99. World Series Drought, Part 2

It gets worse before it gets better.

Shortly after the Dodgers’ new owners went over Fred Claire’s head to make the Mike Piazza trade in 1998, they replaced Claire with Tommy Lasorda as Dodgers general manager on an interim basis. (At the same time, Glenn Hoffman replaced Bill Russell as manager). Then, during the off-season, the search for a permanent general manager led to Montreal Expos GM Kevin Malone. As shocking as the Piazza trade had been, nothing shattered the dignity with which the Dodgers had been known to operate more than Malone proclaiming upon his arrival, “There’s a new sheriff in town.” Malone brought in Davey Johnson, who had averaged 93 victories a year (during full seasons) in more than a decade of managing, to replace Hoffman before the 1999 season, but still Malone’s team went 77–85.

Though the Dodgers won 85 games or more from 2000 through 2003, they could not break the grass ceiling, extending their streak without a postseason appearance to seven years. Dave Wallace and then Dan Evans replaced Malone, who put the finishing touches on his embattled tenure by getting in a fight with a Padres fan in San Diego. Jim Tracy, a Dodgers coach under Johnson, replaced his boss. But the team that once seemed a player away from winning the World Series became the team that was a man short of simply making the playoffs.

Amid 15 years of frustration and another ownership change, the Dodgers added even more tempest to their teapot by hiring Paul DePodesta as Dodgers’ general manager shortly before the 2004 season. DePodesta was a bright, softspoken, 32-year-old ex-Harvard football player who had worked his way up baseball’s front office ladder, but he arrived in a climate filled with suspicion. Not only was the Dodgers’ new owner, Frank McCourt, struggling to convince Los Angeles that his intentions with the franchise were sincere, but DePodesta was a prominent figure in a recent book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball, that had caused a major stir in baseball circles by ostensibly promoting statistical analysis at the expense of scouting. At least, that’s what the book was about if you talked to people like broadcaster Joe Morgan, the Hall of Famer who critiqued the book without even reading it. In truth, the main point of Moneyball was to suggest that it was a fine idea to look for undervalued players—a contention it would be difficult for anyone to find fault with—and that more accurate stats were one way to help achieve that, because traditional baseball methods could sometimes be deceiving. But so defensive was the baseball establishment, including the media, about its Old School values, that anyone associated with Moneyball was considered a rebel with a nefarious cause. DePodesta was on the defensive, particularly with widely read Los Angeles Times columnists Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers, from the moment he arrived.

The Dodgers won the 2004 NL West title, thanks in no small part to DePodesta acquisitions like Jeff Weaver, Milton Bradley, and Steve Finley that built upon the core Evans left behind, but along the way, DePodesta gambled what little peace he had in Los Angeles on the very thing everyone had seemed to want—a deal that would push the Dodgers past mere division-title status into the World Series elite. He sent starting catcher Paul Lo Duca, a beloved figure in Los Angeles for his late-blooming rise to success, to Florida with outfielder Juan Encarnacion and reliever Guillermo Mota, in exchange for starting pitcher Brad Penny, first baseman Hee Seop Choi, and minor leaguer Bill Murphy.

The outcry was like nothing Los Angeles had seen since the Piazza trade six years earlier. Most Dodgers fans were livid, and only a minority saw the trade for what it was—the exchange of three players entering the downside of their careers for three on the upside. When the 26-year-old Penny, a potential difference maker in a playoff series, was injured in his second start with the Dodgers, DePodesta was pushed further out onto the plank. The only thing that could save him in Los Angeles was victory.

For a while, that’s what he got, as the Dodgers (behind Jose Lima) finally managed to win a playoff game for the first time since Orel Hershiser was shutting down the A’s. But the following season, a series of injuries crippled a team that DePodesta was trying to rebuild on the fly (in a manner that manager Tracy was openly rebelling against), and the Dodgers lost 91 games, their most since 1992. Adding further anger to the angst was a clubhouse clash between Bradley and Jeff Kent that led DePodesta’s antagonists to conclude he had lost control of the organization. In October 2005, barely 20 months into his tenure, DePodesta was fired, accused (ironically, if you like) of undervaluing the things that matter, things like chemistry and character, even though Dodgers teams before and after him had notoriously struggled in those very areas.

The PR-conscious McCourt replaced DePodesta with a former PR man, San Francisco assistant general manager Ned Colletti, who brought a more traditional approach to general management. In the 2006–2007 seasons, Colletti was handed an increased payroll and the best set of Dodgers prospects in three decades, but the pattern remained the same as it ever was: quick playoff exits alternating with an absence from the playoffs entirely. Witness to a sequence of trades and signings fraught with bad luck and/or foresight (Jason Schmidt, Juan Pierre, and Esteban Loaiza form just part of the list), numerous Dodgers fans continued tearing their hair out through their team caps.

From the 1903 debut of the World Series through 1946, the Dodgers won NL pennants all of three times, none of them followed by a victory in the Fall Classic. In the next 42 seasons, they won 15 NL pennants and six World Series. The team has known famine as well as feast, and with the expansion of major league baseball to 30 teams, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the race up Everest only became harsher. Yet when you consider that a team with the Dodgers’ resources won fewer postseason games from 1989–2007 than all but Montreal/Washington, Texas, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, and Milwaukee, it also shouldn’t surprise anyone that Dodgers fans entered 2008 very much on edge.

Though the Dodgers paraded through the NLCS for the 2008 and 2009 seasons with Manny Ramirez, the team fell back to also-ran status from 2010 through 2012, frustrating fans by posting the most wins in that period (248) of any NL team that didn’t make the playoffs. From July 7, 2011, through July 6, 2012, Los Angeles went 92–66, yet played poorly enough in those seasons’ other months that the brilliance of Clayton Kershaw and Matt Kemp went for naught. In 2013, as the Dodgers prepared to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser, and 1988, they also desperately hoped to end their wandering through the desert.

 

 

Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul, Foul

On the night of May 12, 2004, they started counting foul balls on the Dodger Stadium left-field scoreboard, because shortstop Alex Cora couldn’t stop hitting them. Batting in the bottom of the seventh against Chicago Cubs righty Matt Clement with a runner on and the Dodgers leading by a slim 2–0 margin, Cora took the first three pitches, two for balls.

He then proceeded to foul off the next 14 Clement pitches, sending the Dodger Stadium crowd into increasingly rapturous states of bliss, even though no tangible baseball play had transpired. Cheers of “Let’s go, Cora” rose from all parts of the ballpark.

It was nothing, and it was epic.

“It was tough,” Cora told The Associated Press. “He was throwing good pitches. When they put it on the scoreboard, that put me under a little bit of pressure. I had to stand back and regroup.”

Finally, on the 18th pitch of the at-bat …a fair ball, a long fly ball, going to right field...going...gone!

It wasn’t October, it wasn’t the ninth inning, but it was beyond unbelievable—unscripted genius.