When Guggenheim bought the Dodgers out of bankruptcy, they inherited Ned Colletti as the team’s general manager and Don Mattingly as its skipper. Colletti was entering his seventh season in the position, Mattingly his second. When Frank McCourt hired Colletti in November 2005 he became the eleventh GM in Dodgers history—but the seventh in the past eight years. In his first twenty months as owner McCourt had clashed with, and fired, the Dodgers’ two previous general managers, Dan Evans and Paul DePodesta. So when McCourt set out to find his third GM in two years, the Dodgers’ then second baseman, Jeff Kent, made a suggestion. Kent had ownership’s ear because he had grown close to Jamie McCourt through charity work they’d done together to help Los Angeles police officers. He told Jamie that she and her husband should consider interviewing Colletti, a baseball lifer he had gotten to know well while playing for the San Francisco Giants.
Before joining the Dodgers, Colletti had worked as an assistant general manager under Brian Sabean in San Francisco for nine seasons. Prior to his stint with the rival Giants, Colletti had been with his hometown Cubs for twelve years, maneuvering his way up from press flack to negotiating player salaries for the club’s front office. Intrigued by his pedigree and his familiarity with National League baseball, McCourt asked Colletti to meet with him about the Dodgers’ GM vacancy. McCourt was said to be particularly impressed when Colletti didn’t ask how much money he would be given to spend on player payroll during his job interview. After McCourt hired Colletti, Colletti returned the favor to Kent. Four months after he took over as the general manager of the Dodgers he offered the thirty-eight-year-old second baseman an eight-figure contract extension.
As the dysfunctional McCourt regime spiraled downward, the Dodgers became notorious for their revolving door of high-ranking executives. In addition to their general manager carousel, during their eight years owning the club the McCourts burned through four managers and three team presidents. Colletti somehow survived. Most baseball executives expected Walter to relieve Colletti of his duties when he came in, not because of his shortcomings but because each new ownership group tended to install its own brain trust to enact its vision—even when it didn’t just spend two billion on a franchise. But the damage McCourt’s tightfistedness inflicted on the big-league club and its farm system was so cataclysmic it was difficult for the new owners to evaluate Colletti. A general manager’s number-one task is to stockpile as much talent as possible. But McCourt’s thriftiness had limited Colletti’s options. So the new owners decided they would keep him for a trial run, then decide if he was good enough to stay. “I didn’t think the problems the franchise had were related to the front office,” Stan Kasten said. Colletti remained the club’s GM, but appeared about as comfortable on the job as a Bush White House staffer when Barack Obama’s team came in.
For the first time in club history, the Dodgers were putting together a roster with no financial limitations. And the responsibility of loading the organization with expensive talent fell on two men: one who grew up in poverty, and another who had built his career on rarely splurging for stars.
In his thirty-plus years in baseball, Colletti had proven he had the moxy to hang within the upper echelon of the game. Major League Baseball can be a nepotistic crony fest, filled with sons of famous ballplayers. But by his own estimation, Colletti grew up dirt-poor, and lived in a converted garage on the industrial outskirts of Chicago for the first six years of his life. His Italian-American father worked as a mechanic who was paid by the hour. When the family bought a home, paying the mortgage on time was a herculean task. It was seventy dollars a month.
Given his background, the fact that Colletti rose to become the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers is astonishing. It’s easier to get elected to the U.S. Senate than it is to be named a GM: there are one hundred senators, and only thirty MLB general managers. And the game’s analytics renaissance meant that Colletti didn’t just have to compete with well-connected scions to hold on to his position. In the early 2000s, the Oakland Athletics’ GM, Billy Beane, and his Moneyball philosophy inspired legions of MBA grads and computer science savants to seek out jobs in front offices so they could use their skills to do something more exciting than writing code for Silicon Valley start-ups. The new owner of the Houston Astros, for instance, had hired a former management consultant, Jeff Luhnow, to be the club’s GM. Luhnow then brought in a crack team of Wall Street wizards, lawyers, and a NASA behavioral scientist to overhaul the organization. When Walter’s group bought the Dodgers the club had an analytics department that consisted of one person. Colletti preferred cowboy boots to calculators.
The directive to overpay Ethier to keep him in Los Angeles must have been a shock to Colletti’s system. Gone were the days of being allowed to add impact bats or arms in the middle of the season only if he could somehow do it for free. Colletti was finally able to pursue the roster he wanted, which better suited his confrontational style. Perhaps because of his humble beginnings, Colletti approached the game with a chip on his shoulder the size of Illinois, and refused to suffer coddled ballplayers. If players viewed him as a bully, which many did, Colletti was more likely to chalk it up to their lack of mental toughness than reflect on the wisdom of letting young guys know they were fucking nobodies who could be cut at any time. While organizations like the Cardinals routinely inserted rookies into the middle of pennant races, Colletti was loath to throw kids into big spots, often to the chagrin of his coaching staff. Regardless of the energy youngsters provided to an older lineup, Colletti worried that rookies didn’t possess the guts required to succeed in October.
Colletti’s emotions often got the better of him. He was so upset when right fielder J. D. Drew surprised him by opting out of his contract that he told reporters he would not rule out filing a tampering grievance against the Red Sox (where Drew went). He also hinted at his displeasure with ever doing business with Drew’s agent, Scott Boras, again. Since Boras represented many of the game’s best players, this fatwa, if adhered to, would put the Dodgers at a serious disadvantage. But in the moment Colletti didn’t care. Or, maybe the problem was that he cared too much. One of his favorite sayings, to the amusement of his players and staff, was “I care so much that I don’t give a fuck.”
That passion extended to storytelling, too. On the first day of spring training before the 2011 season, when the Dodgers were neck-deep in McCourt muck, Colletti addressed the team with a barn-burning speech he hoped would inspire them into battle. In the early 1500s, famed explorer Hernán Cortés set out from Cuba to conquer Mexico for the Spanish crown. Colletti said that, according to legend, when Cortés arrived on the shores of Veracruz, he ordered his frightened men to burn their ships as a means of giving them confidence and scaring the Aztecs, the message being that Cortés believed his men would so thoroughly dominate that when the job was complete they would leave on their enemies’ ships. Colletti told this story to the Dodger players who sat before him, and beseeched them to learn from Cortés and go out and burn the figurative ships. The men shot each other confused glances and shrugged. Three years later, Colletti sat the Dodgers down on the first day of spring training again for his annual pep talk. He told the same story. Only this time he got mixed up and replaced Cortés with Alexander the Great. Players looked at each other in disbelief. When Colletti left, the room erupted in laughter. Within weeks, the guys had T-shirts made that said BURN THE SHIPS on the front, with ATG for Alexander the Great scrawled on the back. During the 2014 season it was not uncommon to hear players yell, “Burn the ships!” before taking the field. It had become an unlikely rallying cry, but not in the way Colletti intended. What Colletti didn’t know was that Cortés didn’t burn his ships as a motivational tool; he did it so his terrified men couldn’t retreat.
In spite of the Dodgers’ financial limitations during the McCourt era, or perhaps because of them, Colletti did find his strengths. He had shown a knack for identifying cheap, effective relief pitchers and cobbling together a dominant pitching staff during the Dodgers’ playoff runs at the end of the previous decade. In 2008 and 2009 the Dodgers led the National League in earned run average, thanks to the performances of afterthoughts and castoffs resurrected by his staff. Guys like Hong-Chih Kuo, Ramón Troncoso, and Ronald Belisario dazzled in their unsexy roles of holding a lead, and they did it while earning salaries that hovered near the major-league minimum.
Colletti had also shown respectable restraint when it came to trading top prospects. When he took over as GM, the Dodgers farm system was bursting with talent, highlighted by the gifted but raw young outfielder Matt Kemp. In 2006, when Kemp was called up to the big leagues, many Dodger veterans didn’t appreciate his cocksure attitude and thought he needed at least a full season under his belt before he could strut around the clubhouse as if he’d already been elected to the Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, Kemp excelled in his first four years in the majors, flashing all five tools on his way to winning a Silver Slugger award as one of the best-hitting outfielders in the National League, and finishing tenth in the Most Valuable Player voting in 2009.
But his play collapsed the following year when his enjoyment of the Hollywood lifestyle caused him to show up to the field mentally if not physically hungover many days. In 2010 Kemp hit .249 and struck out 170 times—a franchise record. And on the rare occasion when he did make it to first, he often ran the bases as though he needed directions, and frequently stumbled into outs.
Unfortunately for Kemp, the Dodgers’ coaching staff in 2010 was short on sympathy. At age seventy, the club’s manager, Joe Torre, had little patience for theatrics from his moody center fielder during what was supposed to be the victory lap of his Hall of Fame coaching career. The club’s third-base coach and Torre consigliere, Larry Bowa, enjoyed a hard-earned reputation for being merciless on temperamental young players, with the Chicago Tribune once describing his coaching demeanor as “more psychotic than a psychologist.” That was back when he managed the Padres in 1988, and by many accounts he had only grown more intolerant of bullshit with each passing year. Bowa and Torre both saw Kemp as a player who could transcend the game if he wanted to. But they had no patience for a head case, regardless of his potential.
Much ink was spilled over whether the Dodgers should cut their losses and trade Kemp, with grizzled, old-school ball writers wailing about team chemistry while the new generation of numbers geeks reminded everyone that the only good reason for parting ways with a center fielder who has the potential to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases is if he moonlights as a serial killer in the off-season. Though no one would ever accuse Colletti of bending to the will of the sabermetric crowd, he took their side. In Kemp, Colletti saw a twenty-five-year-old kid with physical gifts that couldn’t be taught. Kemp was immature, yes, but the last thing Colletti wanted to do was sell low on a guy who could wind up being one of the best players in the game.
Colletti had traded a few dozen young players in his six years as the Dodgers’ GM and the only one who turned out to be a star was the Indians catcher Carlos Santana, a fact that he was quick to point out to the press. The Dodgers received veteran third baseman Casey Blake from Cleveland in that trade deadline deal, and Blake became a critical member of the club’s NLCS runs in 2008 and 2009. That didn’t change the fact that Santana—who went on to average twenty-two home runs with a .364 on-base percentage during his first three full seasons with the Indians—never should have been traded. But even that mistake wasn’t just Colletti’s fault. Santana was the price the Dodgers had to pay to get the Indians to pick up the remaining few million dollars left on Blake’s tab; he became a victim to the notorious cheapskate tax of the McCourt era.
Colletti’s instincts about Kemp proved right. In 2011, the Dodgers replaced Torre with his hitting coach, the Yankee legend Don Mattingly. Kemp flourished. He raised his batting average seventy-five points and his on-base percentage eighty-nine points, hit thirty-nine home runs, and stole forty bases. He finished second in the NL MVP award voting to Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun—who the world learned later had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during the season. Kemp became one of the few bright spots for the Dodgers during one of the bleakest years in franchise history. Colletti responded to Kemp’s resurgence by locking him up that November with an eight-year deal worth $160 million. It was the largest contract the Dodgers had ever given a player.
While general managers are judged by the moves they make, their best deals are often the ones they don’t make. Perhaps because McCourt was so keen on keeping the payroll down, Colletti didn’t often sign free agents to long-term, exorbitant contracts that torpedoed so many other teams when those players underperformed. He did make one infamous mistake, though, when he inked thirty-three-year-old former San Francisco ace Jason Schmidt to a three-year, $47 million deal in 2007—despite an MRI revealing that Schmidt’s throwing arm appeared to be fastened to the rest of his body at the shoulder with chicken wire. In 2003, while Colletti was San Francisco’s assistant general manager, Schmidt led the National League with a 2.34 earned run average, an incredible number considering he posted it at the height of the steroid era. So, three years later in his new capacity as the GM of the Dodgers, Colletti took a flyer on Schmidt, hoping he would heal and recapture at least some of his old form. He didn’t. Schmidt went on to appear in just ten games for the Dodgers, winning three. The signing was mocked as one of the worst of the decade, especially when it emerged later during the Dodgers’ attempt to collect insurance money that the club was aware of Schmidt’s partially torn rotator cuff when it signed him. Many Dodger fans were frustrated by Colletti’s infatuation with former Giant players, and it was easy to wonder if his judgment was clouded by deep emotional ties to the archrival organization. When the Giants won their first title in fifty-six years in 2010, Colletti cried. Those around the game assumed that if he ever left the Dodgers, he would go back to work in San Francisco.
• • •
Ned Colletti’s newfound fiduciary flexibility came with a catch. After Mark Walter took over the Dodgers he installed Stan Kasten as team president to run the club’s day-to-day operations. Kasten had worked in that same capacity for the Braves from 1986 to 2003, before moving to Washington to help guide the Nationals after they relocated from Montreal. During his tenure in Atlanta the Braves became the class of the National League, winning fourteen division titles in fifteen years and five NL pennants with homegrown talent and the best starting rotation of the modern era. During that dynasty, future Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz functioned like a three-headed monster that chewed through opposing lineups with devastating results. Kasten brought with him to Los Angeles an emphasis on pitching and developing a strong farm system. But on the surface, he was a counterintuitive choice to run the new cash-drunk Dodgers. “I just don’t like giving a lot of money to players,” said Kasten.
Nevertheless, the job was his. The Dodgers were setting themselves up as the new Yankees West, and they made no secret of the fact that they were hungry for superstars to showcase on their new television network. Kasten hadn’t run the Braves that way. When he took over in Atlanta the team held the impressive distinction of having the highest payroll ($16 million) in the National League and finishing last in its division. Knowing the Braves’ farm system was also in tatters, Kasten traded better-known players for prospects and slashed the club’s payroll to $12 million. The press roasted him. But Kasten preached patience to his owner, Ted Turner, even advising the media mogul to avoid local sports talk radio for the next few years. After finishing in last place in the NL West the next three seasons, the Braves rebounded in 1991, winning their division and advancing all the way to the World Series. They captured the NL pennant the following year as well. Most impressive, the Braves didn’t sign their first big free agent, Greg Maddux, until after they’d been to the World Series twice. “We kept everyone as they were growing and becoming all-stars,” said Kasten. “My last year there our payroll got up to eight-five or ninety million dollars—which was maybe the highest payroll in the National League—but we had earned our way there because we had started from the bottom.”
Kasten hated the idea of trading away blue-chip prospects for veteran rentals who could help his club win in the short term while wrecking its future. Instead, he believed that in order to win year in and year out, the first thing an organization had to do was stuff its farm system with young talent. Kasten’s measured approach relied on self-control. But Mark Walter didn’t want to wait. While Dodger fans welcomed Guggenheim with much excitement, Walter was smart enough to know that the honeymoon affection his new ownership group enjoyed from the city would evaporate if the club went into rebuilding mode. In order to bring back fans alienated by McCourt and compete with the Lakers, he knew his team had to win, and to win now. Walter couldn’t be at Dodger Stadium every day to deal with the minutiae of overseeing a major-league baseball team because he still lived in Chicago, where he ran his multibillion-dollar investment firm. So he turned the keys to the club over to Kasten. The Dodgers were not Walter’s team or Colletti’s team or even Mattingly’s team: the Dodgers were Kasten’s. Everyone knew it.
• • •
Stan Kasten never stood still. On game days, he arrived at Dodger Stadium by eight in the morning and often stayed until midnight. During the sixteen hours or so he was at the ballpark each day he roamed the premises like a shark that feared it would die if it ever stopped moving. Kasten was not only the captain of the Dodgers’ ship, he was also the club’s hall monitor. His constant motion put everyone he came into contact with on edge. While baseball was a game to many, it was a high-stakes business to him. If something went wrong, Kasten had to answer to billionaires who did not like it when things went wrong. He could not rest when there was anything to be done, and there was always something that needed doing.
After the new ownership group came in, Kasten sat down with Colletti and made a wish list of players they would love to see in Dodger blue—whether they were available or not. At the top of that list was Boston’s first baseman, Adrian Gonzalez. “He was offensively great, defensively great, bilingual, from Southern California, a pillar of the community,” said Kasten, of Gonzalez. “He just checked all the boxes. So he was on the list of the most perfect guys we could ever get some day.”
The Dodgers had employed James Loney at first base for the past seven seasons but were looking to upgrade the position. Loney was a lanky high school senior from Houston when the Dodgers selected him in the first round of the 2002 draft, and he’d spent his entire career in the organization. His slick fielding made him one of the best defensive first basemen in the game, but he’d never hit more than fifteen home runs in a year. That lack of sock in his swing wouldn’t do for a burgeoning super team. Getting Gonzalez from Boston wouldn’t be easy: the Red Sox had just signed the left-handed slugger to a seven-year, $154 million contract extension before the previous season. But Gonzalez’s tenure with the Sox had started on an awkward note. Though he had hit twenty-seven home runs in his first season with Boston and collected an MLB-leading 213 hits on his way to a .410 on-base percentage, Gonzalez drew the ire of Red Sox Nation when, after the team suffered a spectacular collapse in the season’s final month and failed to make the playoffs, he shrugged and told the media that a championship just wasn’t God’s plan. The following year when he struggled to start the season, the boos rained down on him at Fenway. It stung.
Gonzalez had played most of his career in San Diego, a sleepy city whose fan base gives its players minimal grief when they sputter. He never got used to playing under a microscope. When Boston scuffled in the final months of his first season with the team, Gonzalez blamed the club’s schedule. Because the Red Sox were one of the league’s best teams, many of their Sunday day games were moved to the evening so they could be shown nationally. Late Sunday start times meant more overnight flights on getaway days—something Gonzalez rarely had to deal with as a Padre. But they also meant that he was playing on a winning team—and he was mad about that? Gonzalez had moved from one of the most relaxed cities in America to the one wound tightest. “You go to the grocery store and you’re getting hitting advice,” said teammate Nick Punto, of Boston. “You go to the barbershop and you’re getting hitting advice.” That kind of pressure bothered Gonzalez. “They didn’t like that I was a calm person,” he said later to the Los Angeles Times, of the Boston media. “I won’t throw my helmet. I won’t scream, I won’t use bad words if I strike out. That’s what they want over there.”
• • •
That Kasten had finessed control of player transactions from Ned Colletti’s grasp became evident on the night the Boston mega-trade was struck. Colletti had called the Red Sox general manager, Ben Cherington, in early May 2012 and asked what it would take to land the power-hitting first baseman in a trade. Cherington told him Gonzalez was not available. So the Dodgers got creative. Kasten knew the struggling Red Sox had a handful of albatross contracts they would love to be rid of, so he called Boston’s president, Larry Lucchino, and told him his club was in the somewhat rare position of having an owner who was willing to take on a ton of extra money in player salary if Gonzalez was packaged with guys who were way overpaid. Lucchino was intrigued. That July, Colletti thought the Dodgers had struck a multiplayer deal for Gonzalez—but it fell apart on the day of the trading deadline, in part because the Red Sox still believed they had a shot to make the playoffs and they didn’t want to trade away one of their best hitters. “It just didn’t happen and we were all disappointed,” said Kasten.
The bitterness of that failure had been lingering for two weeks when Kasten approached Walter and said he wasn’t ready to give up. The two men brainstormed how far they would be willing to go to take one final crack at landing Gonzalez. Then, opportunity struck. Kasten and Walter were in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Denver for Major League Baseball’s quarterly owners meetings when they noticed Red Sox owner John Henry smoking a cigar on the hotel patio with a group of men that included White Sox emperor Jerry Reinsdorf. Kasten was about to make a beeline for Henry when he saw something out of the corner of his eye that could thwart his plans. Also in the lobby stood two veteran national baseball writers who were in Denver covering the conference. Had either of them seen Kasten lure Henry away for a private conversation, they would have poked around to find out what was up. Kasten knew each man had been in the business long enough to have the sources necessary to break the story of the trade before it happened, which could have wrecked it. Striking a deal with another team before the nonwaiver deadline was difficult enough. But trades after July 31 were always trickier to pull off because by rule a player must be placed on waivers before he is traded, and, for the sake of competitive balance, every other team with a worse record than the club that wants him has first dibs. What that meant was that if any of the Dodgers’ or Red Sox’ rivals got wind of the mammoth trade they were scheming, they could have claimed one of the players involved in the deal just to derail the whole thing.
Kasten had to think fast. He had an idea. Walter had owned the Dodgers for only three months, and he was still a mystery to the national media. Kasten approached the reporters. “How would you guys like an exclusive sit-down with our owner?” he asked. The men jumped at the chance. An interview with Walter, the man crazy enough to plunk down $2 billion for a sports franchise, would make for great copy. Kasten ushered the reporters to a table with Walter, making sure their backs were facing the patio. Then, after they were tucked away, he walked up to Henry. “John,” he said. “Can we talk?” Henry extinguished his cigar and followed Kasten out of the lobby.
When Kasten pulled Henry off that patio on that August night in Denver, the Dodgers and Red Sox could not have been in more disparate positions. Kasten was looking for bold-faced names. Henry had them, and his team was flailing. In 2011, Boston had played well for five months before imploding down the stretch, becoming the first team in baseball history to blow a nine-game wild card lead in September. The Red Sox dropped eighteen of their final twenty-four games and were eliminated from the playoffs on the last day of the season after a furious ninth-inning comeback by the lowly Orioles. The club’s manager, Terry Francona, and general manager, Theo Epstein, were both run out of town.
In an effort to reboot, before the 2012 season the Red Sox brass hired Bobby Valentine, a known authoritarian, to manage the team, and installed Cherington as general manager. The players hated Valentine. But the front office had every reason to believe its talented—and very expensive—team would bounce back and perform well that year. Their center fielder, Jacoby Ellsbury, had finished second in the AL MVP voting the year before, Gonzalez had finished seventh, and second baseman Dustin Pedroia had placed ninth. The Red Sox took the field on opening day in 2012 with a $161 million payroll, third highest in MLB behind the Yankees and the Phillies. That kind of money brought huge expectations, which is why Boston didn’t want to give up Gonzalez on July 31 when they were just three and a half games out of earning a wild card berth to the playoffs.
But when the calendar flipped to August, the Sox lost eight of their first twelve games. And on the evening that Henry stubbed out his cigar and accompanied Kasten out of that hotel lobby, Boston had fallen to eleven games back of the Yankees in the AL East, and five and a half games out of the wild card race with just six weeks left to play.
Though Gonzalez was only a season and a half into his seven-year deal, it was becoming clear he might benefit from a change of scenery. His coaches and teammates compared him to a clubhouse lawyer who liked to argue for the sake of arguing. Some even began referring to him as the Professor behind his back, a dig at their perception that he thought he was smarter than everyone else.
It was true that Gonzalez didn’t display his emotions on the field very often, which made it difficult for fans to tell how much he cared. The only time he seemed to react was when he disagreed with an umpire’s call. Thanks to his exceptional plate discipline, Gonzalez led the major leagues in walks in 2009, with 119. But his walk total decreased in the years after that, and he walked only 42 times in 2012. The explanation was simple enough. He told teammates and coaches that he was tired of taking pitches in 3-2 counts, because it gave the umpire a chance to mistake a ball for a strike. If taking the power out of an ump’s hands to call him out on strikes meant that he was going to walk only a third as often as before, well then so be it. It was also true that Adrian Gonzalez was more verbose than the average baseball player. And though he may have exhausted some teammates with his argumentative streak, his benign transgressions fell far short of the stage-four clubhouse cancer some in the Boston media made him out to be. Even those he annoyed couldn’t help but respect his work ethic.
Gonzalez had been the first overall pick in the 2000 draft, and he had lived up to his potential. During his nine-year career he had kept his nose clean, never having been mentioned on a human growth hormone mailing list or in a police report. And above all else, the man could still rake. Even though the Red Sox had fallen out of contention in 2012, Gonzalez wanting out of Boston wouldn’t have been enough to force the club’s hand. The Dodgers made the Red Sox an offer they couldn’t refuse, at precisely the right moment. That morning, Yahoo! Sports reported that a frustrated Gonzalez had texted Henry to complain about Valentine. Players had met with ownership to disuss their unhappiness, and details about that meeting leaked as well. When Kasten approached Henry in that Denver hotel, a frustrated Henry was ready to blow up everything and start over.
After months of failed negotiations, it took Kasten and Henry just fifteen minutes to agree to the most expensive trade in baseball history. When the deal was done, Kasten returned to the lobby and flashed a thumbs-up to Walter, who was in the middle of his interview and snuck a glance at his lieutenant over the reporters’ shoulders. The two journalists had no idea what had just gone down.
Ned Colletti wasn’t even in the state of Colorado.
Eleven days after the Denver summit, after medical records were reviewed and the Red Sox finalized the list of young prospects they wanted from the Dodgers, the two sides announced the trade. In the nine-player deal, the Dodgers got Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Nick Punto in exchange for James Loney and a package of minor leaguers that included pitcher Allen Webster, outfielder Jerry Sands, infielder Ivan DeJesus, and, the gem of the deal, the Dodgers’ top right-handed pitching prospect, Rubby De La Rosa. To complete the trade, Los Angeles also took on a staggering $250 million in player salary. In Gonzalez, the Dodgers got the slugging first baseman they craved to anchor their lineup. In Beckett, they landed a veteran starting pitcher whose brilliant early career included being named the World Series MVP at age twenty-three after leading the Marlins to an improbable championship over the mighty Yankees. They also got an injury-prone player on the wrong side of thirty who had posted a 5.23 ERA in Boston that season. Beckett was owed a cool thirty-five million bucks over the next two years, and it was doubtful he’d be worth half that.
Crawford, a speedy left fielder, had also been miserable in Boston. After he had spent his entire career in Tampa Bay, the Red Sox had signed him to a massive contract following an intense round of free agent bidding before the 2011 season. And like Gonzalez, he never fit. A tremendous high school athlete in Houston in the late nineties, Crawford received a scholarship offer from the University of California, Los Angeles, to play point guard for its basketball team, and an offer from Nebraska to run the read option at quarterback. After mulling his options, Crawford chose to skip college when the Devil Rays took him in the second round of the 1999 draft and offered him a $1.2 million signing bonus to play baseball instead.
For the most part, life in Tampa was good for Crawford. The Rays had called him up at age twenty and made him their full-time left fielder and leadoff hitter when he was just twenty-one. By twenty-two he’d made his first All-Star team, and led the American League in stolen bases (55) and triples (19). He stole six bases in a game against the Red Sox in 2009, tying the modern major-league record. For someone so fast his bat had a noble amount of pop in it, too. During his last year in Tampa, Crawford hit a career-high nineteen home runs. That off-season he was considered to be one of the best players on the free agent market, and the Angels were among the teams that had courted him. Still, when the Red Sox signed him that December to a seven-year deal worth $142 million—the second-richest contract ever for an outfielder—it was a bit of a surprise. Boston’s lineup was already full of expensive talent, and the club had traded for Gonzalez just two days earlier.
The Red Sox didn’t part with that money freely. In an interview with a local radio affiliate during Crawford’s first spring training with the team, Epstein divulged that the club had conducted a thorough background check on the left fielder before backing up the Brinks truck to his door. “We covered him as if we were privately investigating him,” Epstein told listeners. “We had a scout on him literally the last three, four months of the season at the ballpark, away from the ballpark.”
That revelation unnerved Crawford. “I’m from an area where if somebody’s doing that to you they’re not doing anything good,” Crawford told Boston reporters. “I definitely look over my shoulder now a lot more than what I did before. The idea of him following me everywhere I go, was kind of—I wasn’t comfortable with that at all.”
Being watched by anyone was something Crawford wasn’t used to in Tampa. In his first six seasons with the Rays, the club finished last in the American League in attendance. Those Tampa squads were terrible, but it’s not as if the city embraced baseball as soon as the team started winning. In 2008 the Rays rode an incredible season all the way to the World Series. Their stellar play was rewarded with a third-to-last-place finish in attendance in the AL. For almost a decade, Carl Crawford was the human embodiment of a tree falling in the woods and making no sound: he was the best baseball player that no one saw.
Crawford liked to tell a story about an experience that summed up the anonymity afforded to a player who stars for the Tampa Bay Rays. One day he was hanging out with teammates in the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field when members of the Tampa police department turned up looking for him.
“Carl Crawford?” one asked.
“Yeah,” Crawford said.
“We need to talk to you about the Navigator,” said the officer.
“What Navigator?” asked Crawford.
“Well, earlier today a man walked into a dealership in town and said his name was Carl Crawford and asked to test-drive a Navigator and never came back,” said the officer.
Crawford was confused. He told the cops he’d never driven a Navigator in his life. As it turned out, a crafty car burglar wearing Crawford’s jersey had taken a gamble on a Tampa Lincoln dealer having no clue what the best player on the city’s baseball team looked like. It worked.
That sort of caper would never fly in Boston. Even the thickest thief in the state of Massachusetts wouldn’t be dumb enough to pose as a member of the vaunted Red Sox. When he signed with Boston, Crawford knew he was going to go from playing in an empty stadium to suiting up in front of a packed house of die-hard fans every night. Realizing how uneasy the revelations about Crawford’s private life had made his new star player, Epstein backtracked and insisted he misspoke; that the team acquired information in the same way it did on every free agent in its sights. But the damage was done. Crawford’s tenure in Boston began on a sour note, and in the season and a half he spent with the Sox he never grew comfortable.
In some ways, however, Crawford might have gotten too comfortable. He later told a teammate that he felt like the Rays strung him along for years toward a big payday that never came. His desire to earn the huge money that many of his peers enjoyed drove him to play hard every day. But as soon as he signed his fat contract with Boston he confided in friends that he found it difficult to keep his edge. Crawford still wanted to be great but his motivation was buried somewhere, deep under his millions. He didn’t like that about himself, but it was the truth. “That guy used to terrorize us with his bat and his speed when he was in Tampa,” said one player who faced Crawford when he was with the Rays and later became his teammate. “But after he went to Boston it was like, how is this the same player?”
A career .300 hitter, Crawford hit just .255 while he battled a wrist injury during his first year with the Red Sox. His on-base percentage plummeted from .356 in 2010 to an awful .289 the following season, and his slugging percentage also fell ninety points. While the number of times he struck out (104) remained identical to the season before, the number of walks he took halved from 46 to 23. More troubling: his stolen base total nosedived from 47 to 18. Every ballplayer’s speed declines as he ages, but this drop-off was staggering. Crawford was just twenty-nine years old when he signed with the Red Sox. His legs were his livelihood.
The 2012 season brought even more injury trouble. And after appearing in only thirty-one games, Crawford was shut down for the rest of the year with a torn ligament in his throwing elbow. Of this time in Boston, Crawford said: “For two years I was afraid to smile. Everyone was so uptight.”
“I started growing grey hairs on my face from the stress,” he told USA Today. “Deep down, it’s like I know I can still play baseball but after being told how much you suck for two years straight, it kind of messes with your mind.”
But for as much as he wanted out of Boston, Crawford knew the odds of that happening were slim. Not only was his body battered, but he was also still owed $109 million on his current contract. Even if he were healthy and back to torturing other teams with his power and speed, there were only a few clubs in baseball that could afford to take on such a salary commitment, and everyone knew he was no longer worth the money he was due. The severity of his injury meant that in order to be liberated from Boston, Crawford would have to find a team that was both rich enough to pay his fee and crazy enough to want to. Had the Dodgers not been so hell-bent on getting Gonzalez, Crawford might not have gotten out. “I was completely shocked,” Crawford said, of when he was told he was traded. “I thought I was gonna be stuck in Boston for seven years.”
Forty-eight hours before the trade was announced, Crawford had Tommy John surgery to repair his elbow. The estimated recovery time was six to nine months.
• • •
After the Boston deal was finalized, a giddy Walter was so excited to bring the players he just bought to Los Angeles that he sent a private jet to Boston to retrieve them. The trade with the Red Sox had added a quarter of a billion dollars in salary to the team’s payroll through the 2018 season. Walter didn’t look at it that way. “I broke it down into years and just saw it as thirty-five million over seven years,” he said. “Which really isn’t that bad.” Still, if he was going to pay that much to get Gonzalez, then by God his bat was going to be in the starting lineup that night.
Walter, Kasten, and Colletti were just as surprised as the players that the trade went through. Crawford and Beckett posed no real threat to wrecking the deal because their contracts were too enormous for teams to want to take on. But for the Dodgers to be able to successfully claim Gonzalez, every single American League team had to pass on the chance to pluck him off the waiver wire, and then so did all the NL clubs with a worse record than Los Angeles’s. Though Kasten knew that only a handful of teams would be able to afford the money left on Gonzalez’s deal, if one of those clubs did claim the first baseman then the entire trade would be blown. He told Walter he thought the Dodgers had a 50 percent chance. When Colletti sent an email to Walter with the final word on whether their waiver claim of Gonzalez had been successful, Walter was so nervous that he let it sit unread in his inbox for half an hour. The news was good.
Shortly after word of the trade broke, Gonzalez, Beckett, and Punto were already making their way west. In a nod to his new Southern California address, Gonzalez wore a soft blue T-shirt with a beaming Mickey Mouse emblazoned across his chest. The city’s sports fans were ecstatic. Some Dodger fanatics even tracked the plane’s flight path online. While Crawford remained in Florida to recover from his surgery, the three able-bodied players were ushered into Dodger Stadium ninety minutes before the game, after the team had already taken batting practice. Their late arrival caused some harried moments for the Dodgers’s clubhouse attendants, but because the team had been working on the deal for weeks, the rush to prepare uniforms for the new players wasn’t as frantic as when Los Angeles had traded with the Red Sox for Manny Ramirez four years earlier. On that day, the Dodgers’ clubhouse manager, Mitch Poole, ran out of time and was forced to spray-paint Ramirez’s navy blue glove a royal Dodger blue before he took the field. Poole had run the Dodgers’ clubhouse for almost thirty years, and even tossed Kirk Gibson his warm-up pitches in the team’s underground batting cage before Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. That these three Boston players were being shuttled across the country by private jet and chauffeured to the stadium in a fancy SUV made Poole chuckle. When the Dodgers traded Mike Piazza and Todd Zeile to the Florida Marlins for Gary Sheffield, Jim Eisenreich, Charles Johnson, and Bobby Bonilla in 1998, Poole was handed the keys to a beat-up van and told to retrieve the ex-Marlins from the airport. The van’s tire treads were worn so thin he worried it wouldn’t make the twenty-five-minute ride.
Gonzalez found his locker, said hello to his new teammates and coaches, threw on his uniform, located his equipment bag, which housed his gloves and cleats, snuck in a few quick swings in the team’s underground batting cage, then ran out onto the field and introduced himself to the patch of dirt to the right of first base that would be his home for at least the next six seasons.
When he dug in to the batter’s box for his first at-bat at Dodger Stadium the crowd roared. The score was knotted at one, and the home team had runners on first and third with no out. Marlins veteran right-hander Josh Johnson stepped off the rubber, turned his back to the plate, and sighed. Miami’s pitching coach, Randy St. Claire, trotted from the dugout to the mound to try to settle Johnson down. Gonzalez wandered out of the box, snapping his bubble gum and tugging a handful of his crisp white jersey out from his belt. With nobody out, the runner on third was a lost cause. Johnson’s best bet was to forget about him and focus on getting Gonzalez to ground into a double play. The Marlins’ shortstop and second baseman moved back toward the cut of the grass to set up for the 6-4-3, or the 4-6-3, or any other type of twin killing.
Johnson guessed that Gonzalez, revved up by the crowd noise, was looking fastball. He was right. Johnson threw a first-pitch curveball and Gonzalez swung way out in front of it and spun around on his heels, fouling it into the stands off first. Strike one. After greeting him with a hook, Johnson thought he could sneak the next pitch by him. Gonzalez was ready. With the count 0-1, Johnson reared back and fired a fastball down the center of the plate. Gonzalez crushed it through the shadows. It landed in sunlight, thirty feet behind the right-field fence, a million miles from Boston. Dodger fans, so demoralized by the depressing McCourt years, saw the promise of better days ahead in one sweet swing. Of course, Gonzalez wouldn’t do that in every at-bat. Still, that home run may have meant more to the organization than any since Gibson’s. The 2012 Dodgers squad wouldn’t make the postseason. But Gonzalez’s homer did something just as important: it closed the book on the McCourts forever.