All winning teams are alike. Each losing team loses in its own way.
Throwing a round object overhand at 90-plus mph, over and over again, is not something a human limb was ever intended to do. Calling baseball America’s pastime hides the violence of it. At its core the game is, quite literally, an arms race. The teams left standing in October are usually the ones who suffered the fewest elbow and shoulder injuries to their pitching staffs. The Dodgers’ trainers knew this. But they did not account for one of their star pitchers having his collarbone snapped in a brawl.
The San Francisco Giants had won the 2012 World Series because their five starting pitchers missed only two starts combined during the entire 162-game season. Both Colletti and Kasten were disciples of the church of You Can Never Have Too Much Pitching, Never Ever. So, they loaded up on starters.
The Dodgers entered spring training in 2013 with eight healthy starting pitchers, which was three too many in theory, but three too few in practice. After a slew of injuries, on April 27 Los Angeles was forced to use its ninth different starter, the most the club had employed through twenty-three games in more than seventy years. Its revolving-door rotation could have been described as eclectic, which was a polite term for Frankenstein. By May 14, its disabled list resembled a triage unit in an emergency room: Greinke (collarbone), Billingsley (elbow), Lilly (rib cage), Beckett (groin), and Capuano (calf) were all too injured to pitch. And because the club took the field on opening day with such an embarrassment of riches at the starting-pitcher position, Colletti had traded Aaron Harang to the Rockies for Ramon Hernandez, a thirty-six-year-old backup catcher who would appear in seventeen games for Los Angeles, hit .208, get released, and never play in the big leagues again. The only starting pitchers to survive the first six weeks of the season intact were Kershaw and Hyun-Jin Ryu, and the twenty-six-year-old Korean was struggling to adjust to the schedule of American pitching.
Going into the season, Ryu was the team’s biggest question mark. The big lefty had pitched well for the Hanwha Eagles in South Korea over the past seven seasons, giving up an average of 2.8 runs per nine, and striking out a batter an inning. At six foot two and 255 pounds, Ryu looked a bit like a Korean David Wells. He raised eyebrows by showing up to his first spring training in the United States even heavier, and by throwing fastballs that topped out in the mid-80s. With the idea that he would become their third starter after Kershaw and Greinke, the Dodgers had paid the Eagles $25 million to buy Ryu out of his contract, then gave the pitcher another $36 million to play in Los Angeles for six years. Some baseball analysts who saw him pitch that spring chalked him up to another instance of the Guggenheim group’s lighting money on fire to watch it burn. The criticism caught Ryu off guard. Back home, players used spring training to get into game shape: that was the purpose of it. No one told him that he was supposed to show up to Dodgers camp already at his fighting weight. But there was something else he wasn’t used to that was far more challenging than carb-cutting his belly away. In Korea, Ryu had pitched every six days. He would be expected to throw every five for the Dodgers, which meant one fewer day for his arm to recover from throwing one hundred pitches as hard as he could. Barring injury, the average MLB pitcher makes between 32 and 34 starts a year. Ryu hadn’t started more than 27 games in a season in six years.
As if losing five starting pitchers to injury and a sixth in a trade over the course of six weeks wasn’t devastating enough, two of them were wiped out by a single pitch. After Greinke broke his collarbone in the melee with San Diego, Capuano replaced him in the rotation. But in his first start, the veteran lefty gave up four runs in the first inning, and was pulled after two. After the game, Mattingly revealed that Capuano was removed because of a sore left calf muscle. Later, the lefty admitted he had injured it sprinting in from the bullpen in a futile attempt to stop Greinke from getting maimed by Quentin.
Chad Billingsley, a promising young righty the Dodgers drafted and developed out of high school, finished the previous year with a tightness radiating from the elbow of his throwing arm that almost always required Tommy John surgery, and its frustrating year-plus recovery time. Ever the optimist, Billingsley instead opted to undergo a relatively new procedure called PRP treatment, in which a patient’s own blood is drawn from his body, whipped and separated into its different components, enriched with an infusion of its own platelets, and reinjected into the problem area like some kind of super healing potion. It didn’t work. Billingsley made two starts, in pain, and then went under the knife, ending his season and his Dodger career.
After he was traded to Los Angeles in that Boston megadeal in 2012, the oft-injured Josh Beckett told Mattingly that he did not appreciate being removed during the middle of an inning. If the skipper was going to pull him from the game, that was fine, but he didn’t like being yanked off the mound; he’d rather just not start the inning at all. During a game in Baltimore in late April, with the wheels already rattling off the Dodgers’ applecart and their starting rotation in shambles, Mattingly left Beckett in the game to face Orioles wunderkind Manny Machado with two on and two out in the sixth, trailing 3–1. Machado homered, sealing the Dodgers’ sixth loss in a row.
Because he hadn’t pitched well in spring training, the Dodgers placed thirty-seven-year-old Ted Lilly on the disabled list so that he could toss a few tune-up games in the minors before joining the big club. An angry Lilly told teammates he was healthy, and that the Dodgers were just phantom DL’ing him to buy time to figure out what to do with their poorly constructed roster. But his body wasn’t right. And despite the aches in his back and the tightness in his side, he took the ball anyway—after Greinke, Capuano, and Billingsley went down—to prove a point. His first start, versus the Mets, went well enough. In his second start, the Rockies shelled him. Afterward, Lilly admitted to reporters that he had struggled because he was injured. Mattingly was livid. “It’s fine that he felt it, but he’s gotta say something,” said Mattingly, in one of the first times anyone could remember him blowing up one of his veteran players in the press.
But it wasn’t just the pitching staff that had a hard time staying healthy. One of the Dodgers’ best hitters, Hanley Ramirez, missed all but two games in April after injuring his thumb while playing for the Dominican Republic team in the World Baseball Classic before the season, then missed most of May with a hamstring strain. The club’s starting second baseman, Mark Ellis, sat out for three weeks with a bum quadriceps muscle. On May 8, the Diamondbacks completed a three-game sweep of the Dodgers, which sent Los Angeles to its seventh loss in a row, and a season-low .394 winning percentage (13-20).
The pressure was getting to everyone. Adrian Gonzalez was forced to leave one of those games against the Diamondbacks because his neck hurt. A few of his teammates questioned his toughness behind his back, and one even put on Gonzalez’s neck brace and wore it around the locker room as a joke when the slugger wasn’t in the room. The criticism that Gonzalez was soft was unfair, as tests on his neck showed a legitimate injury. But since many players looked to take out their frustrations on a new candidate every day, they ignored the facts.
Each defeat brought with it a new set of questions. The Dodgers had lost a flurry of men to the infirmary, sure, but were the uninjured playing their hardest? The farm system was bereft of international talent thanks to McCourt’s tightfistedness, yes, but where the hell were the young American-born reinforcements? It had been seven years since the Dodgers called up a position player they drafted who became a star (Kemp), and five years since they promoted a homegrown starting pitcher (Kershaw) who stuck in the rotation. In fact, only three pitchers called up to the big leagues post-Kershaw had made more than ten starts for the Dodgers over the previous four seasons combined: Nate Eovaldi, who was then traded for Hanley Ramirez, and Rubby De La Rosa, who was dealt to Boston in the megadeal for Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett, were two of them. (The other, John Ely, started nineteen games for the team from 2010 to 2012, and posted a dismal 5.70 ERA.) While McCourt could be blamed for many of the Dodgers’ deficiencies, the failure to draft and develop amateur players wasn’t all his fault. The club’s weak farm system left a void that could be filled only by aging, expensive free agents, many of them malcontents cast aside by their previous teams. And if those veterans got injured—which was one of the things players in their thirties did best—the Dodgers were toast.
By May 7, the most expensive team in baseball history sat in last place. A Los Angeles Times writer marked the occasion by noting that when the Titanic sank there was a Guggenheim on board. When the new ownership group took over, Stan Kasten had called the Dodgers a franchise worthy of being written about in all capital letters. Shipwreck headlines weren’t what he had in mind.
• • •
The Dodgers’ starting pitching woes wouldn’t have been as devastating if Matt Kemp had been playing like, well, Matt Kemp. But after the brawl with the Padres, Kemp kept on scuffling, and hit just .182 through the club’s first fifteen games. It wasn’t just his batting average that was so alarming: his power appeared to be gone. “I don’t think he’s hurt,” Mattingly said to a group of reporters before an April game, but everyone knew that wasn’t true. Kemp used to stand upright in the box, tall and intimidating, and calmly wait for a pitch he could drive. Now his aching shoulder forced him to lean out over the plate so he could reach pitches on the outer half, with his bum sticking out behind him as if he were preparing to sit down. The hole in his swing became so pronounced that he even swung and missed at pitches lobbed at him by a machine during batting practice. When Mattingly removed him from the starting lineup to give him a mental day off on April 17, a frustrated Kemp told reporters, “I don’t ever want to sit out.” Mattingly inserted him into the game to pinch-hit with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh. Kemp struck out.
In Joe Torre’s last season as manager of the Dodgers in 2010, Kemp had gone from future of the franchise to chief resident of its doghouse. Colletti criticized his effort on local radio. Matt Kemp was, without question, the most talented offensive player in the organization. Yet many wanted him gone.
After that disastrous season ended, Kemp knew he had to get out of Los Angeles to clear his head. When he packed up his locker and headed to his off-season home in Phoenix to decompress, he wondered if he would ever come back. Though he had two years remaining on his contract with the Dodgers, his agent did not shy away from suggesting to reporters that his client might be better off in another city surrounded by a supportive organization that could help him reach his full potential. Potential. Kemp couldn’t escape that word, which to whoever said it must have felt like a compliment, but to him felt like a euphemism for failure. And here he was, a young black man who could hit the stuffing out of the ball and run like hell, in a sport that was hemorrhaging talented young black men to football and basketball, and nobody seemed to know what to do with him.
Kemp had only ever played for the Dodgers, specifically for old white men, which made him particularly aware of his blackness, as if it were something he ever forgot when he was out on a baseball diamond anyway. Baseball had served as a daily reminder of his race ever since he was a child. Growing up just outside Oklahoma City, he was always the token black kid on whatever Little League team he played for, unless he convinced his cousin to join the squad to hang out with him, and then there were two black kids. His mother, Judy Henderson, signed him up to play baseball because he needed something to do while she worked overtime as a nurse to support the two of them. That he wound up being good at it was a happy by-product. His Little League teammates nicknamed him “the Big Little Hurt,” after the Hall of Fame slugger Frank Thomas, who was known as the “Big Hurt” both for the number of home runs he hit and for his enormous thigh muscles. (Kemp believes that in retrospect his friends might have just called him that to tease him, because he was chubby.) But as Kemp reached adolescence, the baby fat melted from his frame like candle wax. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he was a smidge under six foot three and chiseled, with electric green eyes on a face that eventually earned him fashion endorsements.
But Kemp never wanted to be a professional baseball player. No. He was going to play in the NBA. Baseball may have been cool for suburban white boys, or Latin American kids looking to move their families to the United States to enjoy a better life, but it was not Matt Kemp’s first choice. Besides, he was always better at basketball than he was at baseball, and starred for Midwest City High next to future Duke and NBA player Shelden Williams. He thought he had a good shot at making it just as far as Williams. But Williams grew to be six foot nine in high school, while Kemp graduated at six two and a half. So unlike Mattingly or Kershaw or even Ned Colletti, Matt Kemp didn’t choose baseball as much as baseball chose him. Or, more specifically, the Dodgers chose him in the sixth round of the 2003 MLB draft, and offered him $130,000 to sign. That was more money than he and his mother had ever seen. Years later, after he became an all-star and companies fell over themselves to get him to use their products, he sat at his locker thumbing through boxes of nonslip astronaut-ish socks that an eager sales rep had dropped off for him, unsolicited, and shook his head: “It’s only after you’re rich that people start giving you free shit,” he said. “There wasn’t nobody around to give me stuff when I was a kid when we couldn’t afford anything.”
Kemp finished his 2005 season with the Dodgers in high-A ball. But his development was so rapid that two months into the following season he was promoted to the big leagues—a remarkable achievement for someone who had been playing baseball full-time for only three years. In 2009, he hit twenty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases, earning himself a Silver Slugger, winning a Gold Glove, and finishing tenth in National League MVP voting.
Then everything fell apart.
Even though Kemp had proven he was good enough to make it to the big leagues and emerge as a star, in his darkest moments during that nightmare 2010 season, he started to feel again as though he had never belonged. His caliber of play in center field seemed to be affected by however he’d done in his last at-bat, making it even more difficult to shake things off. When he struck out, the sting of it seemed to linger in his eyes until his next at-bat, clouding his vision in the outfield until he could somehow redeem himself on offense. That blindness caused him to fall deeper into the abyss. Sometimes, Kemp forgot to back up second base when the Dodgers’ catcher attempted to throw out a runner from stealing, and he appeared to sulk after fly balls he misjudged, allowing them to sail over his head. He spent his days standing alone in the center of a huge field of grass, painfully exposed, as if the handsome man who now posed for Gap ads was still the pudgy, self-conscious boy. Baseball is a meditation on failure. Even Ted Williams, the best hitter in the game’s history, failed to make it to a base more often than succeeded. Besides a bat and a glove, the other tool the game requires most is a short memory. Matt Kemp didn’t have that. “So many nights I just went home and cried,” Kemp said later, of that season. He couldn’t shake the boos. He cared too much what others thought.
It was true that a change of scenery might have done the young outfielder some good. While Kemp hadn’t yet reached his full potential on the field, as the boyfriend of the global pop star Rihanna he needed no help realizing the full scope of what playing in Hollywood had to offer. As his relationship with Torre soured and Colletti blasted him publicly, his agent could have demanded a trade, all but forcing Colletti’s hand. But Kemp had a warm relationship with Mattingly, whom he affectionately called Donnie B., and when the Dodgers brass reassured Kemp’s inner circle that Mattingly would succeed Torre, Kemp breathed a sigh of relief.
When Colletti ultimately decided to stick with Kemp and ownership promoted Mattingly, the new skipper knew one of his main objectives was to save the troubled slugger from himself. For outsiders, it was difficult to figure out what the problem was. Kemp was a good-looking, healthy, twenty-five-year-old man dating one of the most beautiful women in the world, getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to play center field for a famous baseball team. But he was miserable. And when Matt Kemp was upset, there was no hiding it. When he played well, he was a great teammate, all smiles and high-fives, perched on the top step of the dugout, snapping off enormous chewing gum bubbles night after night. But when he struggled his misery had a unique way of infecting everyone around him, like some kind of hellacious airborne virus resistant to antibiotics or pep talks. He was not an easy man to read. One night, he might notice a sick child in the stands, jog over to him unannounced after the game ended, and hand him his cap, cleats, and the jersey off his back. The next day, he might stroll into the clubhouse, notice his name wasn’t written on the lineup card, and yell: “Trade me to the fucking Astros!” in frustration in front of his teammates.
Still, Mattingly’s relaxed presence and exhausting patience had a better chance of soothing Kemp than shouting him down did. Kemp returned to spring training in 2011 with a renewed focus, having spent the entire off-season in Phoenix—some four hundred miles from the clubs on the Sunset Strip—hitting, lifting, and running every day. It worked. Kemp obliterated National League pitching that year, leading the league in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and total bases. Any pitch thrown to him on the inner half of the plate was a mistake. That year, twenty-two different pitchers looked at him standing there in the batter’s box and thought, To hell with this, and intentionally walked him, figuring that giving him a free base was better than risking surrendering four. Kemp also stole forty bases, and finished the season just one home run shy of forty homers and forty steals—a feat that has been accomplished only four times in the game’s history.
• • •
After his huge 2011, Colletti rewarded Kemp with an eight-year, $160 million contract extension before the 2012 season. And even though it was the largest deal in the club’s history up until that point, at the time it seemed that the Dodgers were getting a hometown discount. He had just turned twenty-seven, and Los Angeles had sewed up the rest of his prime. A few months after Kemp signed that contract, the Guggenheim group bought the Dodgers. Kemp had grown up idolizing Magic Johnson and was ecstatic. At the start of the season, the two men appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated together, announcing the triumphant liberation of the Dodgers from bankruptcy.
In 2012 Kemp picked up right where his 2011 campaign left off, homering on opening day and clubbing a Dodger-record twelve home runs in April, on his way to being named the NL’s Player of the Month. Around that time, Scott Boras stood in the front row at Dodger Stadium during batting practice and watched Kemp hit; he marveled at his prowess. But Boras turned to a reporter and mentioned how the Dodgers ought to consider moving him out of center field or they’d run the risk of his legs crumbling underneath him, like Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Griffey had enjoyed one of the best decades ever to start his career, and seemed poised to shatter Henry Aaron’s all-time home run record, before a series of hamstring injuries robbed him of the chance. Of course, it was also possible that Boras’s concern for Kemp’s health was really just a clever way to clear a position for his client Jacoby Ellsbury, Boston’s center fielder, who was about to hit the free agent market. Boras knew the new Dodger owners were rich, but he had yet to taste that Guggenheim dollar. A few weeks later he was proven right. In the Dodgers’ thirty-fourth game of the season, Kemp hit the ball to short and pulled up lame on his way to first base. Mattingly removed him from the game with a left hamstring injury. Despite his protests, he was placed on the disabled list, snapping his consecutive-games-played streak at 399, the longest in baseball. Unable to handle being sidelined, he sat out for the minimum of fifteen days before returning. But it was too fast. He came back for two games, injured it worse, and missed another five weeks. He returned in mid-July, but he wasn’t the same player. The club kept him in center field, and on August 28 he crashed into the outfield wall at Coors Field in Colorado so violently he writhed on the ground for several minutes. The team called it a knee contusion. Kemp sat out for two games, then played nearly every day in September. But he endured lingering shoulder pain from the collision, and hit .220 in the season’s final month. The Dodgers knew his shoulder was injured. But when they cut him open after the season ended, they discovered a torn labrum and rotator cuff damage. Kemp was stunned. He should not have been playing at all.
Entering 2013 with a surgically repaired shoulder, Kemp told reporters he was healthy, confident, and ready to go. But on the inside he was terrified. He could not lift his left arm above his head to reach the top shelf of his locker, let alone extend his heavy wooden bat high enough to drive a baseball with any authority. His new teammate Adrian Gonzalez had undergone the same surgery for a torn labrum two years earlier, and afterward declared that he was no longer a power hitter. Kemp approached Gonzalez and confided his fear that he would never hit another home run.
It only got worse for him. In mid-May the Dodgers were in Atlanta to face the Braves, and Kemp still had only one home run on the season. An opposing fan began heckling him, telling him that he was horrible at baseball. After a couple of innings of enduring his taunts, Kemp sassed the fan back, retorting that, basically, he was laughing his way to the bank. A few of Kemp’s teammates heard this and became enraged. It wasn’t just that he was struggling at the plate. Even the best hitters go through slumps, and everyone knew he was coming off a major injury that impacted his ability to hit. It was his effort in center field that drove them nuts. He’d fallen back on old habits, and his terrible at-bats were bleeding into the next half inning and poisoning his ability to concentrate in center field. Some coaches wondered if he just didn’t care about defense. Since repeatable pitching and hitting mechanics are an important key to success, every team’s video department offers playback that can be broken down into milliseconds, so that players can pinpoint the tiniest of hitches that can derail an at-bat, or, in some cases, a career. To amuse themselves, when Dodger pitchers watched game film they began counting the number of clicks it took Kemp to move when a ball was hit in his general direction.
His response to that Braves fan made a bad week worse. The Dodgers were in last place, and struggling to field nine healthy players each night. And now Matt Kemp, the supposed face of the franchise, was pointing out to some drunk guy that sticks and stones would never break his bones because he would always be rich. A teammate yelled at Kemp to shut up. Kemp did not. More words were exchanged. At a loss for how to curb their center fielder’s downward spiral, the Dodgers’ front office dispatched a club executive to speak with Kemp’s mother, who attended almost every home game, about what the team might do to help her son. Was he having girl problems? they wondered. Was there something else going on? Whatever it was, they just wanted to help. When his mother told him that a team employee had approached her, Kemp exploded. “You don’t know me!” he screamed at the executive, in front of stunned teammates. “You don’t fucking know me! Don’t go talking to my mom!” In their attempt to support Kemp, the front office had poked at his deepest, most paranoid fear: that he was alone and the world was against him. With the situation deteriorating fast, the Dodgers panicked. Magic Johnson was in New York fulfilling his duty as a television analyst for ESPN during the NBA playoffs. Feeling that perhaps Johnson was the only one who could calm Kemp down, the team flew him to Los Angeles to meet with the brooding slugger.
After getting swept during that disastrous Atlanta series, the Dodgers set off for Milwaukee looking to turn things around. “Hopefully we’ll get drunk on the plane and tell each other how we really feel,” said one player. Don Mattingly felt sick. His job was to facilitate a winning season by keeping the locker room from imploding, and that wasn’t going very well. It didn’t help matters that after each loss Mattingly knew he would have to return to the stadium the following afternoon, sit in the dugout surrounded by cameras fixed on his face, and answer questions from reporters about whether he thought he was going to be canned. It reached a boiling point when a respected national columnist wrote a piece speculating that Mattingly’s firing was imminent. Even members of Mattingly’s own family thought he was out. The injuries weren’t Mattingly’s fault; the ghost of Earl Weaver couldn’t have led this wounded club to a championship. But the Guggenheim group did not spend billions on a baseball team to watch it flounder in last place.
Mattingly had proven he could keep his team from rioting during the upheaval of the franchise under McCourt, but his in-game decisions baffled observers. He and Hillman seemed so transfixed by the double switch that they employed it as much as possible, often pulling bats from games that weren’t yet decided to move a relief pitcher down a few slots in the batting order, only to watch it backfire later. As the noise around his potential firing grew louder, Joe Torre called to console him.
Mattingly had been around the game long enough to know that any day he pulled on his Dodger uniform could be his last. Milwaukee was his make-or-break series, and he knew it. Colletti flew to Wisconsin, and many wondered if he packed his hatchet in his carry-on. Dodger players felt awful. They loved their skipper and didn’t want him to be punished for their poor performance. With Mattingly’s job hanging in the balance, Kershaw took the mound. The southpaw tossed a complete game, giving up just three hits and a run. Kemp homered for the first time in weeks, and Ethier added another solo shot and a triple.
Then the Dodgers got an unexpected lift. When Greinke hurt himself, the training staff told him he’d miss eight weeks. He replied that he’d be back in two. They split the difference. While Greinke admitted he wasn’t 100 percent, he returned to the mound after being away for just four and a half weeks because he knew the Dodgers needed help. He took the ball in the second game of the Milwaukee series, but wasn’t sharp, giving up five runs on nine hits in just four innings. “I just had no feel out there,” Greinke said afterward. “I made no adjustments. It started out bad and never really got better.” The Dodgers lost, 5–2.
After the game, Colletti huddled with Mattingly and the rest of the coaching staff at Miller Park until 1 a.m. The men agreed the Dodgers had sleepwalked through the first seven weeks of the season, and that it was time to shake things up. Maybe it was because he knew his job was at risk, or perhaps he was just sick of watching his guys go through the motions with little regard for the consequences, but Mattingly showed up to the field for the final game of the Brewers series seething with anger. His $214 million roster had won eighteen games and lost twenty-six. If their malaise was going to cost him his job, he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Lou Piniella had left a lasting impression on him when he managed him in the Bronx. Despite his placid demeanor, Mattingly liked to think that when the situation called for it, he could conjure a little Piniella. When he filled out his lineup card, he penciled in reserve Scott Van Slyke for Andre Ethier. It was a puzzling move. Van Slyke, son of former Pirates star Andy Van Slyke, feasted off left-handed pitchers, while Ethier struggled against them. But the Dodgers were facing righty Wily Peralta that day. A reporter asked Mattingly why Ethier was out of the lineup. “I just want to put a club on the field that is going to fight, to compete the whole day,” Mattingly replied. His answer was somewhat surprising. While his outfield mate Kemp had taken criticism for his lack of hustle in the past, this was a new knock on Ethier. The right fielder had homered and tripled in the first game of the series on Monday, but he’d also been ejected from the game in the eighth inning for arguing balls and strikes. The following day, he missed the sign for a safety squeeze play and was thrown out at home.
With Ryu on the hill, the Dodgers clobbered the Brewers in Mattingly’s tantrum game, 9–2. Some players attributed their offensive outburst to the spark Mattingly lit before the game, saying that for the first time all season those seated on the bench seemed fixed on every pitch, and those on the field played with a sense of urgency. Maybe it was Ethier’s benching that woke them up. Or maybe they knew they had to play better to save Mattingly’s job. After the game, Ethier was asked about his manager’s comments: “Yeah, I take offense to that, without approaching me first,” he said. “Other than that, I show up every day and find ways to compete, to work hard whether I’m going good or bad.”
It wasn’t just Ethier’s miscues during the Milwaukee series that chafed Mattingly, however. His frustration with his right fielder had been bubbling for at least ten days. When Ethier showed up to a Sunday matinee game versus the Marlins on May 12 and noticed his name written on the lineup card, he complained to his skipper that, at thirty-one years of age, he was too old to be playing in day games after night games. The banged-up Dodgers had lost seven straight entering their series with Miami, and had dropped their first game against the Marlins. With Gonzalez nursing his neck strain, Mark Ellis shelved with an injured quad, and Kemp dealing with a sore shoulder, the Dodgers needed Ethier more than ever. Mattingly was incensed that Ethier, one of the club’s few starters who was still able to stand upright—who had also gone 4-for-4 the day before—would ask for a break while the team was melting down. Especially when he’d be facing Tom Koehler, a young righty making his second career start in the major leagues. So Mattingly left Ethier in the lineup, and he went 0-for-3. After popping out to third base in the fifth inning, an irked Ethier could be heard saying that everyone knew he didn’t hit well during day games, because it was too bright for him. Whether it was a coincidence, or there was something to his theory that the sun blinded him, Ethier wasn’t wrong: his career batting average was thirty-five points lower in day games than in night games, while his on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) was eighty points worse.
• • •
Andre Ethier had always played with a chip on his shoulder, real or imagined. Hailing from Phoenix, Ethier signed on to play baseball at Arizona State out of high school. But when his coaches told him after his freshman season that he wasn’t talented enough to play Division I ball, he was forced to transfer to a nearby junior college to keep playing. And though he proved them wrong by smashing the ball at the JC level, reenrolling at ASU, and continuing his torrid hitting there before being drafted in the second round by the Oakland A’s, that feeling that he was always being underestimated and overlooked never left him. In one of Ned Colletti’s better moves as GM, he traded troubled outfielder Milton Bradley to Oakland for a twenty-three-year-old Ethier a month after he was hired. Ethier was called up to the big leagues with a crop of young hotshots—including Kemp, Billingsley, James Loney, Jonathan Broxton, and Russell Martin—who were all projected to be better than he was. He used the bitterness he felt about being an afterthought as motivation, and it worked. Ethier hit thirty-one home runs and finished sixth in NL MVP voting in 2009, and made the 2010 and 2011 all-star squads.
Some hitters’ postgame moods were determined by whether their teams won or lost; others were dictated by how they did at the plate that day. Some saw Ethier as a guy who seemed to be in a better mood after a loss in which he’d collected three hits than after a win in which he’d gone 0-fer. In late July 2008, the Dodgers were a game back of the Arizona Diamondbacks for first place in the NL West, and tied 0–0 with the Giants in the bottom of the sixth inning. Kemp led off the inning with a single, then stole second base. Up next, Ethier worked a nine-pitch at-bat before grounding out to second. Kemp hustled over to third. When Ethier returned to the dugout, his teammates lined up to high-five him for advancing the go-ahead run ninety feet in such a crucial game. But Ethier was angry. “That’s not gonna help me in arbitration,” he said, as he slammed his bat into the rack. Veteran third baseman Casey Blake had just been traded to the Dodgers from the Cleveland Indians earlier that week when he heard Ethier’s remarks. At first he thought his new teammate was joking. When he realized Ethier was serious, he couldn’t believe it.
Blake shouldn’t have been surprised. Though teams that stick together are praised as ideal, the reality is that baseball is the most individual of any of the four major team sports. The 2013 Dodgers were less a team than they were twenty-five separate corporations. Assuming he is healthy, an everyday player notches somewhere in the vicinity of six hundred plate appearances each season. “So at that number, you’re looking at about five hundred and fifty at-bats for yourself, and fifty for the team,” said Diamondbacks pitcher Josh Collmenter, who had given this issue a lot of thought. In close games, a walk, a long fly-out, or a ground ball to the right side can be critical to victory. This, in Collmenter’s estimation, would qualify as an at-bat for the team. In these situations, a hitter might be better served shortening his swing so he has a better chance to make contact and advance the runner, rather than aim for the fences and risk striking out. This calculated approach was one of the reasons Adrian Gonzalez was so good at driving in runs year after year. With the bases empty, Gonzalez and Ethier were almost identical hitters over the course of their careers entering the 2013 season:
Ethier: .283 batting average/.348 on-base percentage/.478 slugging/ .825 OPS in 1,921 at-bats
Gonzalez: .283 batting average/.345 on-base percentage/ .493 slugging/.838 OPS in 2,410 at-bats
But with runners in scoring position, Gonzalez was much better:
Ethier: .290 BA/.385 OBP/.482 SLG/.868 OPS in 937 at-bats
Gonzalez: .329 BA/.437 OBP/.559 SLG/.996 OPS in 1,080 at-bats
Why? Old-school analysts might call Gonzalez more “clutch,” and it was true he had a gift for focusing in high-leverage at-bats. But a better explanation might lie in their differing approaches. With no runners on, Gonzalez considered it his duty, as one of the Dodgers’ butter-and-egg men, to hit a home run or a double. “And when you try to hit home runs sometimes you pop out,” said Gonzalez. But with runners on second or third, he simplified his approach and focused on roping line drives to knock them in. Runs batted in have become a controversial success metric in baseball, since a hitter has no control over whether he comes to the plate with a runner on base. But Gonzalez loved to use RBIs as a measuring stick, and cited it at the end of the 2013 season as one of the reasons why Arizona first baseman and Collmenter’s teammate Paul Goldschmidt should win the MVP award over Pittsburgh center fielder Andrew McCutchen. The irony was that when Gonzalez didn’t try to do too much he did more than usual: his career slugging percentage with runners in scoring position (when all he needed was a single to plate a run) was sixty-six points higher than it was with the bases empty (when he swung out of his cleats in hopes of parking one in the bleachers). “I think that’s because when you’re not thinking home run it’s easier to square the ball up,” said Gonzalez. “So yeah, in that sense it might be easier to hit a home run when you’re not trying to.”
Perhaps it was the constant pressure Ethier felt to prove himself that led him to be less willing to sacrifice his own at-bats for the team, at least earlier in his career. And who could blame him? All he had heard was that Kemp was a future MVP and Loney was a future batting champion. Could he really afford to give away outs to keep up? Regardless of his success against right-handed pitching he often felt like his struggles against lefties was all anyone ever talked about.
But while Kemp tended to bristle whenever an authority figure called him out, Mattingly’s words worked like smelling salts for Ethier. He began hustling out every ground ball and showing up early to take extra batting practice and reps in the outfield. And after Kemp reaggravated the hamstring strain that derailed his 2012 season, Ethier shifted over to center and handled the difficult position admirably even though he’d never played it in the major leagues before. With Kemp on the DL, Mattingly didn’t have a true center fielder on his roster. Ethier stepped up, and his teammates loved him for it. His rejuvenated attitude and effort won over the locker room. Perhaps Ethier felt he had a bigger, more important role on the team as the new captain of the outfield. In terms of status, center field was like the aisle seat on an airplane. Right field was the window, and left was the middle. Switching positions in the middle of a season can be mentally exhausting, and many players hate doing it. Ethier accepted his new assignment with a positivity his teammates hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t as athletic as Kemp, but he appeared to make more of an effort, to the delight of the Dodgers’ pitching staff, who did not count the clicks it took him to move when a ball was hit to him. Ethier started hitting better, too. In his seventy-four games as the club’s center fielder, his batting average and on-base percentage were each more than forty points higher than when he was in right, and his slugging percentage was eighty points better.
The scapegoating of Ethier one minute and praising him as a team savior the next underscored just how fickle a baseball locker room can be. The amount of time these grown men spent in closed quarters with each other was so unnatural that every loss made otherwise harmless habits, from grooming tendencies to music preferences, that much more grating. That claustrophobia extended off the field, too. The lives of Dodger players were so intertwined that it wasn’t uncommon for one player’s family to rent a home that his teammate’s family had lived in the year before.
Nevertheless, Ethier’s move out of right field was supposed to be temporary. No one knew that he would never be the Dodgers’ starting right fielder again.
• • •
After the Dodgers left Milwaukee, they flew home for a series versus the St. Louis Cardinals, the National League’s model organization. Though the size of their media market limited their payroll, the Cardinals had won two world championships in the past seven seasons by hoarding young talent via the amateur draft, which their analytics department seemed to crush each year. It wasn’t just that their top picks panned out—many of the guys who wound up being stars were snagged by the Cardinals in the lower rounds of the draft after being overlooked by everyone else. They selected their second baseman, Matt Carpenter, in the thirteenth round of the 2009 draft and signed him for a thousand bucks. He would finish fourth in the 2013 MVP balloting. In that same draft, they picked pitcher Trevor Rosenthal in the twenty-first round. When his fastball began touching triple digits he became the club’s dominant closer.
When the Cardinals took the field to stretch before the first game of that series at Dodger Stadium, a clutch of L.A. players watched them stream out of the visitors’ dugout with envy. Nick Punto and Skip Schumaker had played for the Cardinals team that won the World Series in 2011, and Colletti brought both utility players to Los Angeles to help build a winning culture. St. Louis had selected Schumaker in the fifth round of the 2001 draft, and he spent twelve years in that organization before coming over to the Dodgers in a trade the winter before. He remained close to many of his former teammates, especially to ace Adam Wainwright, who convinced him to turn his life over to God.
Colletti was right about Schumaker and Punto. The two veterans were vital to keeping the clubhouse loose during the Dodgers’ dreadful first half of the 2013 season. At thirty-five and thirty-three respectively, the light-hitting Punto, an acolyte of the headfirst slide into first base, and Schumaker, of similar grit, were not expected to start for the Dodgers. But injuries pressed them into full-time service. The humble duo became the club’s spiritual leaders, and also offered the most comic relief. Perhaps the highlight of the Dodgers’ twelve-week-long slump to begin the season was Schumaker taking the mound to pitch the ninth inning of a game in which his club was getting drubbed by the Rockies. Schumaker hit ninety on the radar gun and held Colorado scoreless in his inning of work. The next day, he joked that he had practiced shaking off his catcher before he entered the game to play mind games with the batters he faced. When asked if he would consider converting to pitcher, Schumaker replied: “Believe it or not, there was actually a time when I could hit a baseball. Becoming a pitcher isn’t a bad idea, considering I already hit like one.”
Schumaker and Punto would tell some of their teammates who had only ever been Dodgers about how much different it was to play on a team like the Cardinals, where everyone liked everyone else. St. Louis didn’t hand out hundred-million-dollar contracts like Snickers bars on Halloween, but somehow they kept winning, even after they let their superstar first baseman, Albert Pujols, walk out the door. Part of the reason the Cardinals’ deft general manager, John Mozeliak, felt comfortable letting Pujols sign with the Angels was that he was confident the organization’s farm system could produce an adequate replacement. Sixteen of the twenty-five men who dressed for St. Louis on the first day of the 2013 season had been drafted by the club; only five Los Angeles players were homegrown. St. Louis’s player development system was so superior to the rest of the league’s that the new Astros owner hired the architect of it, Jeff Luhnow, to remake the organization in the Cardinals’ image. Kasten had made it clear that the Dodgers’ unlimited payroll had a shelf life: as soon as their minor-league system was nursed back to health they would rein in the excessive spending.
The Dodgers’ pipeline was supposed to work like this: Scouting guru Logan White and his group would find talented young players and draft them, farm director De Jon Watson and his team would develop them, and Colletti and his assistants would decide whether to promote them, release them, or trade them. The factions functioned like a three-headed form of government, with all the checks, balances, and finger-pointing that went with it. If Colletti’s crew was criticized, they could argue the failure of turning prospects into ballplayers was Watson’s; when Watson caught heat, he could shift blame to White. As the major-league team sputtered out of the gate in April and May and it became obvious just how thin the team’s farm system was, no one’s job was safe. Even the club’s training staff feared they were on the verge of being fired, as if they could somehow stop aging hamstrings from fraying, or angry opponents from tackling their pitchers.
It was no secret that White loved the risk and the upside inherent in drafting high school players. Since he began running the Dodgers’ drafts in 2002, twelve of the club’s eighteen first-round picks were selected out of high school, including Loney, Billingsley, and Kershaw. While White was respected as one of the sharpest scouting minds around baseball, the problem with taking teenagers, besides the greater likelihood that they will blow out, is that even when they do meet expectations, it takes them years longer to reach the big leagues than college kids, who might be called up months after being drafted, as reliever Paco Rodriguez was in 2012. As the club sat in last place in early June, rumors swirled that Kasten had ordered White to use the Dodgers’ highest picks to draft college players because they would be closer to helping the big club. Though Kasten denied he ever gave such a directive, White took college athletes with the Dodgers’ first three selections for the first time in his career.
The Houston Astros had opened the 2013 season with a $26 million payroll. The Dodgers would pay all the men who played for them that year almost ten times that amount. Comparing victories between the two teams became a running joke in the Los Angeles clubhouse. “Hey, we’ve got one more win than the Astros!” players would often say, in mock celebration. Unsure of what else to do, an anxious Colletti emailed leadership surveys to Punto, Schumaker, Hairston, Kershaw, and Mark and A. J. Ellis. The front office also called an emergency meeting with Kershaw’s representatives, terrified that the stench of the season would push him toward free agency.
Colletti knew he had to do something drastic. So at the end of May he flew to Chattanooga to see about a young outfielder.