kershaw’s payday wouldn’t change his work ethic or how badly he wanted to win. If anything, the kid would only push himself harder so he could feel like he was earning his keep. That edge was something Mattingly couldn’t will upon his men, especially the ones who had already been paid. It either came from within or it didn’t exist. “They need to be self-motivated, number one,” Mattingly said. “And they have to want to win. Some of these guys have already reached that carrot financially but now what else is there? There’s gotta be more than that. Because there’s a lot of people out there who are rich who aren’t necessarily happy or fulfilled, and there’s a lot of people out there who don’t have money that are.”

  What kept Mattingly up nights was the minutiae he feared would saddle the Dodgers with dumb losses, the nebulous stuff that cost good people their jobs when added up but was rarely considered in contract negotiations. Things like remembering to throw a ball low enough so a teammate could cut it off on its way to home plate if necessary; taking a walk and passing the baton to the next guy; showing up early without being asked to field more grounders after a defensive clunker—basic fundamentals talented players didn’t need to bother themselves with to be handed a check with a lot of zeroes on the end of it. The Padres entered the 2013 season with a payroll hovering around $70 million, or less than a third of the Dodgers’ dole. To compete, they had no choice but to bust their asses. Mattingly worried about the Dodgers’ want. As he looked around the clubhouse, it was starting to become clear that the guys he needed the most were the ones who needed him the least.

  • • •

  Don Mattingly had loved baseball his whole life, and baseball had loved him right back. It wasn’t just that he was so good at it from the time he was a young child, though that had helped. He got hooked on the subtle parts of the game: the challenge of having to face a different pitcher every night, the focus and concentration it took to stand in the batter’s box and hit a 95 mph fastball. He clung to the idea that if he got good enough at hitting these tiny dancing spheres that were in the air for only one second, he could make a life out of it, and get paid to play a children’s game every day for almost nine months out of the year for decades.

  Mattingly grew up in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest of five children. His father, Bill, delivered mail to support the family. He attended all of his son’s ball games and never raised his voice. His mother, Mary, stayed home to raise the family. As the star first baseman in a proud midwestern town, Mattingly lived the dream adolescence as a high school jock hero, leading Reitz Memorial to fifty-nine straight wins and a state championship. The left-hander hit .463 as a prep, and still holds the Indiana state record for career triples, with twenty-five. Indiana State signed him to a scholarship, but when the Yankees took him in the nineteenth round of the 1979 draft, he begged off college and set out for A-ball.

  Mattingly hit right away in the minors, but the Yankees thought he might be too scrawny to play first base in the big leagues. At six feet tall, 175 pounds, Mattingly was on the small side for a first baseman, and coaches considered shifting him over to play second. But like shortstops and third basemen, second basemen are almost never left-handed, because it’s so difficult to turn double plays goofy-footed. Mattingly was ambidextrous, though, a talent he put on display later as manager of the Dodgers when he fielded throws at first base during batting practice with a righty’s glove. In a testament to his physicality, had the Yankees moved him over to play second he would have covered the position with his off hand.

  In the end, though, they thought better of making that change. And it was a good decision, too, because Mattingly was just as good at picking throws out of the dirt at first as he was at whacking line drives. The Yankees called up Mattingly for some quick licks at the end of the 1982 season, when he was just twenty-one years old. In his first full year in the majors two years later, he hit twenty-three home runs and won the American League batting title. He earned the MVP award the following year as an encore. In 1987, he homered in eight straight games and hit an incredible six grand slams, still a major-league record. (By comparison, the entire Dodgers team would hit one grand slam in 2013.)

  During his time with the Yankees, Mattingly showed up to work each day and went about his business with a quiet dignity that endeared him to millions. Although the team included more exciting players like Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, television and radio commercials implored fans to come to Yankee Stadium to watch Donnie Baseball. He played hurt and he played sick. And no matter how high his star ascended, he never quite shook his underdog status, as the slightly undersized son of a mailman. Perhaps it was his noted ability to keep an even keel in the Bronx Zoo that had qualified him to run the Dodgers despite having no managerial experience whatsoever when he was hired. After playing under Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and managers Billy Martin and Lou Piniella for the Bombers, Mattingly seemed to have reached the point where it would take an actual bomb to faze him. That’s not to say he was a robot. Toward the end of his tenth season
with the Yankees he decided to grow a mullet to match his famous mustache. When the club’s management asked him to cut his hair to adhere to the organization’s famously strict grooming policy, Mattingly refused. He was pulled from the lineup, benched, and fined. Lest anyone confuse his levelheadedness with resigned acquiescence to bullshit, following the game he complained to reporters that the club’s general manager, Gene Michael, only wanted players who were puppets, and suggested he might not belong in the organization anymore. “He hardly ever gets mad,” said his son Preston. “But when he does, man, look out.” (Mattingly cut his hair and stayed.)

  As a late-round draft pick who became an idol in America’s biggest city, Mattingly had all the requirements of a folk hero. But he did not want to be defined by the one thing he wasn’t. In his mind, the truest measure of a man was how his children felt about him. During his playing days, a generation of young baseball fans grew up wanting to be just like him. He worried that if he kept on playing for them, his own sons wouldn’t know him. While he was a Yankee, he and his first wife, Kim, made a home for their three young sons across the Hudson River in Tenafly, New Jersey. But the brutal nature of his baseball schedule meant that half his nights were spent in hotel rooms scattered across the country. Mattingly hated missing months of his kids’ lives every year. So he made a decision. “Everybody always thinks it was my back,” Mattingly told ESPN later, about why he retired. “But it was really about my kids. I had kind of figured how to play with the back. I went a couple of years where I couldn’t find my swing, I was messing with different stances, and a couple years were lean for me. But the last year, I was rolling. I was really crushing.” After the 1995 season, the Yankees offered him a multiyear contract. He turned it down. His eldest son, Taylor, was ten. Preston was eight, and the youngest, Jordon, was four. “If I re-signed, Taylor was going to be in high school, Preston was going to be right there,” he said. “And I knew they weren’t going to know me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live my life with them not knowing me.”