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

by Molly Knight

  Jay-Z, Jackson, Ronaldo, and Scherzinger were exactly the kind of patrons the club’s marketing department hoped to attract to their Dugout Club, the section that made up the ten rows behind home plate at Dodger Stadium. Folks who spent nine hundred dollars a ticket were treated to unlimited free food (gourmet and ballpark fare), wait service, televisions, and a private cash bar. Over the years, the Lakers had become known for their celebrity courtside clientele, and the Dugout Club was the closest thing the Dodgers had to the same starry incubator. If the new Dodger owners got their way, the club would become like the ultimate Hollywood lunchroom, with actors, pop stars, models, and studio heads mingling and mugging for the cameras. In some ways it already was: all the major talent agencies and entertainment law firms in town owned season tickets in the premium spot, and their clients popped in and out of those seats every night. The stars who attended the game versus the Yankees matched those on the field. Television ratings for the game that night were the highest for any MLB regular-season game in the Los Angeles market on record. This was no small thing, because the Dodgers were as much a media and entertainment company as they were a baseball team.

  The Yankees were the closest business model the new Dodgers hoped to emulate, with a few caveats. Walter said when he took over that he didn’t want to price families out of the stadium; that if the Dodgers were going to raise ticket costs he’d rather tax the rich down in the Dugout Club and surrounding seats than stick it to the people in the cheap seats. For the most part, he kept his word. It was still possible to buy season tickets in the upper deck for $5 per game.

  Despite all the pregame pomp and circumstance, Kershaw delivered the first pitch at 7:11, just a minute behind schedule. It had been a long summer for the big lefty. Though the Dodgers’ brass loved him best of any player, members of the club’s front office were growing more exasperated with his contract situation. When the Dodgers were flailing in last place with a record comparable to the awful Astros, it was hard to blame Kershaw for being wary of signing on for fifteen more years. But the Dodgers were winning now. What did he want?

  • • •

  While the club’s front office fixated on Kershaw, fans, teammates, and the press continued to obsess over Puig. The right fielder ate it up. Now that Bravo was gone, Puig had no handler to tuck him in at night and make sure he got to the stadium on time. The Dodgers traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, sent regular group text messages to players about things like when to show up for a game and when to pack a suit for a travel day. A small whiteboard in the team’s clubhouse next to Puig’s locker also posted the same information. To help Puig with his chronic tardiness, McGwire told the kid to find out whatever time the Dodgers were due to begin stretching on the field that day and show up to the park two hours earlier. That advice didn’t take. He arrived twenty minutes late for a team meeting in July and Schumaker told him to clean it up. Puig just glared at him.

  When teams are at home, players are responsible for getting themselves to the ballpark. When they’re on the road, the club organizes two buses to transport players and staff from the team hotel to the stadium. The league was pretty much divided between early bus guys and late bus guys. Puig fell into the latter group. Mattingly defended that. “I’ve seen guys that are in the Hall of Fame that came on the second bus,” he said. “Rickey Henderson was a late bus guy. Dave Winfield was another late arriver. And honestly I wasn’t one of those guys who was at the ballpark early. But in those days I guess there wasn’t much reason to get there early. There weren’t full batting cages in every city back then. There weren’t full kitchens. There was just a candy rack.”

  The late bus was fine, as long as a player was on it. But during a series with the Marlins in mid-August, Puig—who made his off-season home in Miami—opted to sleep in his own bed and drive himself to the ballpark. He showed up thirty-five minutes late. A ballplayer missing stretch was a rare occurrence. Longtime Dodger beat writers couldn’t recall a player ever showing up that late. Nick Piecoro, a reporter who had covered the Arizona Diamondbacks every day for seven seasons, said that he remembered a player missing stretch once, and that happened during spring training with a random reliever who had no shot at making the team anyway. “He said he was jet-lagged from flying in from Australia,” said Piecoro. While Puig was prone to oversleeping and getting stuck in traffic, his constant tardiness was made more serious by the fact that the organization had arranged a private security firm to watch over him because of the drug cartel threats. Teammates wondered if one day Puig wouldn’t show up at all.

  Mattingly benched him that night but told reporters he had planned to give Puig the day off. Barring Puig from playing in Miami was enough to get the kid’s attention. Since his defection from Cuba, many of his relatives had joined him in the United States, and made their homes in and around Miami. Puig’s mother, sister, cousin, and many other friends were on hand to watch him play at Marlins Park. Not to get to run out onto the field in front of them was painful, and perhaps what Mattingly needed to do to get his young slugger in line. But the skipper ultimately decided he needed Puig’s bat more than he needed to teach him a lesson. Since his call-up on June 3, Puig had led Major League Baseball in batting average, runs, hits, and total bases. In the eighth inning with the game tied 4–4, Puig came off the bench and hit the first pitch he saw for a mammoth home run to center field, giving the Dodgers a lead they would not relinquish. If any message was sent, it was that Puig could break rules and still be handed a bat, because winning mattered most.

  And, oh, were the Dodgers winning. The club won fifteen of the first sixteen games it played in August, and would win twenty-three games that month—the most wins in any month in Los Angeles Dodgers history. June 22 could have been the day Mattingly got fired. Instead, it was the day the Dodgers hit the rocket booster on their season. From that game that Greinke won in San Diego to the gem Kershaw pitched in Philadelphia on August 17, the Dodgers went a mind-boggling 42-8, the best fifty-game stretch for any team in over seventy years. They had gone seven weeks without losing two consecutive games. On June 21 the club was 30-42, tied for the fourth-worst record in MLB. On August 17 the Dodgers were 72-50 and tied for the second best. “Anything less than a World Series championship at this point would be a disappointment,” said Ethier that week. His teammates began calling Ethier “Joke,” due to the frequency of his repeating the phrase “we’re so good we’re a joke.” And the club’s bullpen began calling itself the “Dot ’Em Up” pen, in reference to the laser-like accuracy they were using to locate pitches.

  They had a point. During that incredible fifty-game run, the Dodgers’ pitching staff posted the following ERAs:

  Kershaw

  1.40

  Greinke

  2.25

  Ryu

  2.84

  Nolasco

  2.97

  Rodriguez

  0.47

  Howell

  0.52

  Belisario

  0.90

  Jansen

  1.35

  Over fifty-three games, Hanley Ramirez hit thirteen home runs, stole nine bases, and tallied an OPS of over 1.000. The Dodgers were pitching, they were hitting, and when they got a lead, their bullpen did not blow it. In thirty-one innings since Mattingly’s D-Day, Jansen had given up just four runs while striking out forty-nine. The rest of the staff was nearly as good: the Dodgers combined to pitch eight shutouts in August, and finished the season with an MLB-leading twenty-two. The Reds and the Rays each threw the next most, with seventeen. The Phillies staff tossed just three. While impressive, these raw statistics didn’t tell the whole story. It wasn’t as though the club clobbered the competition every night. During their historic fifty-game stretch, twenty-two of their forty-two wins were decided by two runs or fewer. The team that couldn’t stand each other weeks earlier when they were losing now seemed to be one of destiny, and found ways to pick each other up and win games they trailed night after night. Winning, it s
eemed, healed all rifts.

  On August 9, the Dodgers trailed the Rays 6–0 in the seventh inning and rallied to win 7–6. That tied the largest deficit they’d overcome since moving to Los Angeles. The next week, the Mets came to town for a three-game set and started three talented young pitchers, including phenom Matt Harvey. The Dodgers fell behind early each night, only to rally late with the help of a different hero. In the first game, Puig hit a sacrifice fly to break the tie in the sixth, and little Nick Punto clubbed just the seventeenth home run of his thirteen-year career to pad the Dodgers’ lead in the seventh. In game two, A. J. Ellis collected a two-out, two-run single off Harvey that made the difference. And in a wild game three, Ethier came off the bench after sitting out with a calf injury to smack a pinch-hit, opposite-field two-run home run to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth. Adrian Gonzalez won it with a walk-off double that plated Puig in the twelfth. The wins were so improbable that Vin Scully began referring to Dodger Stadium as the Magic Castle.

  Not everything around the stadium was magical, however. When Tim Bravo left, he took with him any hope of keeping the riffraff away from Puig. “Oh to be twenty-two and a Dodger,” Scully said of Puig, and he was right. Puig lapped up the Hollywood nightlife, becoming a constant presence on the club scene and chronicling his run-ins with other celebrities via his social media accounts. While his escapades were, for the most part, innocuous, his presence in these venues made it easier for grifters and snake oil salesmen to approach and befriend him. Soon he had an entourage of new buddies, including a guy whom Puig began referring to as his best friend despite having known him only for days. Puig’s new crew began showing up at Dodger Stadium hours before each game, every day, and stood on the field during batting practice as his guests. The ringleader seemed to know everyone, though nobody really knew how or what he did. Hanley Ramirez knew him from Miami. When the Yankees came to town, Cano walked over and hugged him. Even Cristiano Ronaldo seemed familiar with him. Another member of Puig’s entourage carried a binder with pictures of shoes and other swag he claimed to have access to, and approached Dodger players during batting practice.

  These men roamed between the locker room and the field with guest passes from Puig hanging from their necks every day from around 4:30 until the time the game started. And when they got kicked out of the clubhouse between the end of batting practice and game time, they’d go hang in the dugout, to the chagrin of stadium security, who had a hard time getting them to leave. If a guard tried to kick Puig’s entourage out of the dugout minutes before, say, Kershaw arrived for his pregame ritual, one of the guys would simply call Puig, who would then leave the locker room and come to the dugout to hang with them. And then the guards could do nothing. Players tended to see the locker room as their sacred space; most thought the media’s pregame window was too long and were relieved when writers left. When the locker room was closed to everyone but players and staff, they were free to be themselves without worrying about saying or doing something that would be shared with the world. While Puig’s friends weren’t media, their presence in the locker room and dugout annoyed his teammates who did not appreciate the violation of personal space. And because nobody in a position of authority wanted to say no to Puig, it continued for the rest of the season.

  A week after the Miami incident, Puig put another foot wrong. In an afternoon game against the Cubs, he struck out in the bottom of the third, then took his time walking to his position in right between the third and fourth innings. He often was the last Dodger onto the field after their side was retired, only this time he was so late getting to his spot that he wasn’t fully facing the batter’s box when Ricky Nolasco delivered the inning’s first pitch. Between pitches, outfielders demonstrate their attentiveness by slapping their gloves, bending their knees, or bouncing in place. The best outfielders move their feet in preparation with every pitch. Puig annoyed coaches and teammates by standing flat-footed with his hands on his hips. He thought the other stuff was a waste of time, because he believed he could catch with one hand any ball that was hit to him. The first batter of the inning, Anthony Rizzo, lined a ball to Puig, which he caught. He snagged the third out as well. After Nolasco finished the inning and the Dodgers retreated back to the dugout, Mattingly asked Puig if anything was wrong. Puig told him he was tired. So Mattingly pulled him from the game and subbed Schumaker. When Mattingly told Puig he was benched, Puig begged Mattingly, through Adrian Gonzalez, to stay in the game. But the skipper had made up his mind. Puig stomped into the tunnel in a rage. Nick Punto stopped him from redecorating the locker room. After the game, a cryptic Mattingly told the media he made the change because he felt Schumaker gave the club the best chance to win. Nolasco was a bit more forthright. Though he didn’t divulge what happened, he said simply, “Puig knows what he did.” As other players left the stadium, Puig met with Mattingly and Colletti for a half hour and apologized. “I always give my best but honestly today there was some fatigue and I wasn’t prepared,” he said to reporters through a translator after the game. He was back in the lineup the next day, and stole two bases and collected four hits, lifting his batting average to .354.

  • • •

  There was one more move Colletti wanted to make before the Dodgers began their stretch run. Though Jansen had been brilliant, Colletti wasn’t comfortable entering the last legs of the season with a first-year closer and no real insurance if he got hurt or flamed out. Plus, the kid had never finished a game in October before. So Colletti signed the eccentric former Giants closer Brian Wilson to the roster for depth. Wilson was coming off his second Tommy John surgery and had not pitched in a game in sixteen months. Dodgers officials watched him throw a bullpen session at UCLA in secret and were impressed by the mid-90s velocity on his fastball. Hoping to keep the potential deal under wraps, Colletti set up a clandestine meeting with Wilson at a hotel near the campus. His cover was blown when the hotel valet took his keys, smiled, and asked if he was there to sign Wilson. With Wilson it seemed nothing could be clandestine.

  When he took the mound for the Dodgers for his debut outing on August 22, there was no question his stuff was electric. The first batter he faced was the Marlins’ superstar power hitter Giancarlo Stanton. He struck him out looking. Wilson would go on to appear in eighteen games in August and September for the Dodgers, usually in front of Jansen as the eighth-inning man. He gave up just one earned run. But Wilson was known as much for his peculiarities as he was for his talent. He looked normal enough during his first few seasons with the Giants, then he decided to grow an unruly beard down to his chest and dye it jet black, like a disguise. No one knew what he was hiding from. Wilson developed a new persona as well. He gave clipped, bizarre answers to questions about baseball, and often walked around the clubhouse with a plate full of unidentifiable purple and gray food he referred to as whale puke.

  Wilson had won two World Series rings with San Francisco in the last three years, but his time with the Giants did not end well. When the Dodgers visited San Francisco in mid-September, Wilson walked across the field after a game to confront Giants CEO Larry Baer about why he hadn’t yet received his latest World Series ring. Though San Francisco said they had invited Wilson to their on-field team ceremony earlier in the season and the pitcher hadn’t responded, Wilson was irate, and screamed at Baer for keeping the ring from him, while stunned fans and former teammates looked on. Colletti knew Wilson well from his time with the Giants and was aware of the pitcher’s erratic behavior. Still, he had signed him only to a one-year deal worth a million bucks. If things got too weird he could always cut him.

  During the second week of September, when the Dodgers were a few victories away from clinching the division, something strange happened: they started losing. The Giants took three of four in Los Angeles, including a 19–3 drubbing. Then they traveled to Arizona on September 16 and dropped the first of a three-game set. At that point, the Diamondbacks were the only team that could catch them in the division, as they trailed
the Dodgers by nine and a half games with twelve to play. Los Angeles needed two wins to clinch.

  Before the second game of the series, Mattingly addressed the team. He told his men they were playing to clinch instead of playing to win, and that it was making them tight. All they had to do, Mattingly said, was put the division title out of their heads and just play for the day. Those in the room said it was an effective speech. When he was finished, Zack Greinke stood up. “I’ve got something to say,” Greinke told the room. This was unusual, not just because Greinke wasn’t prone to public speaking, but also because he was pitching that day, and most pitchers don’t even like to make eye contact with other humans in the hours leading up to their starts.