The new owner’s bunker had been open for two business days when it became the setting for the biggest contract offer in American sports history. After Colletti led Kershaw down the tunnel for his impromptu sit-down with ownership and his agents, Colletti learned that he wasn’t needed for anything else. “That’ll be all, Ned,” he was told. The door closed. Despite being the team’s general manager, Colletti was shut out of the conversation. His loss of power was an open secret in the clubhouse.
The pressure to win was enormous. On opening day in 2013, the Dodgers’ payroll was $214 million, or about three times what Frank McCourt intended to pay players annually. When Kershaw took the mound to face the Giants, the southpaw ace led a team onto the field that was favored to win it all. Gonzalez jogged over to his position at first base and skipped the ball across the dirt to the club’s sure-handed second baseman, Mark Ellis. At thirty-five years old, Ellis was starting his eleventh season in the big leagues, and his second with the Dodgers. He’d spent most of his career in Oakland playing on excellent teams, and was a rookie on the famous Moneyball club. But he’d never won a championship. With his career winding down, this figured to be his best chance.
As the Dodgers’ best fielder with the least amount of thwack in his bat, Ellis stood out on a team that prioritized offense. He was different from many of his teammates in another fundamental way, too. Baseball was serious business for him. Though teammates agreed he was one of the nicest human beings ever to swing a bat, he played the game with a silent, gnawing intensity that made it seem like it was no fun for him at all. He didn’t like to make small talk with opposing catchers as he stepped into the batter’s box and tortured himself without mercy whenever he slumped. While many of his teammates enjoyed the never-ending spoils of being young and rich in Los Angeles, Ellis’s idea of a good time was hitting the ball to the right side to advance a runner. He batted second in a lineup crowded with superstars, and in many ways functioned as the club’s captain. He was as steady as he was respected, and his teammates wished he could be as kind to himself as he was to others.
To Ellis’s right was a plucky young man doused in tattoos and hair gel named Justin Sellers. At 160 pounds, Sellers skipped onto the field that day with a noticeable spring in his step, as a scrub occupying one of the glory positions on baseball’s most glamorous team while the Dodgers’ starting shortstop, the superlatively talented Hanley Ramirez, was off nursing a torn thumb ligament. (Sellers was sent to the minors weeks later and cut after the season.)
At third base stood Luis Cruz, a journeyman infielder who spent the better part of twelve seasons in the minor leagues with six different organizations, even taking a whirl through the Mexican leagues before earning a shot to make the Dodgers’ opening day roster. With the team’s regular third baseman, Juan Uribe, slumping in 2012, the unknown Cruz emerged from bush-league obscurity in the final three months of the season and hit .300. That he hailed from nearby Mexico endeared him to hometown fans even more.
Cruz had the inglorious distinction of taking the job of the most popular man in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. Like Jeff Kent, Uribe was another former Giant nearing the last licks of his career when Colletti rewarded him with a three-year contract before the 2011 season. His first two years in Los Angeles had been a disaster. Entering the 2013 season, his career batting average for the Dodgers sat at an abysmal .199; he’d hit just six total home runs. So feckless was Uribe at the plate that he was given just one at-bat in the last month of the 2012 season. But in the final team meeting of that tumultuous year, Mattingly singled him out for his leadership and his unselfishness. Addressing the group, he thanked Uribe for maintaining a positive attitude, and for showing up to work every day with a smile on his face despite all else. “He thanked him for being a professional,” Colletti said. “Even though his year hadn’t gone as he planned—or we planned—and even though September didn’t provide him many opportunities, he singled him out because of who he is.”
Uribe’s teammates loved him just as much as Mattingly and Colletti did. Because of significant language and culture barriers, baseball locker rooms are almost always segregated by race, with white players hanging with white players, Latinos with Latinos, African-American players with other black players, and Asians with their translators. Not Uribe. He had an easy way of mingling with everybody and making outsiders feel included. When the Dodgers signed starting pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu out of South Korea the previous off-season, Ryu showed up to spring training not speaking a word of English. “Coming over here I was worried about making friends,” Ryu said later, through a translator. “Like would my new teammates like me?” Uribe took care of that. He noticed Ryu sitting alone one day, and, not having any idea how to say “Come hang out with us” in Korean, he walked up to Ryu and slugged him on the shoulder. Ryu looked up at him, confused. Uribe smiled, and wrapped his arms around him. Then it was on. The two men began wrestling until Ryu pinned Uribe, to the delight of cheering teammates. “He understood that I wasn’t able to blend in and speak the language here, so he really reached out and accepted me for who I was,” said Ryu. “He’s got a great sense of humor and he’s just a great person to be around.” From that day forward the two men were inseparable, even though neither had any clue what the other was saying, ever.
A bear of a man, Uribe became the Dodgers’ unofficial mascot. Bored by talk of hitting mechanics, he summed up his approach in the batter’s box like this: “I see the ball, I hit the ball.” He could make anybody in the room laugh with his penchant for self-deprecating jokes, and he had a black belt in teasing teammates, knowing exactly how far he could push a joke before he ran the risk of hurting feelings. “He’s the best teammate I ever played with,” said Matt Kemp, a frequent target of Uribe’s ribbing. But as beloved as Uribe was, he still wasn’t hitting. And so on opening day he took his spot on the pine.
Rounding out the bench were veteran utility infielders Jerry Hairston Jr., Nick Punto, and Skip Schumaker. Along with Uribe, those four owned a combined five World Series rings, which gave the club a lift if championship experience meant anything, because no one in the Dodgers’ starting lineup had any. They weren’t the stars of the team, but they were the glue. Hairston was months away from retiring and taking a position as a broadcaster with the team’s new television network. Schumaker and Punto became close friends while playing together for the Cardinals and carpooled to Dodger Stadium together an hour up Interstate 5 from Orange County every day.
While Carl Crawford, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier took their places in left, center, and right, respectively, A. J. Ellis fastened his catcher’s mask to his face and squatted into a crouch behind home plate. Like Luis Cruz, Ellis had toiled in the minors for the better part of a decade before the Dodgers gave him a real shot at starting in the majors. The front office had teased him by calling him for various cups of coffee during the 2008, ’09, ’10, and ’11 seasons, but each time he felt like he was on the verge of winning the starting job, the team would sign a veteran or trade for someone else’s backup and he was blocked again. Because minor leaguers are paid in pounds of peanut shells, his wife, Cindy, had supported their family during the early years of their marriage by working as a pastry chef at a resort during the season and as a caterer in the off-season. When their second child, Luke, was born in May 2010, Ellis was in the midst of his first extended stint as a backup on the major-league roster. Big-league players are allowed to take a few days’ paternity leave after their children are born, and most do. But Cindy encouraged Ellis to stay with the team because she thought it was best for their family.
The next catcher on the Dodgers’ depth chart in the minors was twenty-five-year-old Lucas May, who the Ellises kept hearing was the next big thing. If Ellis took even a day away from the club to be with his family, May would be called up to replace him, and then who knows what could have happened. So, Ellis stayed, and didn’t meet his son until two weeks later. It was worth it. Two months after Luke Ellis was born the Dodgers traded May to the Royals. He appeared in twelve games for Kansas City at the end of the season and never played in the big leagues again. Ellis wouldn’t miss the birth of his third child, however. A few weeks after the 2012 season ended, Ellis was with Cindy in their home outside Milwaukee when her water broke. The two set off for the hospital within minutes but didn’t make it. Audrey Elizabeth Ellis was born in the front seat of the car they had borrowed from Cindy’s father while Ellis was doing 75 mph down the interstate. He didn’t even have a chance to pull over.
During his last few seasons in the minors, when a permanent promotion to the big leagues began to seem less and less likely, Ellis decided he would keep playing in the club’s minor-league system for as long as they’d have him, with the idea that he would transition into coaching when his knees gave out. What Ellis lacked in athleticism he made up for in instinct and intelligence. Knowing full well he couldn’t hit the ball as hard or as far as many of his teammates, he resolved to turn himself into a tough out. He began memorizing every opposing pitcher’s fastball release point, and studied the window and the trajectory the ball took toward the batter’s box. Then, based on where that fastball landed in the catcher’s mitt, he would look for the spin of the ball out of the pitcher’s hand to try to determine if it was a curveball, changeup, or slider, and calculate the likelihood that it would be a strike.
A standard home plate is seventeen inches wide. To be called a strike, the ball must pass over it somewhere between the bottom of the batter’s knees and the letters across the chest of his uniform (or wherever the home-plate umpire determines the strike zone to be). To save his career, Ellis decided that if a pitch was not a strike then he would not swing at it. It started when his Single-A manager told him to stop swinging at pitches when the count was 3-1, believing that Ellis had a better chance of walking than getting a hit. He got so good at separating balls from strikes that in his last season in the minors he reached base 47 percent of the time he stepped up to bat, walking fifty times in fifty-nine games. Even if he had to take strikes to achieve his objective he didn’t care. He became determined to see as many pitches as possible to make the opposing pitcher work hard. In 2012, he had led all of Major League Baseball in pitches seen per plate appearance, with an average of 4.44, because, he says: “There’s no worse feeling than taking a bad swing at a first pitch and making an out and wondering what could have been.” When opposing hitters faced Kershaw, Ellis marveled at how they seemed happier with a broken-bat first-pitch groundout to third base than striking out in an eight-pitch at-bat. He finally won the team’s starting catching job in 2012, at age thirty-one. While still a young man by any other standard, it was ancient for a guy getting his first crack at a starting job—especially at a position so physically demanding.
With Kershaw as his best friend, Ellis’s life’s work had in many ways become more about ushering along the Hall of Fame dreams of others than chasing his own personal accolades, which was fine with him. But he didn’t win the starting job on the super team because he was a nice guy. In 2012 he broke out and posted one of the best seasons of any catcher in the National League, hitting thirteen home runs to go along with a .373 on-base percentage—the best of any Dodgers regular. Still, entering the 2013 season Ellis knew that nothing was guaranteed. Should he falter, his backup, a twenty-five-year-old rookie named Tim Federowicz, felt more than ready to take his spot.
The Dodgers had a starting rotation problem. Following Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-Jin Ryu they employed five guys jockeying for the remaining two spots, each with his own set of problems. Josh Beckett was healthy and penciled in as the fourth starter when the Dodgers began the season, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before his body fell apart. Veterans Chris Capuano and Aaron Harang were interchangeable back-end-rotation types to whom teams gave $5 million a year in hopes that they’d give up fewer than five runs a game. Chad Billingsley, a talented young right-hander who came up through the Dodgers system, had spent the off-season nursing his injured pitching elbow, hoping to avoid the dreaded Tommy John surgery that would knock him out of the game for a year or longer. And at thirty-seven and already gray-haired, Ted Lilly was often mistaken for a coach by visiting reporters. Hitters had no trouble identifying his pitches and crushing them for home runs, however. He was injured, too. So while Billingsley and Lilly began the season on the disabled list, Harang became the club’s fifth starter after a figurative coin flip, and an annoyed Capuano was sent to the bullpen.
Joining Capuano in the pen was a motley tribe of elder statesmen, a converted catcher, and one kid just old enough to drink. At twenty-one years old, Paco Rodriguez was four years younger than everyone else on the roster. The Dodgers had selected the lefty out of the University of Florida with their second-round pick in the 2012 draft and called him up just three months later, making him the first player from his class to get promoted to the big leagues. The club had good reason for doing that: in addition to his stuff being deceptive because his unorthodox delivery hid the ball longer than usual, the time bomb in his arm ticked louder than most. The front office felt it was smarter to use the innings he had left in the majors rather than the minors.
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.
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 not 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.”
So at age thirty-four, Mattingly retired and moved back to Evansville. And because he was still a young man and he didn’t know what else to do, he bought an RV so he could drive his boys all over the country so they could see all the things he’d seen—and many things he hadn’t. He stayed away from the big leagues for nine years, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t wanted. Steinbrenner had tried to lure him into joining the Yankees coaching staff, to no avail. Mattingly wanted to be with his boys. From 1997 to 2003 the Yankees’ boss was able to coax him into working as a special hitting instructor during spring training with the idea that if he just got Mattingly back into those pinstripes, even for a couple of weeks a year, Donnie would someday crave an even bigger role. The Boss was right. The year Taylor turned nineteen and Preston hit seventeen, Mattingly accepted a position as the Yankees’ hitting coach under Torre. “Before he took the job he asked us if it was okay if he went back,” said Preston. “We wanted him to. We pushed him to do it.” Mattingly coached the Yankees for four years, until Torre wore out his welcome with management and went to Los Angeles. Mattingly interviewed for Torre’s old job, but when the position went to another former Yankee, Joe Girardi, Mattingly followed Torre out west and became the Dodgers’ hitting coach. Mattingly’s hard luck continued. The year after he and Torre left for L.A., Girardi’s Yankees won another title.
There was a silver lining attached to Mattingly’s pilgrimage west, however. What no one knew then was that part of the reason Mattingly was talked into moving three thousand miles away was that he was promised he would succeed Torre when Torre retired, despite never having managed before. Mattingly had already accomplished enough in his career and didn’t need to prove anything. With his children mostly grown, his reason for becoming a coach was simple. “I liked helping guys,” said Mattingly. “I think at the end of my career I had a good feel for hitting. I had a good vision of—I could tell good swings from guys that didn’t have good swings. [Lou] Piniella taught me how the swing worked. And how one thing creates another. I knew mechanically how to break it down, how it pieced together.”
During those three years in Los Angeles under Torre, Mattingly earned the affection of players with his relaxed attitude and approachability. Compared to Torre, third-base coach Larry Bowa, and the Dodgers then bench coach, Bob Schaefer, Mattingly was the laid-back stepdad who didn’t have to discipline the kids because it wasn’t his job. When Torre walked away after the 2010 season, in part because he was tired of trying to get through to young players he just couldn’t reach, Mattingly would step into a role that was quite different from anything he’d done before. So the Dodgers’ front office made sure his coaching staff was full of former ballplayers who were more than capable of helping him out.
Chief among them was pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, a former Dodger pitcher in his eighth season as a coach with the club. Honeycutt was so important to the success of the Dodgers rotation that A. J. Ellis said: “He’s the most indispensable member of the organization.” Zack Greinke believed that most pitching coaches were either strong at breaking down a hurler’s mechanics or at concocting a game plan. When he joined the Dodgers he was surprised to discover that Honeycutt excelled at both. While watching video, Honeycutt had an uncanny knack for noticing when something was off for one of his guys, be it a slight hitch in his hip rotation or a degree drop in his arm slot imperceptible at first blush. By getting the most out of every arm given to him, he had a gift for resurrecting careers, which might have been one reason Ned Colletti signed so many broken former closers to fill out the club’s bullpen.
In 2011 the Dodgers lured one of the best base stealers and baserunning coaches of all time, Davey Lopes, away from the Phillies, and his impact was felt right away. Though every first-base coach uses a stopwatch to clock the time it takes between when the pitcher makes his first move toward home plate and when the ball reaches the catcher’s mitt, Lopes was deft at reading pickoff moves and peppered his base runners with intel to keep them out of danger. But there was another reason the Dodgers were so keen on Lopes. The baserunning guru’s best friend was Matt Kemp’s agent, the former pitcher Dave Stewart. When Lopes came to L.A., Kemp was coming off the worst season of his career, during which he hit .249 and stole 19 bases while being caught 15 times. Stewart was optimistic that Lopes could help Kemp regain his form, and he was right. During Lopes’s first season with the Dodgers, Kemp stole 40 bases in 51 attempts.
Over at third base was Tim Wallach, a man who many thought would be a better choice to manage the Dodgers when Mattingly got the job. Two years before Mattingly took over as skipper, Wallach led the club’s Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes to a franchise-record eighty wins and was named Pacific Coast League manager of the year. Respected for his sharp baseball intellect, Wallach was unaware of the unspoken agreement that Mattingly would succeed Torre and thought he had a shot at becoming the Dodgers’ manager when Torre stepped down. Being overlooked had been a disappointment. Nevertheless, Wallach and Mattingly got along well. Should Mattingly get fired during the season, many thought Wallach would take over as interim manager. As much as Wallach wanted a chance to manage, he didn’t want to be given that opportunity at Mattingly’s expense.
The team got a gift when another ex-player who wanted to be closer to his children fell into its lap. Former superstar slugger Mark McGwire, he of the 583 career home runs, had worked with Cardinal hitters for the previous three seasons to rave reviews. Many exceptional athletes are so naturally gifted that when they try to teach what they do to others they just can’t. McGwire was a rare exception. And because he hit most of his home runs while they were kids, players lined up to receive his secrets. McGwire had starred for St. Louis, and the Cardinals had even named the third deck in left field at Busch Stadium “Big Mac Land” in his honor. But McGwire’s wife and five young children were living back in Orange County, California, and he missed them. So when the Dodgers offered him their hitting coach position, he jumped at the chance to go home. While minor on the surface, this move wound up having major implications six months later.
But of all the men surrounding Mattingly, perhaps the most important was his bench coach, Trey Hillman. Since a manager’s typical day is filled with the exhausting balancing act of tap-dancing for media, keeping the front office happy, and massaging player egos, he isn’t able to devote full use of his brain to setting a lineup and studying potential late-game matchups. That’s where bench coaches come in. Hillman had managed in the Yankees’ farm system from 1990 to 2001, and he got to know Mattingly when he came back to the organization as a part-time instructor. After the 2002 season, Hillman moved to Japan to manage the Nippon-Ham Fighters for five years, before the Kansas City Royals hired him as their skipper in the winter of 2007. While the Royals were stuck in a never-ending rebuilding slump thanks to a series of bad drafts and uninspired free agent signings, Hillman was fired six weeks into his third season.
During his brief tenure in Kansas City, Hillman noticed something that began to drive him nuts. The small market Royals hadn’t made the playoffs since 1985 and had pinned their hopes to the influx of prospects rising up through their system, because they couldn’t afford to outspend other teams in free agency. But when Kansas City promoted these youngsters to the big leagues, Hillman realized the kids weren’t as prepared as they could have been had the organization’s farm system been, well, organized. In a perfect world, each team in a club’s minor-league system would use all the same signs and preach identical philosophies on things like advancing runners and defensive positioning, so that when players were called up to the majors they wouldn’t be so overwhelmed with new information. In reality, communication was a mess. Nothing was streamlined. Hillman was certain that every team could benefit from an emphasis on this kind of organizational synthesis. So, jobless and looking to continue his baseball career in a new capacity, he mailed a folder with his ideas to all thirty teams after the 2010 season ended. The Dodgers had just hired Mattingly as their manager, but they had yet to name a bench coach. When Ned Colletti called Hillman and expressed interest in interviewing him, Hillman assumed it was for the position of minor-league instructional czar, a post he hoped to create. Hillman met with Colletti and told him his ideas. At the end of the meeting, Colletti surprised him by offering him the job as the Dodgers’ bench coach.
It was a curious hire. A bench coach functions like a first mate, often serving as the manager’s eyes and ears from the dugout, running through strategy and substitution ideas and acting as a sounding board during the tense late-inning decisions that come to define that manager’s competence. Hillman had managerial experience, and he could craft a mean Excel sheet, but he had never coached in the National League before. To baseball purists, managing in the American League versus the National League was akin to the difference between playing checkers and chess. Because pitchers don’t hit in the AL, there are far fewer in-game substitutions that need to be choreographed to outmaneuver the opposing skipper; and there are seldom any double switches. Mattingly had only ever played in the American League. Hillman had only ever coached in it. Some worried they would be overmatched. Mattingly was well aware of his limitations. So to help himself prepare to be a skipper someday, while he was still just a hitting coach he would sit in front of his television during the playoffs with a stack of note cards and write down what he would do in each scenario that unfolded in front of him.
But while his coaching staff focused on micro, Mattingly’s most important objective was keeping twenty-five grown men who lived in uncomfortably close proximity to one another for nine months out of the year from killing each other. Hillman believed Mattingly was up for the task. In the three years they worked together, the two men became close friends. And, because they were both living away from their families, they bunked together in a rented home in Hermosa Beach and rode to and from the ballpark together every day. Of Mattingly, Hillman said: “I’ve never been around someone who always unwaveringly has seen the best in everyone.”
Goodness came naturally to Don Mattingly. Heading into the 2013 season, his unbridled optimism was his greatest attribute. It took him ten days to fly into a rage.
• • •
Zack Greinke wasn’t trying to hit Carlos Quentin. His teammates knew this for certain, because he told them so, and he wasn’t any good at lying. And even if Greinke were capable of massaging the truth—if when he was asked a question he did not want to answer, his dimples didn’t betray him by widening across his face and his dark blue eyes didn’t fixate on the ground like a young child caught in a fib—he would not have wanted to, because he viewed anything other than the truth as a grand waste of time. Greinke had no energy for suffering fools, either, and, as if channeling Holden Caulfield, he referred to journalists who attempted to butter him up with small talk as phonies and ball washers. When the Dodgers signed Greinke in the winter of 2012, they became World Series favorites that afternoon. A team needs to win three games to advance past the first round of the playoffs, then four victories to make the World Series, then another four to win it all. With Kershaw and Greinke taking the mound twice in each round as the team’s number-one and number-two starters, they could, in theory, do that on their own. The club finally had a Don Drysdale to Kershaw’s Koufax.
After Greinke signed, he exchanged a few polite text messages with his new catcher, A. J. Ellis, about where he and his wife, Emily, should look to buy a home in L.A. On the morning Greinke threw his first bullpen session for the Dodgers the following spring, Ellis approached him and asked how he liked to warm up. Some pitchers liked to throw nothing but fastballs and curveballs for the first few weeks of training camp and wait until mid-March to mix in their slider because it’s harder on the elbow. When Ellis asked him about how he preferred to get loose, Greinke smirked and stared at his feet. “I’m pretty easy,” he said. “You go stand over there and I’ll stand over here. I’ll throw the ball and you catch it. Then you throw it back to me.” Ellis couldn’t contain his laughter. He laughed again when, weeks into the season when the Dodgers were stuck in a painful slump, he asked Greinke what roster moves he might make to improve the team. Greinke considered the question carefully, as he always did, then came back to Ellis later with his answer. “Well, the first thing I’d do is trade you because your value will never be higher,” Greinke said. “And then I’d sign Brian McCann in the off-season to play catcher so we can upgrade the position offensively.” He was serious. Unsure of how to respond, Ellis told him: “Oh yeah? Well, I’d trade you, too.”
Greinke wasn’t trying to be rude. He just lacked the ability to sugarcoat words as they stumbled off his tongue. Once, after Greinke had been riding Ellis hard for being so slow on the base paths that Greinke’s bunts had to be perfect to sacrifice Ellis over, a teammate told Greinke that for every five mean things he said to someone he had to pay one compliment. He was half joking, but Greinke took it to heart. The next day, Greinke approached Ellis between innings and told him he’d done a nice job framing a low pitch. Ellis wondered what the hell he was talking about. Then he remembered Greinke’s new orders to be nice. He laughed again.
Zack Greinke knew he was different, but he didn’t want to be seen as a jerk. When he threw a pitch that missed too far inside he would often shout, “Look out!” to the batter from the mound. And when a hitter laid off a tough pitch, Greinke would yell, “Good take!”—not to patronize, but because he loved the game so much he couldn’t hide his respect for those who were good at it. (Kershaw followed suit in his own way, sometimes tipping his cap to a hitter who resisted swinging at a nasty borderline strike, too.) When the Dodgers played the Tigers at Comerica Field in Detroit, Greinke, who had spent most of his career in the American League, knew he would face some batters he’d seen many times before, so he tried to mix things up. After he threw a first-pitch changeup for a called strike to Ian Kinsler, the second baseman stepped out of the box, impressed. Batters tend to look up at the scoreboard after each pitch to check the radar gun reading to help them figure out what type of pitch they just saw. A number in the 90s meant fastball. Eighties could mean changeup or slider; 70s a curveball. But the gun on the scoreboard wasn’t working that day. So when Greinke noticed Kinsler looking around the stadium for help, he began waving his arms at him. “Hey!” he shouted. “It was a changeup!” Kinsler shook his head and chuckled. “That’s beautiful,” he said, and nodded at Greinke in appreciation.
Some people looked at Greinke and saw a brilliant eccentric with a wicked sense of humor. Others saw something else. When Carlos Quentin stepped into the box against Greinke on that fateful April night, he’d already been plunked by 115 pitches in his short major-league career, including the night before by Dodger reliever Ronald Belisario. Despite playing in only eighty-six games in 2011, he’d led the league in hit-by-pitches with twenty-three. He was hit more times than anyone else in 2012, too, even though he played in only eighty-six games. It was no secret that hitters and pitchers fought for control of the plate, with some batters crowding it to have a better shot at making contact with pitches that were thrown outside. But Quentin’s stance was extreme. He was twenty times more likely to get hit by a pitch than the average batter; he leaned so far over the plate that at least four of the balls that struck him could have been called strikes. Greinke had hit him twice before, but then so had seventeen other pitchers. One had plunked him four times. In fact, Quentin had been hit once in every twenty-four plate appearances, the highest rate of anyone in the history of the game.
It was the bottom of the sixth inning in San Diego, during that glorious time of the year when every team, even the bumbling Padres and their modest payroll, believed they had a chance. With their roster they did not, of course—but perhaps they could hang in for another month. San Diego had beaten its rich rivals two nights before, and could win the series if it pulled out another victory. So when the club’s big left fielder stepped up to the plate to lead off the inning with his team trailing by a run, he was in position to tie the game with one swing.
Though Greinke had limited the Padres to just one run through the first five innings, he had been frustrated by his lack of command that day. When Greinke was on, which was most of the time, he threw seeds that hit their target some sixty feet away over and over again, like a world champion dart maestro. In his two seasons before coming to L.A., he used a heavy sinker and a tight slider to go 31-11 for contending teams in Milwaukee and Anaheim, with 401 strikeouts in 384 innings. And in 2009, when that slider was so good that he could throw it in any count, to any batter, and know it would not be touched, he posted one of the best seasons for a pitcher this century and won the American League’s Cy Young Award. But what was most remarkable about Zack Greinke was that he was even playing baseball at all.
A superb athlete growing up in the suburbs of Orlando, Greinke excelled at just about any sport he tried. As an eight-year-old, he was one of the best tennis players in the country, compiling a 50-0 record before deciding it wasn’t fun anymore and quitting the sport altogether. The pressure he put on himself to be perfect outweighed the sweetness of victory. And so he walked away, and turned his attention to baseball. He thought maybe a team sport, where a loss could not be pinned just on him, might be easier on his psyche. And it was, for a while. He struck out 118 batters in 63 innings his senior year of prep school, and like Kershaw, was named Gatorade’s National High School Baseball Player of the Year. But unlike Kershaw, Greinke didn’t become a starter until the twelfth grade. Before that, he was a slugging shortstop who fell into pitching by accident when coaches noticed how hard he threw the ball one day and put him on a mound. The Royals took him with the sixth overall pick in the 2002 draft, certain he’d be a star. And even though he had converted into a full-time pitcher, his athleticism on the diamond stood out. His excellent fielding reminded Colletti of Greg Maddux, who won eighteen Gold Gloves. After he stole second base in a tie game in September, a reporter asked him if the coaches told him to do it. “They didn’t tell me not to,” he said.
Greinke’s adjustment to life as a professional baseball player wasn’t easy, however. He had dealt with anxiety since childhood, since those tennis days as an eight-year-old when he’d make himself so nervous before matches he’d remind himself, “Just breathe, Zack,” while choking down the vomit as it rose into his throat. The further he advanced in his career, the worse his anxiety got. His agile mind betrayed him by imagining everything that could go wrong in any given situation. Though he had some of the best pure stuff of any pitcher in baseball, he analyzed and reanalyzed every hitter’s tendencies as if the key to his success lay not in his strengths but in their weaknesses. Greinke’s intellect was his greatest asset and his biggest obstacle. “Sometimes,” he said, “I try too hard and it backfires.”
Greinke envied teammates who didn’t think at all. In his second season with the Royals, he lost seventeen games, the most of any pitcher in the American League. By the time the 2006 season rolled around, his anxiety became so debilitating that he considered retiring at twenty-two years old. Two weeks after reporting to spring training that year, he told the Royals’ brass he could no longer continue. On the mound, he was fine. Always. But he hated all the downtime that being a ballplayer entailed. Showing up to the ballpark five hours before each game and having to deal with writers and other people he didn’t know or trust was as agonizing as waiting four days between each start. There was too much time to think. Unhappy with his routine, how antsy it made him to just sit and stew for a living, day after day, he thought about asking the Royals to convert him back to a position player so he could play every day. But there was no shot of that happening, not with his talent on the mound.
So, he told his bosses he needed a break. And he walked away from baseball, maybe forever if that’s how long it took, to get his head right. He devoured self-help books with little results. Depression had run in his family, but he didn’t think that was what was wrong with him. He had never thought of taking his own life, not even once. But then he saw a doctor who put a name on the cause of his suffering. Social anxiety disorder. The label didn’t matter much, except that a diagnosis of a genuine illness meant that perhaps there was medicine out there that could fix it. By the time that doctor handed him a piece of paper with the word “Zoloft” scribbled on it, Greinke was ready to try anything. Two months later he picked up a baseball again, only this time the noise that pushed him out of the game was just a whisper. He could deal with whispers. And far from feeling embarrassed that he needed an antidepressant, his only regret was that he hadn’t gone on the drug sooner. Three years after his diagnosis he won the American League’s Cy Young Award.
As Greinke inched toward free agency, he knew the Royals didn’t have the money to keep him. Kansas City wasn’t going to let him walk with no consolation prize, however, and Greinke hoped they would trade him for prospects before the final year of his contract came up. The Royals had finished last or second to last in the AL Central in each of his first six seasons with the team, and he was sick of losing. So Greinke, ever the patron saint of honesty, stood in front of his locker, faced the cameras, cleared his throat, and said he wanted out. He was traded to Milwaukee. Years later, Greinke addressed the situation with his usual candor. “I was pretty rude on my way out,” Greinke said. “But I wanted to be traded, so I had to be rude.”
Greinke didn’t like to talk about his anxiety disorder. He hated how it was mentioned in every lengthy story written about him, as if it were just another fact to rattle off, like his height or his hometown or his ERA. When Greinke showed up to his first spring training with the Dodgers in 2013, he addressed the media about his past struggles in hopes that he would never have to talk about them again. “In life you have to do things you don’t want to do, but I was raised to do what you enjoy doing, whether you are making several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or thirty thousand per year,” Greinke said. “That was my thought: Why am I putting myself through torture when I didn’t really want to do it? I mean, I enjoyed playing but everything else that went with it, I didn’t.”
But it wasn’t just the playing he enjoyed. Zack Greinke loved baseball more than perhaps anyone else in the sport. No major-league games to watch on television? No problem. He’d flip on a college contest and scout the players—thinking, thinking, always thinking—and anticipate who he might face one day. Hell, he even went to watch high school games, too, if his schedule allowed it. As the most talented pitcher on the free agent market in November 2012, Greinke had many suitors. He chose the Dodgers not just because they offered him a lot of money and had a good chance of winning, but also because he wanted to play for a National League team because he loved hitting so much. When he sat down with Stan Kasten to discuss signing with Los Angeles, he praised the club’s most recent first-round draft pick, a high school shortstop named Corey Seager. (Greinke was right. The Dodgers stole Seager with the eighteenth pick overall, and the lanky kid tore his way through the minors and entered the 2015 season as one of baseball’s top-five prospects.) A team’s intelligence in the draft room mattered to Greinke when he set out to choose whom he would play for. Only a few clubs could afford his salary, of course, but he wanted to win. And if two teams offered him the same amount of money, Greinke would choose the club with the more competent front office—which he didn’t mind saying out loud to members of those front offices. Kasten later called his meeting with Greinke the best, most interesting sit-down he’d ever had with a player in his thirty-plus years working in sports.
After Greinke signed with the Dodgers, baseball experts questioned whether he would wilt under the bright lights of a big city. Those who knew him and were well acquainted with his fierce competitiveness chuckled at the predictions of armchair psychologists and their weak grasp of the nuances of anxiety. His past afflictions had nothing to do with sold-out stadiums. After all, he’d quit the Royals, who in 2005 had played in front of an average home crowd of 17,000 people every night, second lowest in MLB. And anyway, that was eight seasons ago.
Greinke thought he might be a general manager someday, which was another thing about him that didn’t jibe with the perception that he was an oddball who lived alone in a forest and came out of isolation to pitch every fifth day. He loved the strategy of the game, the cost-benefit analysis of signing certain players, and the way a twenty-five-man roster had to be solved like a puzzle. But a GM would have to socialize and schmooze with people for a living like Colletti, himself a former PR man. So Greinke resolved that one day he would run a team without anyone knowing it, and hire a good talker to deal with the media for him. And if he decided against taking a front-office job, because the hours were so long, he had a backup plan when he retired. “I could be in the lawn business, mowing grass,” he said. “I could probably do whatever I want, not needing to get a salary involved. It could be fun. You could be outside a bunch and if you’re running your own business you could make your own hours. Like if you needed a day off sometimes you could take a day off pretty easily.”
As fun as lawn care sounded to Greinke, it was difficult to imagine him ever staying away from baseball for any length of time. He was so obsessed with it, so consumed with uncovering the game’s mysteries, that the first thing he did after every start was pull up pitch-charting websites on a clubhouse computer and review the exact location of every ball and strike he had thrown that day, his velocity, the umpire’s strike zone, and what he threw that batters swung at and missed.
• • •
With Quentin in a full count and the Dodgers leading the Padres 2–1, Greinke wound up to deliver the at-bat’s deciding pitch, knowing his control was off that day. The lone Padres run had scored when he threw a fastball in the dirt that skipped to the backstop, and he’d cursed himself over it. Now Ellis put down the sign for another fastball, and Greinke rocked and fired. But instead of finding Ellis’s mitt, it tailed away from him and popped Quentin between his left shoulder and elbow, right in the meat of his bicep. At first Quentin just stared at Greinke. And then something in him burst. Perhaps he didn’t like that Greinke had rolled his eyes, frustrated with himself and annoyed that Quentin had taken three steps toward him. Or maybe Quentin was chafed that Greinke’s body language didn’t display concern for his throbbing arm. Whatever it was, Quentin charged at Greinke, all 240 pounds of him, all blood and guts and rage. Ellis was so stunned he didn’t have time to react to stop him; he chased after him in full catcher’s gear minus his mask, white as a sheet. Hitting a batter on purpose in the middle innings of a one-run game is as unusual as it is stupid. But Quentin was certain it was no accident. So the brawl was on.
When Greinke saw Quentin sprinting at him, he chucked his glove to the ground, in equal parts defiance and resignation, and turned his left side toward home plate so that if there were a collision, his nonthrowing arm would absorb the blow. Though he was fifty pounds lighter than Quentin, he did not flinch. Quentin tackled Greinke and crushed him under his weight. Both benches cleared.
Matt Kemp watched the pitch leave Greinke’s hand from center field, and saw it tail to the right of its intended target and smack Quentin on the arm. He thought it might have been retaliation for his almost getting hit in the face by a pitch in the first inning, but he couldn’t be sure. He and Greinke had been teammates for only six weeks of spring training and nine regular-season games and hadn’t yet said more than two words to each other. As Quentin charged toward Greinke, Kemp sprinted in from the outfield, screaming, looking for payback. Though he arrived too late to stop Greinke from getting squashed, he continued to yell and looked as though he might try to fight the entire San Diego bench. “Don’t fucking touch me!” he yelled at Padres manager Bud Black, who tried to calm him down. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”
After the heap of bodies on the ground was untangled, Greinke emerged with his shirt untucked and approached the Dodgers head athletic trainer, Sue Falsone, holding his collarbone. “It’s broken,” he said, expressionless. And because Greinke was not prone to hyperbole, his teammates knew it was true. By the time word of the injury reached Kemp, he became unhinged again. He pushed his way back toward the Padres dugout, which caused both teams to erupt again. Kemp was looking for Quentin, but he was long gone, having been tossed right after he hit Greinke. Even after it was announced that Greinke had indeed suffered a broken collarbone, Quentin held firm in his conviction that the pitcher had it coming. “Myself and Greinke have a history. It dates back a few years. It’s documented,” he said. “There’s a reason I reacted the way I did. It was the final straw.”
Kemp, Greinke, and Hairston were also ejected. Alexi Amarista entered the game to pinch-run for Quentin. A shell-shocked Chris Capuano replaced Greinke, and threw a wild pitch that allowed Amarista to take second. Then, in a 3-2 count, Capuano lobbed a sinker that didn’t sink, and Yonder Alonso singled to center, scoring Amarista to tie the game. With the game still knotted at two in the eighth inning and the pitcher’s spot due up, Mattingly looked down his bench and told Juan Uribe to grab a bat. Dodger fans in attendance groaned. One writer in the press box quipped that perhaps the club would be better off letting relief pitcher Matt Guerrier, who had two at-bats total in his ten-year career, hit for himself. With Luke Gregerson, one of the Padres’ best pitchers, on the mound, the slumping Uribe didn’t appear to have a chance. He worked the count full. And on the sixth pitch of the at-bat, Gregerson hung a slider Uribe did not miss. The ball cleared the left-field fence, untying the game. Uribe sprinted around the bases with his jaw clenched tight, trying to keep the chewing tobacco from falling out of his right cheek. Vin Scully remarked that it looked as if Uribe was trying to hold back tears. His teammates mobbed him. Who better to save this awful game than the best-loved player in the clubhouse, who was coming off two abysmal seasons? The Dodgers held on to win, 3–2, and remained a half game behind the first-place Giants.
Moments after the game, the reality of what was lost in victory sank in. The usually stoic Mattingly let his emotions get the better of him, and snapped at a local reporter who asked about Greinke’s role in the brawl. Kemp was still so incensed hours after the incident that he confronted Quentin in the tunnel under the stadium that led to the Dodgers’ team bus, shouting obscenities at him in front of teammates’ family members. Further drama was prevented when Padres pitcher Clayton Richard, one of the largest men in baseball, grabbed Kemp by the wrists and restrained him.
Greinke insisted that hitting Quentin was an accident, but seemed annoyed he even had to dignify the accusation with a response, given that hitting a guy on purpose in that situation would have been pretty dumb. The Padres doubled down on blaming Greinke days later when their CEO, Tom Garfinkel, discussed the brawl during a meeting with season ticket holders, not knowing one of them was recording the session. “He threw at him on purpose, okay? That’s what happened,” said Garfinkfel, on the audiotape leaked to a reporter. “They can say three-and-two count, 2–1 game, no one does that. Zack Greinke is a different kind of guy. Anyone seen Rain Man? He’s a very smart guy. He has social anxiety disorder. He doesn’t interact well with his teammates. He doesn’t really eat meals with his teammates. He spends his life studying how to get hitters out.”
Garfinkel was right about Greinke’s preparation, but he could not have been more wrong about the way Greinke’s teammates felt about him. While it was true he hated talking with strangers and it took a while for him to warm to a new face, when it came to people he knew and liked, Greinke was an impish chatterbox; his friends on the team had a hard time shutting him up. And in a game that often chokes on its own clichés, they found his candor hilarious and refreshing. While Kershaw would rather swan-dive into a vat of acid than shoot the bull on the days he starts, Greinke earned the nickname “Trader Zack” for his propensity to offer fantasy football trades to his teammates right up to the minute he took the mound.
Greinke was vindicated weeks later when Quentin called to apologize for injuring him. “That’s cool, man,” Greinke said. “But just so you know, if you stand on the plate I’ll hit you again.” Quentin said he understood.
Major League Baseball suspended Quentin for eight games. The Dodgers would lose Greinke for much longer than that. But it was more than the loss of a great player. Because it happened just a week into the season it felt like a terrible omen, as if their title dreams had been snapped right along with Greinke’s clavicle. It was so badly broken that doctors would have to cut the right-hander open and affix a metal plate to his collarbone to stabilize it. His estimated recovery was six to eight weeks, but that was if everything healed right. In the eyes of many, the brawl was just what the Dodgers needed to bring them together, to turn this wayward band of rich misfits into a team rallying around a shared goal.