Ned Colletti landed in Tennessee with his job on the line.
He had somehow survived the chaos of the McCourt era, which was no small feat since the thing his former boss loved most after suing people was firing them. Then, against even longer odds, Colletti hung on to his job as GM when the Guggenheim group took over, because Walter and Kasten wanted to see him in action before deciding what to do with him. So far, his audition wasn’t going very well. Even though ownership understood that the club’s injuries weren’t his fault, last place was embarrassing. And for the hundreds of millions ownership had spent on player salary, when the Dodgers flew home from Milwaukee on May 22 to face the Cardinals and Angels their roster appeared to be as deep as a paper cut.
A couple of young outfielders on the Dodgers’ Double-A affiliate in Chattanooga were hitting well, so Colletti went to watch them play in person. One of those players was Yasiel Puig. He stood six foot three and weighed 240 pounds but carried it high in his chest and shoulders, like a wild animal that raised its hackles to look bigger to enemies. Except Puig’s enemies were everywhere. He was shaped like a sinewy funnel, with quick, strong hands that could snap the handle of a wooden bat in half on a check swing that didn’t even touch a baseball, and black eyes as endless as the season itself. Despite his size, he could beat any teammate in a footrace around the bases, an event that, were it up to him, would take place in batting practice every single day.
Puig hailed from Cuba but he may as well have been from Mars. When he showed up to the Dodgers’ spring training complex in Glendale, Arizona, that February he didn’t speak a lick of English. On his first day in major-league camp he stood in front of a water cooler and shook his head in disbelief at the blue liquid spewing out of it. He didn’t know Gatorade existed in more than one color. As the season wore on, the rest of the baseball world looked at him in much the same way. No one had heard of Puig a year ago, but in 2013 he would be the game’s most talked-about player.
Though it had been almost a century and a half since Major League Baseball was invented and declared America’s pastime, the game had changed more in the last twenty years before Puig’s call-up than in the hundred before that. In many ways, the advent of the Internet transformed baseball from a children’s game to a chew toy for adult control freaks and obsessive-compulsives. The brightest minds in front offices around the league now tied their livelihoods to predictive statistics and computer spreadsheets, safe in the knowledge that in the post-Google era, superstar ballplayers didn’t just materialize out of thin air anymore. The best (and worst) thing about scouting in the Information Age was that there were no more secrets: if any teenager, anywhere in the world, could hit a baseball five hundred feet or throw one 99 mph, then video evidence would, at the very least, be posted by a relative on YouTube. Because of this, and the United States relaxing its Cuba embargo shortly after Puig’s arrival, he was perhaps the sport’s last buried treasure.
Few MLB scouts had known what to make of the young refugee when he took the field to showcase his talent in Mexico City eighteen months earlier. Most professional baseball players who blossom into stars have been studied under microscopes by talent evaluators since adolescence. But since Puig grew up in a country whose government not only controlled what went on the Internet, but was also especially keen to keep its young, exceptional ballplayers hidden from the prying eyes of American agents who might steal them away, his skill set was unknown. Some major-league scouts had seen Puig represent Cuba in a few international tournaments over the years, but he hadn’t even played for his country’s “A” team with the Cubs’ uber-prospect, Jorge Soler, or Yoenis Cespedes, the star outfielder who defected the year before and signed with the Oakland Athletics.
After several attempts to flee Cuba, in June 2012 Puig left by boat in a harrowing 350-mile escape that landed him in Cancún. He showed up to Foro Sol Stadium in Mexico City a week later, fat and out of shape, having not played ball for a year after Cuban baseball officials had banned him from the game when they had foiled an earlier defection attempt. His showcase had been a fiasco. Major-league scouts were first told Puig’s tryout would be held in Mexico City. Then they were told it would happen in Cancún. After another round of phone calls, Puig showed up in Mexico City after all; the confusion stemmed from the fact that two separate management groups were trying to claim him as their client.
The Guggenheim group had assumed ownership of the Dodgers just weeks before Puig’s showcase. And in the midst of the chaos of a regime change, Logan White had taken over running the club’s international scouting department as well as the draft. When White received a call from Puig’s agent, Jaime Torres, asking him to come to Mexico to see the young right fielder, he was intrigued. White had never heard of the kid. Players born in the United States were subject to baseball’s amateur draft, and teams picked in the reverse order of where they finished in the previous season’s standings. The system was set up this way to help the weakest teams land the best prospects for competitive balance. But most foreign players were free to sign with the highest bidder. Now that White was working for men who were willing to pay a premium for the best players, he flew to Mexico City excited to finally have license to outbid other teams if Puig was a stud.
White arrived alone in Mexico City for the second day of Puig’s tryout. Puig took four rounds of batting practice in front of him and scouts from a dozen other teams. Because Puig was so out of shape, forty-five pitches took forty-five minutes. He bent over his knees between pitches to catch his breath and took long breaks between rounds. Scouts from other teams didn’t seem very impressed. By day three of his tryout, only four other teams stayed to watch him hit again. But White couldn’t believe what he saw in the kid. Puig was raw, yes, but his mechanics were flawless. The path the barrel of Puig’s bat took to meet the ball was so optimal that White believed he could hit for power and average. His hands were so fast that he could stay back on the ball for an unusually long time before he decided whether to swing, which gave him an advantage. They also appeared strong enough to flick baseballs over the fence even without the use of his legs. And his hands didn’t panic or flail: they stayed between his body and the ball with so much consistency that he usually drove inside pitches to right-center field, a marked difference from young, overanxious hitters who try to pull everything. White had seen thousands of players swing bats over his three decades in the game, first from the mound as a pitcher in the Mariners’ minor-league system, then as a scout for San Diego, Baltimore, Seattle, and finally Los Angeles. He knew Puig was an exceptional talent. He was certain he would be a star.
White wanted him, bad. But there were a few problems. First, new international signing rules were about to go into effect in a few weeks. Because MLB worried rich teams had too big of an advantage under the current free agency system, it decided to give each club an allotment of money to spend on international players, with respect to where they finished in the standings. (The worse the team was, the more it would be allowed to spend.) If a team went over its bonus pool money, it would be fined and prohibited from signing a foreign-born pro for more than $250,000 for the next two years. Under the new system, the worst teams might get only $5 million to spend on players, the best might get only $2 million. White thought Puig was worth many times that sum, and he worried the other teams who stayed to watch his tryout did, too. Since major-league clubs still weren’t allowed to sign players out of Cuba, Puig would first have to establish residency in Mexico, then reach a deal with a team before the new rules went into place to avoid any penalties. While White wanted Puig, he didn’t want to put the Dodgers in a situation where signing him would prevent the club from inking talented foreign players for two years—especially now that he was working with owners who were willing to spend money.
The other hurdle White faced was getting Kasten to say yes. Even though he loved Puig, signing him was still a huge risk. White had only seen Puig swing at 45 mph batting practice fastballs. Puig hammered the ball, sure, but Mexico City sits at 7,300 feet, and baseballs tend to rocket through thin air. White never saw Puig swing at a breaking ball, or run the bases, or field his position in right, or throw home from the outfield. Puig had been away from baseball so long and was in such a hurry to sign that his handlers didn’t want him to hurt himself. The Dodgers had bid aggressively on the much-hyped Soler, but had lost out to the Cubs. White believed Puig was better. To help reassure himself that he wasn’t crazy, he called two of his scouts in Los Angeles and asked them to hop on the first plane to Mexico City to watch the kid hit. The scouts did and agreed that Puig was the real deal.
Talent evaluators from other teams weren’t as impressed. Some thought that Puig’s refusal to run or throw or field demonstrated laziness or arrogance. Rumors flew about his temper. The stories the evaluators traded only added to his myth. Baseball scouts are known for gossiping like teenagers, but the veracity of these stories didn’t matter because Puig’s past was impossible to check. Nonetheless, the salacious tales scared off many potential suitors.
White knew about Puig’s anger issues, and he told his bosses. But he also knew the kid was smart and quickwitted. They went to dinner together and Puig fixed White’s computer so he could get online abroad. White believed that the Cubs and White Sox also coveted Puig, so he joked with the kid in broken Spanish that he didn’t want to live in Illinois because Chicago was muy frio and windy, while Los Angeles was full of sunshine and the girls were better looking. Puig laughed. He understood.
While his future as a major leaguer was almost impossible to project based on a couple of days of BP at high altitude, the fact that he was such a mystery made White want him even more: his potential upside was much higher than that of an American prospect who’d been put through a battery of tests, both physical and psychological, by every other team. White looked at signing Puig like buying a lottery ticket. So he called Kasten and told him that the kid had a chance to turn into the kind of five-tool player who came along once in a generation. The Cubs had paid $30 million for nine years of Soler. White told Kasten the Dodgers should offer Puig $42 million, just to be safe. Kasten about choked on his phone. Since no one else seemed to know who Puig was, it was perhaps the biggest gamble of Kasten’s career. He tried to call Mark Walter but couldn’t reach him. With very little time to wait, Kasten knew he had to make the decision himself. Remembering that Walter had told him he wanted the Dodgers to be overaggressive in paying for international talent after they missed out on Soler, Kasten gulped, called White back, and gave him the go-ahead. The club’s race to sign Puig before the deadline was so frantic they had to scramble to find a reputable doctor in Mexico City to examine him because they didn’t have time to fly him to Los Angeles for a physical. When that doctor found no hidden problems, the Dodgers got their man.
• • •
Before Puig ever set foot in big-league camp, his legend preceded him. The Dodgers’ longtime clubhouse manager, Mitch Poole, had heard about Puig’s hellion reputation, so he assigned him number 66 in spring training as a joke. “I thought it’d be funny to give him number sixty-six to reference 666, like he was Diablo,” said Poole. Puig wanted to wear 14, but that number belonged to Mark Ellis. Poole told Puig that after the regular season started he could pick a different number whenever he was promoted to the majors. Puig wasn’t expected to make the Dodgers’ twenty-five-man roster out of camp in 2013 because he had yet to play a full season in the minors. But he clobbered opposing pitching from the start, collecting thirty hits in twenty-seven spring games, and accounting for more hits than outs en route to a .517 average—best in the Cactus League among players with at least fifty at-bats. Though he was the Dodgers’ best hitter during camp, he was sent to Double-A Chattanooga to get more experience. On his way out, he approached Poole with a new request. “Papi,” he said with a smile. “Can I keep sixty-six?” He believed the number had brought him luck.
What began as a joke turned into an omen. Puig lived his life like the present moment was the only place safe enough for him to be. He rarely fell asleep before dawn, and when he did, he told friends he slept with one eye open so that he might see evil approaching. He wore the two sixes on his back like a crucifix to ward off the devil.
Puig had a gift for turning mundane baseball tasks into exciting ones. Routine fly balls became circus basket catches. If he was on second base and a ground ball was hit to an infielder, he might try running all the way home. People searched for other baseball players to compare him to, but Puig’s style was more comparable to Michael Jordan’s, or to his hero’s, the Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. For starters, he seemed offended by the idea of hitting singles. Every time he whacked a baseball into the outfield he charged out of the batter’s box as if he could make it to second before anyone caught him. He didn’t just round bases, he blew past them, daring fielders to throw at him to make him retreat. And when he fielded the ball in right and the other team’s runners were circling the bases, he didn’t bother with relaying the ball back toward home plate via a teammate. He believed, with all of his heart, that he could throw a ball four hundred feet faster than any human could run ninety. To take your eyes off Yasiel Puig was a mistake, because he might do something you’d never see again. Because of its slower pace, Major League Baseball had been having a hard time attracting young fans who were more entertained by football and basketball. Puig was just what the game needed.
Opposing teams who saw how big and strong he was—how he could fling his bat at a baseball traveling 95 mph and three feet out of the strike zone and send it over the outfield fence—swore he was thirty years old. People who engaged him in conversation wondered if he was fifteen. His loud, booming voice entered rooms before he did. It wasn’t uncommon for him to sit in his corner locker and yell “Pow! Pow! Powpowpow!” like machine-gun spray in a video game when he thought that he was not getting enough attention.
Though he hit the ball better than anyone else on their squad during spring training, the Dodgers had no intention of putting Puig on their opening day roster because he wasn’t mature enough emotionally. In a perfect world, the young outfielder would have stayed in the minor leagues for the entire 2013 season so that he could make whatever mistakes he needed to make as far from the limelight as possible and arrive in L.A. the following April a year wiser for it. Some players could handle the pressure of being called up while they’re still young enough to be playing college ball. Kershaw had made his major-league debut in 2008, two months after he turned twenty. But the self-possession Kershaw displayed as a teenager was exceptional; he handled pressure better than many players who were ten years older. Puig was still a kid: his favorite television show was the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. During the first week of the season, Don Mattingly was asked why Yasiel Puig didn’t make the Dodgers’ opening day roster despite his obvious talent. “I heard a guy say one time, you feed babies baby food,” Mattingly said. “You don’t give them steak when they’re six months old.”
A Dodger executive explained it this way: “Go to YouTube and type in ‘Puig bat flip’ and you’ll see why.”
He was talking about the way Puig disposed of his bat after he hit a baseball with positive results. When he smacked home runs (or sometimes even singles), Puig flipped his bat high in the air behind him, handle up, barrel down, like a Spanish exclamation point. Opposing pitchers hated the way he celebrated his success against them and often retaliated by buzzing him with high fastballs during his next at-bat. The Dodgers saw it as an annoying extension of the youthful exuberance that made him great. Their tricky task was to get him to cool off the showboating without watering him down into a lesser player. But there was an even greater challenge when it came to Puig, with more serious ramifications: his joy turned to rage at a terrifying rate that he seemed unable to control. When opponents vented their exasperation with his antics, Puig puffed out his chest and hollered back. In the minors, he even dropped his bat to the ground in disgust after a called strike two. He was a man of high highs and low lows, the kind of player whose changing moods terrified coaches. It didn’t help his cause that he pouted when he was assigned to Double-A out of training camp.
But with their backs to the wall and their season already circling the drain, the Dodgers in their desperation considered promoting Puig just weeks after Mattingly compared him to an infant. Team officials decided to delay his call-up, however, after he was arrested in the early morning hours of April 28 for doing 97 in a 50 mph zone, and charged with reckless driving, speeding, and driving without proof of insurance. The next day the Dodgers were embarrassed by the Rockies at home, falling 12–2 in the game that Skip Schumaker pitched in relief. Almost a month had passed since Puig’s brush with the law when Colletti went to see him, and perhaps he had endured enough overnight bus rides and Double-A cold-cut spreads to atone for his transgression. While Puig might have done his penance, the Dodgers’ front office was reluctant to promote him unless he was in line for significant playing time. What the young right fielder needed most were at-bats; a warm seat on major-league pine would just delay his maturation by another year.
• • •
That’s where Mike Trout came in. In the year and a half he had been in the big leagues, Trout had already established himself as the best player in baseball. In his first full season with the Angels, the twenty-year-old center fielder became the first player in MLB history to hit 30 home runs, steal 45 bases, and score 125 runs in a season. He reminded many of Mickey Mantle. But at six foot two and 230 pounds, Trout was three inches taller and thirty-five pounds heavier than the Mick. As if his personal accomplishments weren’t enough, he also collected the hit that forced the Dodgers to call up Yasiel Puig.
During the last week of May, the Dodgers and Angels played four straight games, two in Los Angeles then two in Anaheim. The Dodgers had taken the first two games of the series at home, but were trailing in the seventh in the third game, 3–1, when Trout stepped into the batter’s box to lead off the inning.
Maybe it was because Trout was up to bat, or maybe it was just a coincidence. But while Kemp was slowed for most of 2012 with injuries, Trout had established himself as the best center fielder in Southern California, winning the American League’s Rookie of the Year award and finishing second in MVP voting. When Trout whacked a 1-2 fastball from Dodgers reliever Javy Guerra toward the wall in right-center field, Kemp took off sprinting after it with more ferocity than usual. His first two steps toward the ball were fine. But when he took his third stride he pulled up lame and slowed into a trot. At first glance it wasn’t clear what was wrong with Kemp; his face registered no pain, and he didn’t grab at any part of his body. The ball ricocheted off the top of the wall and bounced into his glove, and he chucked it back into the infield well after Trout had arrived at second base. It wasn’t until Guerra was removed from the game two batters later that anyone knew Kemp was injured. He motioned toward the dugout, and one of the Dodgers’ trainers jogged out to talk with him during the pitching change. After some discussion, Kemp left the field, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him. Someone in the Dodgers’ dugout yelled out to Schumaker, who was playing second, that they needed to move him to center, so he had better grab an outfielder’s glove.
“What happened?” Schumaker asked Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire as Schumaker approached the dugout.
“I don’t know,” said McGwire as he handed him a bigger glove. Schumaker shook his head. If Kemp’s injury was bad enough to require a trip to the disabled list, he would become the twelfth Dodger to land on the DL in the club’s first fifty-one games. The team had only twenty-five men on its roster: the wounded almost outnumbered the well. The Angels held on to win the game, 4–3. The Dodgers remained in last place, trailing the division-leading Arizona Diamondbacks by seven and a half games.
When the club announced that Kemp pulled a hamstring, yet again, the postgame locker room gave off an even more morose vibe than usual. “It’s not as bad as last year,” Kemp said after the game, and he may have believed it. “But you’ve got to take it easy and make sure you’re careful with it because it can get worse. I’d rather maybe miss a couple days or whatever and not miss a month like I did last year.” When Kemp hurt himself chasing down Trout’s hit, he could not have imagined it would trigger a sequence of events that threatened his job.
• • •
At first, Mattingly tried to deny Puig was on the way to L.A. by suggesting instead that the Dodgers needed someone who could fill Kemp’s position. “Obviously we’ll need a player who can play center,” Mattingly said. That was true: the loss of Kemp meant Los Angeles didn’t have a true center fielder on its roster, as Puig’s natural position was right. The Chattanooga Lookouts also featured a young center-field prospect named Joc Pederson, who had been the Dodgers’ eleventh-round pick in the 2010 draft out of high school. He was better than where he was selected, though, and the club gave him the second-highest bonus of any of the players they drafted that year, hoping he would sign with them instead of going to play ball at the University of Southern California, as his father had. A year and a half younger than Puig, Pederson entered the 2013 season as the Dodgers’ fourth-best prospect according to Baseball America, and the youngest member of the Lookouts. Pederson was a better defender in center than Kemp was, and his arm was just as good. But he appeared overmatched in the batter’s box and was striking out in 25 percent of his plate appearances versus Double-A pitching. To give themselves more time to mull their decision on Puig, the Dodgers promoted outfielder Alex Castellanos from Triple-A Albuquerque as a stopgap and headed off to Colorado for a series with the Rockies on the first weekend of June.
Privately, the front office had settled on Puig. The week before the club called him up, Kasten flew to Chattanooga and pleaded with the young outfielder to behave. “Please,” said Kasten. “Do it for me.” While there were doubts that Puig was ready to become a starting outfielder in the big leagues, the club had little choice but to rush him. The Dodgers were not only losing, they were playing the kind of snoozy, uninspired ball that horrified their new owners, whose main objective was to showcase stars on their upcoming multibillion-dollar cable network. Puig was raw, sure, but he played like he had bumblebees in his pants. Even if he failed, he would not be boring. The front office had hoped he would roust the club from its season-long dirt nap. The decision to promote Puig was made even easier three days later when Carl Crawford reached out and slapped a ball down the left-field line at Coors Field, sprinted around first base, and grabbed the back of his right leg on his way to second. Hamstring injuries were now spreading through the Dodgers’ clubhouse like a nasty flu bug. On the morning of May 29, there had been no roster spot for Puig. But in the span of seventy-two hours, the Dodgers lost both Kemp and Crawford to the disabled list. Puig flew in to Los Angeles while the club was still in Colorado, and was told to keep his promotion a secret until it was made public the following day. For the next twenty-four hours, Puig referred to himself as “El Secreto.” As an homage to the secrecy surrounding his call-up, when he was asked to pick a song that would play in the stadium whenever he walked up to bat, Puig chose a tune by Dominican musician Secreto El Famoso Biberon.
Three hours before his first major-league game on June 3, Puig stood behind home plate during batting practice and fastened white batting gloves tight on his hands as he took in the scene with Mark McGwire. Dodger Stadium hadn’t yet opened its turnstiles to the public for that evening’s game, which meant he was still a mystery to fans. But by the time the last out was recorded, few in the crowd would remember the Dodgers before Puig existed. He had come a long way since Logan White first saw him on that field in Mexico a year earlier when he was overweight and out of shape. Where his body used to contain curves, there were now right angles. The fat around his belly, thighs, and backside had fallen away and been replaced by muscle.
McGwire, who would become a sort of father figure to Puig over the course of the season, quickly ran through basic English with him, making sure the young Cuban knew how to say “fastball,” “change-up,” and “curve.” As the two sluggers conversed in a language they cobbled together on the fly, Mattingly addressed the media and admitted he had lied about Puig’s call-up. “I was basically bullshitting the whole time,” Mattingly said of his comments the previous week that the team would promote a center fielder instead.
A few hundred thousand people may one day boast that they attended Yasiel Puig’s first game, but the truth was the club had been playing so badly that Dodger Stadium was only half full that night. At first pitch, about 75 percent of the seats were empty. A reporter joked that there were as many media members in attendance for Puig’s debut as there were spectators. It was hard to fault Dodger fans for staying home. Until Puig’s call-up the team’s lineup consisted of a hodgepodge of bench players thrown into starting duty in place of injured regulars. When Puig was promoted, the Dodgers had $87 million worth of players on the disabled list. (Fifteen teams had opened the season with payrolls lower than that.) As such, the Dodgers’ lackluster line-up for Puig’s first game looked like this:
RF Yasiel Puig (first major-league game ever)
2B Nick Punto (subbing for the injured Mark Ellis)
1B Adrian Gonzalez (regular starter)
C Ramon Hernandez (Subbing for the injured A. J. Ellis. Hitting cleanup. Would be cut eleven days later and never play in the big leagues again.)
LF Scott Van Slyke (subbing for the injured Carl Crawford)
CF Andre Ethier (Subbing for the injured Matt Kemp. Only third game in his eight-year career that he started in center.)
3B Jerry Hairston (Subbing for Luis Cruz, who had to move over to shortstop to fill in for Hanley Ramirez. Four months from retirement.)
SS Luis Cruz (Subbing for the injured Hanley Ramirez. Hitting .120. Three weeks from being cut.)
P Stephen Fife (Called up from Triple-A earlier that day to replace injured Chris Capuano in rotation. Making seventh career start.)
Mattingly opted to bat Puig leadoff for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to get Puig as many at-bats as possible, especially given how decimated the Dodgers’ lineup was. Second, he was wary of a roadkill situation. Puig was so fast around the bases that the skipper worried that if he batted a slower runner in front of him, the young right fielder might run over him. Guys who hit first in a major-league lineup tend to be quick and small, with their primary job being to get on base so the power hitters slotted third, fourth, and fifth can drive them in. Puig was one of the largest leadoff hitters in the game’s history. If he was nervous, he hid it well. But that didn’t mean he knew what he was doing.
His first at-bat was straightforward, but the Dodgers’ coaching staff had to remind him to take his time walking up to the plate before his second at-bat so that he might give the pitcher, who hit in front of him when the lineup turned over, a chance to get back to the dugout. They also told him not to argue with umpires. After running through the simple vocabulary with McGwire during batting practice, Puig went and stood on first base while a member of the club’s coaching staff mimicked the pickoff move of Eric Stults, the Padres’ starter that night. Even though Puig was fast, he lacked basic survival instincts, punctuated by his inability to slide. Watching him run the bases reminded some in the organization of handing the keys of a Ferrari to someone who couldn’t drive stick. The coaches did not rehearse Stults’s move so that Puig might try to run on him. Stealing bases was too advanced. The objective was just to help him avoid getting picked off.
• • •
Vin Scully told listeners that night that Puig’s pregame pickoff tutorial was something he’d never seen before in his sixty-four seasons on the job. Scully, eighty-five, had been around the game his whole life. Born in the Bronx, he played center field for Fordham University and once even suited up against a Yale squad that featured George H. W. Bush at first base. “I could run, I could throw, but I couldn’t hit,” Scully would say about his ballplaying career. Upon graduation he began his career as a fill-in for a CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., focusing on college football. Impressed by his professionalism, legendary Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber invited Scully to join him and Connie Desmond in the booth a year later, in 1950. Like Puig, Scully was just twenty-two years old when he began his Dodger career. When Barber left the club for the Yankees three years later, Scully became the team’s lead announcer, at age twenty-five. Going into the 2013 season he was the second-longest-tenured team employee, after former manager Tommy Lasorda, who became a vice president, then a special advisor to the chairman after he retired.
As Scully put on his gray sport coat and fixed his silver and white striped tie before leaving for Dodger Stadium for Puig’s first game, even he could not have imagined what was about to unfold. Vin Scully loved baseball, but what he loved even more were the stories of the men who played it. If a player’s mother’s cousin was a descendant of John Wilkes Booth or related to the astronomer who had discovered Pluto, Scully would figure out a way to weave that fact into the broadcast. One of the best stories he told was about racing Jackie Robinson on ice skates. The two men, along with Robinson’s wife, Rachel, had gone to a resort in the Catskills one winter and Scully told them he was going to go skate. The couple asked if they could come along. “When we get there I’d like to race you,” Robinson said.
“Jack, I didn’t know you skated,” Scully said, knowing Robinson had grown up in Southern California.
“I’ve never skated in my life,” Robinson replied. “But I want to race you because that’s how I’m going to learn.”
Sure enough, when Robinson laced up his skates he could barely stand on the ice. He raced Scully anyway, running on his ankles.
Scully told this story, some fifty years after it happened, with the same sense of wonder that must have overtaken him on the day it took place. The legendary announcer was blessed with the rare combination of a child’s enthusiasm and a poet’s tongue.
Hours before Puig’s first big-league game, Scully and his wife of forty years, Sandi, ducked into the car that waited outside their home in Thousand Oaks and began the forty-mile ride to Dodger Stadium. When he was younger, Scully drove himself to the park every day. But as he grew older a chauffeur shuttled him. During the drive to the stadium, which could take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, Scully and his wife liked to listen to show tunes and standards. Sometimes on the ride home he’d berate himself over mistakes he made during the night’s broadcast. Though he was in the middle of his seventh decade working for the Dodgers, because of his advancing age he approached his job like a man employed on a year-to-year basis. For decades, he did every Dodger game, home and away. Then he began to scale back. First by calling away games only within the division, then by not traveling any farther east than Phoenix. Each August, he would announce whether he would return the following season. In 2012 he got so sick during one of the team’s trips to San Diego that he thought it might be time to walk away. But he recovered and kept on going.
The Scullys’ driver would arrive at Dodger Stadium around four o’clock every day and drop the couple off at the players’ entrance near the top of the park. Like Puig, Scully’s voice usually entered rooms before he did. He could be heard saying hello to every security guard and usher he passed, calling each of them by name on his way to the elevator, or whistling a standard like “Singin’ in the Rain,” his all-time favorite song. He and Sandi would then descend three floors to the media level and enter the press box named after him. He’d go over his game notes, film any pregame spots that were needed, then retreat to the press dining room for dinner with his wife. After he finished eating, he would often sidle up to the table with the writers on the Dodgers beat and trade stories about baseball and current events. Young reporters would ask him about watching Sandy Koufax in his prime, and he would never tire of telling them what a marvel he was, how it was impossible to compare any modern-day pitchers to Koufax because he took the mound every four days instead of five, and how he threw twenty-seven complete games in each of his final two seasons because there was no such thing as a pitch count. He would also say that out of everyone he saw in all the games he covered or attended as a fan, watching Willie Mays patrol center field at the vast Polo Grounds was perhaps the most remarkable.
Red Barber had told Scully when he began his career to refrain from being partial to the home team. And though Dodger fans claimed him as their own, Scully never referred to the Dodgers as “we,” as in “We need to score some runs,” or “We need to not get blown out tonight.” He was so good at remaining impartial while broadcasters from other towns descended into homer-ism that it wasn’t uncommon to hear a Dodger player wonder if Scully was in the tank for the other team. Scully, of course, was not, but it was the best possible testament to the fairness of his calls. His wife used to watch the games from the owners’ suite, but in recent years had taken to sitting behind Scully during his broadcasts because he liked her company. Aside from the odd tech engineer and producer, Scully worked alone. Within sixty seconds of the final pitch of every home game, the Scullys were whisked out of the press box by security, through a crowd of fans hoping to catch a glimpse or a wave, and into the elevator, which was held for them. Then their driver took them home.
Vin Scully had called thousands of Dodger games before Yasiel Puig came into his orbit. In that time, he’d witnessed fourteen Rookies of the Year, ten Cy Young winners, and eight MVPs. But after watching Puig run and hit and throw and revive the energy around Dodger Stadium for two weeks, Scully was just as dumbfounded as everyone else. “He is not to be believed,” Scully said. “Because this game is not that easy.”
The buzz surrounding Puig was defeaning, but no one knew what to expect. Though the Dodgers desperately needed to change the course of a disastrous season to give fans something to cheer about, club officials asked the team’s social media coordinator, Josh Tucker, not to hype Puig too much on the team’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, because they didn’t want to put even more pressure on the kid.
The Dodgers were playing San Diego at home on June 3, just eight weeks removed from the brawl that had cost them Greinke. They sat in last place in the NL West, with a 23-32 record. Only the Brewers, Mets, Marlins, and Astros had fewer wins—and the latter two clubs entered the season with the lowest payrolls in MLB, at $39 million and $24 million, respectively. When Puig ran onto the field, his crisp white uniform appeared brighter than those worn by his teammates, having not yet been muddied and ripped and colored by dirt and grass stains. He stood in right with the manufacturer’s sticker still stuck to the underside of his blue cap. As he stepped up to the plate for his first major-league at-bat, the sparse crowd granted him a valiant ovation. Greinke and Kershaw moved toward the end of the dugout nearest the plate and leaned over the railing to get a better look. Kershaw worked on an enormous wad of bubble gum while Greinke spit sunflower seeds into a paper cup.
Puig stepped up to the plate carrying a two-toned bat with a wood-colored handle, the barrel painted black, and his name carved into it in capital letters. How many hits would it have in it? So many prospects advanced to the major leagues with breathless hype they never lived up to. Would Puig be one of them? He looked out at Eric Stults on the pitcher’s mound as though he was already mad at him. One of the most terrifying things about Clayton Kershaw was that his face remained kind while he dominated hitters, like that of a sneaky executioner. Puig more closely resembled Greinke on the diamond: he glared at his opponent with cold eyes that steeled against any human inclination toward empathy. The young Cuban took the first pitch he saw from Stults low for a ball. He was fooled by the next pitch, swinging way ahead of a changeup as if he were trying to hit the ball to the moon. He took Stults’s third offering for a ball, then fouled off another changeup. With the count even at two, Stults delivered the perfect pitch to any anxious rookie in his first major-league at-bat: soft, low, and away. Puig surprised everyone by waiting on it, and then reaching out and extending his bat until it almost touched the dirt to hit it. The ball looped over the shortstop Everth Cabrera’s head and dunked into left-center field for a single. It wasn’t a home run, but he was happy to take the hit. Puig rounded first, shrugged, and smiled. He was erased from the base paths a batter later when Nick Punto grounded into a double play. Up next was Adrian Gonzalez, who yanked a home run into the right-field bullpen, close to the spot where he had hit the ball in his first at-bat with the Dodgers eight months earlier. Gonzalez circled the bases and ran down the length of the dugout looking for Puig, to congratulate him on his first hit. When he found him, he pointed at the kid. They embraced.
In Puig’s third at-bat, he hit a chopper to the right side of the infield that deflected off first baseman Kyle Blanks’s glove and bounced into the outfield. Puig sprinted to first out of the box, rounded the base, and took an enormous turn toward second, daring the Padres’ right fielder, Will Venable, to choose which base to throw to. It was a reckless move that Puig would employ over and over again in his first year with the Dodgers. Sometimes it would result in a rushed throw that sailed into the stands and awarded Puig two extra bases. Other times, he’d be thrown out by thirty feet. Puig played the game the same way he lived his life: gambling on his ability to stay one step ahead of whatever was chasing him.
• • •
Like many of his baseball-playing countrymen, Yasiel Puig had tried several times to defect from Cuba before he made it to the United States, including an attempt in April 2012 that was foiled by the U.S. Coast Guard on an open stretch of water between Cuba and Haiti. To finally make it out, he relied on a powerful Mexican drug cartel called the Zetas to smuggle him by speedboat from Cuba to Isla Mujeres, a four-mile-long island near Cancún, just off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Miami investors who had heard of Puig’s talents and wanted to cash in on his potential agreed to pay the smugglers $250,000 to get the young Cuban to Mexico, where he could establish residency and then be eligible to sign a free agent contract with an MLB team.
But according to a lawsuit filed against Puig by one of his traveling companions, a boxer named Yunior Despaigne, when the group landed in Mexico the smugglers changed their minds and decided Puig was worth $400,000. Puig, Despaigne, and three others were then held hostage in a Cancún hotel room for a month while the two sides haggled. According to Despaigne, Puig’s Miami advisors solved the standoff by finding another group willing to whisk the young slugger to Mexico City, where he could hold that open tryout for interested MLB teams. If Despaigne was telling the truth, Puig’s journey to the United States began with stiffing the drug dealers who had snuck him out of Cuba. Despaigne alleged in his lawsuit that he feared for his life because a smuggler named Leo found him in Miami, held a gun to his stomach, and told him to tell Puig that if he didn’t pay the Zetas the money they were owed they would kill Despaigne and Puig both. A month later, Despaigne discovered that Leo, whose real name was Yandrys Leon, had been shot to death in Cancún.
This story wasn’t unique to Puig. Rare is the Cuban Major League Baseball player who didn’t face the possibility of death, or worse, while fleeing the communist regime. When Puig signed with the Dodgers, no reporters knew for sure how he had gotten to Mexico, though the drug cartel rumors flew around him from the start. His teammates were aware of that theory; they spoke of it to each other in hushed tones, but most thought of it as one of the tall tales that added to the lore that surrounded him. The seriousness of his situation didn’t hit them until later, when a team meeting was called in Pittsburgh ten days after Puig’s call-up, in mid-June, and players were told that they were going to begin traveling with private security. No one ever told them that the added guards were for Puig, but his teammates soon noticed that the four hired men who took turns sweeping hotels before they arrived seemed concerned only with the young right fielder.
Puig never discussed with teammates or reporters his terrifying journey to the United States. In fact, in his first year in the big leagues he mostly stonewalled the media altogether. “I don’t really like the press,” he explained in one of the rare one-on-one interviews he gave. It was hard to blame him. Back in Cuba journalists were government spies. Puig didn’t trust anyone whose job was to uncover truths, especially now that he was harboring dark secrets about how he had escaped his home country. At the end of Puig’s first week, Luis Cruz took a roll of masking tape and cordoned off a small section of carpet in front of their adjoining lockers. Puig got down on his hands and knees and wrote “No Reporters” in Spanish with a blue Sharpie pen on the tape. “He likes playing,” said Cruz. “He doesn’t like all the attention.”
But that attention was inevitable after the way his first game ended. In the bottom of the ninth the Dodgers were leading the Padres 2–1 when they brought in Brandon League to close out the game. Colletti had traded two middling prospects to Seattle for League at the deadline in 2012, and the twenty-nine-year-old right-hander did well in the final two months of the season for Los Angeles, posting the best numbers of his career. As a reward, Colletti gave him a three-year contract for $22.5 million. Despite his success in Dodger blue, the deal looked like a mistake from the day it was signed, just like the contract Colletti had given Andre Ethier months earlier. The influx of cash Colletti had to play with was not without its downside. Outbidding everyone else for superstars like Greinke and Kershaw was one thing. Overpaying guys like Ethier and League was another. Each club had only twenty-five roster spots. It was much easier to cut underperforming players who weren’t still owed eight figures. If a guy making the minimum struggled, the club could ax him from the roster with no real skin lost. But if a guy making a lot of money floundered, the Dodgers were hurt not only by his play on the field but also by the fact that they were stuck with him.
One of the most curious things about baseball is that men who pitch the ninth inning are paid way more than those who pitch the sixth, seventh, or eighth—even though they’re responsible for the same number of outs. This is because most general managers believe that a player must possess a certain type of bravery to be a closer, because the last three outs of a game are the hardest to get, even when facing the bottom of a lineup. Colletti, in particular, had an affinity for pitchers who had amassed a pile of saves in the past, so much so that a player’s career save total seemed to trump better, more accurate measures of his ability. First and foremost, closers need to strike out hitters. This is because when a batter makes contact with a baseball, even when he is fooled, it has a chance of falling in for a hit. A strikeout neutralizes bad luck. In 2012, the National League’s most dominant closer, Atlanta’s Craig Kimbrel, fanned 116 batters in 62 innings. In the four months with Seattle before he was dealt to Los Angeles, League had struck out just 27 batters in 44 frames. While League excelled at inducing ground-ball double plays with his sinker, he didn’t make batters miss. And because of this, the Mariners had replaced him as closer with the second-year fireballer Tom Wilhelmsen.
What made League’s contract even more perplexing was that the Dodgers had a twenty-five-year-old homegrown reliever who was much better. In 145 career innings, Kenley Jansen had struck out an incredible 236 batters, which was 41 percent of the men he faced. He did this while posting a 2.22 earned run average. And he did it with one pitch that everyone knew was coming. Jansen’s cut fastball reminded many of the brilliant Yankee closer Mariano Rivera’s, except that Jansen threw it harder. He stood six foot five and weighed 265 pounds. At nearly seven feet, his stride toward home plate when he threw a pitch was one of the longest in the majors and had the effect of making his 97 mph fastball seem even faster. But heading into the 2013 season, the Dodgers’ front office didn’t feel comfortable moving him into the closer’s spot, as if he would somehow combust under the weight of it. Perhaps that was because they had signed Jansen—who hailed from the tiny Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao—as a catcher, and converted him to pitcher only after they discovered he couldn’t hit. In 2009, at age twenty-one, he had even served as the starting catcher for Team Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic. Jansen entered the 2013 season with only two and a half years of experience as a major-league pitcher, a statistic Colletti seemed to value more than his strikeout rate. The Dodgers’ GM preferred League to close games.
That decision had been a disaster. On May 31, League owned a 5.31 earned run average and had blown three wins the struggling Dodgers could not afford to give away. Jansen pitched a clean eighth inning in Puig’s debut game on June 3, striking out two. When Mattingly brought in League in the ninth, he fell behind to Padres second baseman Jedd Gyorko, before getting him to ground out to shortstop. Then, with one away, he walked the right fielder, Chris Denorfia, on pitches that weren’t close to being strikes. Many fans in the stadium began to boo. League grimaced and paced behind the rubber, looking about as comfortable on the mound as if he were walking barefoot on cactus needles.
Kyle Blanks was on deck, which was significant, because with Carlos Quentin out of the lineup that day, if any Padres hitter could tie the game with one swing it was the six-foot-six, 265-pound Blanks. League’s best skill was getting batters to hit ground balls, and a ground ball in this situation would likely result in a game-ending double play. League knew that to get the result he wanted he needed to keep the ball down, so his first two pitches were low and out of the strike zone. His third pitch was belt high. Blanks went with it, and hit it deep toward the right-field wall, over Puig’s head. Puig sprinted back toward the fence, running an awkward banana route toward the ball. It looked like a home run off the bat. But before the ball could clear the fence the night sky knocked it down. With his momentum carrying him backward, Puig caught the ball one-handed on the warning track, took two steps to his left, and fired it toward first base across his body. Denorfia had been off with the pitch and now he was sprinting back toward first. The ball arrived a split second before he did for an improbable game-ending double play.
That game-winning throw from the wall was Puig’s career highlight for less than twenty-four hours. In his second game he hit two home runs and drove in five. Most young players come up to the big leagues trying to pull everything, and opposing pitchers use that tendency to their advantage by feeding them a steady diet of pitches away. Puig surprised them by driving those pitches over the right-field fence. When Puig hit his third homer of the week in just his fourth game, a stunned Scully delivered this call: “And a high drive into deep right field—I don’t believe it! A grand slam home run!” Then he stayed silent for ninety seconds through Puig’s curtain call and two replays, letting the crowd’s euphoric screams narrate the scene. “I have learned over the years that there comes a rare and precious moment where there is absolutely nothing better than silence,” Scully said afterward. “Nothing better than to be absolutely speechless to sum up a situation. And that was the moment.”
The mechanics of Puig’s swing were as gorgeous as Logan White had described to Kasten back when he first saw him taking batting practice on that field in Mexico City. His arms were long and strong enough to cover the outer part of the plate. And because his hands hung particularly close to his body when he swung, he could stay back on inside pitches rather than flail over them. This meant that there weren’t very many places where a pitcher could get away with throwing the ball to him. “If you catch too much of the plate you’re basically fucked,” said one NL West starter. For all the emotion with which he played the game, Puig was quiet in the batter’s box and held his bat still until he began his swing. “Puig is a stud!” tweeted Braves perennial all-star third baseman Chipper Jones the day after Puig’s grand slam against his former team on June 6. “Bat stays in the zone a long time.”
Puig became the second batter since 1900 to hit four home runs in his first five games. For his efforts, he was named the National League’s player of the week. A pitcher who gave up one of those home runs was heard saying after the game, “There’s no way that guy is twenty-two.” But it wasn’t just his stats that got the rest of the sport talking. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball, but he went about his business on and off the field in such a calm and composed manner that he was almost boring. Puig was a human backflip. He stood in the batter’s box and admired his home runs; he stared at pitchers who threw inside. He showed up to the ballpark when he felt like it, and ran through stop signs held up by the Dodgers’ third-base coach, Tim Wallach, because he thought he knew better. Opposing players could not stand him. “If he’s my teammate I probably try to teach him how to behave in the big leagues,” said Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero a month into Puig’s career. “He’s creating a bad reputation around the league, and it’s unfortunate because the talent he has is to be one of the greatest players in the big leagues.” When told of Montero’s comments before a game in Arizona, a Dodger pitcher nodded in agreement. “He’s right,” he said. “But I don’t really care because he rakes.”
After Puig nailed the runner at first to win his first game with the Dodgers, there was little hope of coaches getting him to hit a cutoff man ever again. “I always try to put on a show for the fans,” Puig explained later. “They come to spend their time and lose sleep watching us play. To me, it is one of the more emotional things in baseball.” And put on a show he did. In his first month with the Dodgers, Puig collected forty-four hits and was named the NL’s player of the month. The only player to post more hits in his debut month was Yankee great Joe DiMaggio, who had forty-eight in May 1936. Puig had never even heard of DiMaggio. He had no context for the pace he set. Even though the coaching staff had seen him hit well in spring, they were stunned by the tear he was on. “I don’t think any of us were really thinking this is something that could keep happening over an extended period of time,” said Mattingly.
The mood around Dodger Stadium reminded some old-timers of the pandemonium surrounding Fernando Valenzuela’s debut season in 1981, when he won the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards. The forty minutes or so between the young right fielder’s at-bats felt like Puigatory. The club raced to stock concession stands with his number-66 jersey. “Every friend, celebrity and executive I know has been calling me for Dodgers tickets now!” tweeted Magic Johnson. “Dodger Stadium is the place to be!!” But the excitement in the crowd didn’t match the energy in the Dodgers’ locker room. While his teammates—the pitchers, in particular—were happy to receive the offensive boost Puig provided, the Dodgers still sat in last place.
Juan Uribe did his best to loosen the tension in the clubhouse. Though he still hadn’t regained the starting third-base job from Luis Cruz, he was hitting much better than he had in his previous two years as a Dodger, and showed up to work every day in the same goofy mood. It was not uncommon for him to wear a bright red or purple suit on travel days, and walk to the team bus donning aviator shades with a cigar hanging from his mouth. He was the only teammate who could tease Kemp and get away with it. He would sometimes approach the sensitive slugger singing “Oh na naaa,” which was part of the chorus from Kemp’s ex-girlfriend Rihanna’s hit song “What’s My Name?” When the Dodgers were in San Francisco in September, a television in the clubhouse showed a game where Brewers center fielder Carlos Gomez hit a home run against Atlanta and barked his way around the bases, causing both benches to clear before he reached home plate. Dodger players were glued to the fight. Kemp stood in the center of the room under the television, shaking his head and yelling, “Wow!” He could not believe how angry Gomez was. Uribe jumped up from his chair and grabbed Kemp by the shoulders, acting as though he were holding him back from a fight. “That’s like you in San Diego!” he said, referring to Kemp’s reaction during the Greinke-Quentin brawl back in April. “Hold me back! Hold me back!” The rest of the room laughed. And after realizing how silly he’d been, Kemp did, too.
It wasn’t just Kemp whom Uribe goofed on. The Dominican-born player gave up on trying to pronounce Skip Schumaker’s name, so he began calling him Chewbacca. He took Puig under his wing, too, and chided him when he hid from media in the shower or the commissary. While the Dodgers’ front office loved that Puig’s play helped revive an otherwise flatlining club, many of his teammates worried about putting so much pressure on a player who was so emotional and immature. His stellar play gave the coaches no other option; regardless of his mental lapses and temper flares, he was allowed to take up residence in the club’s central nervous system because he hit like, well, DiMaggio.
A week after Puig’s debut, the first-place Diamondbacks came to L.A. for a three-game set on June 10. A Dodgers sweep would cut Arizona’s lead to four and a half games. But if the Diamondbacks won all three contests the Dodgers would trail them by ten and a half games with a little over half the season to go. With Kershaw on the mound for the first game, the club felt good about its chances of gaining some ground. The big lefty was his usual self, going seven innings and giving up one earned run before handing the ball to Jansen for the eighth. Jansen tossed a perfect frame, and the Dodgers took a 3–1 lead into the ninth. Brandon League walked to the mound to close it out. After striking out Montero, League imploded. He gave up a double, three singles, and a walk, and the Dodgers watched the Diamondbacks score four runs to win the game. In a season full of bitter losses, this one tasted the worst. Throughout their slide, the club at least believed that when they sent Kershaw to the mound, it would stop the bleeding. League’s waste of Kershaw’s gem was devastating. After it was over and the players were left to dress in silence, one veteran infielder said he hoped a blogger would ask a dumb question so he could pop him.
The best managers understand that a baseball season is grueling and cruel, and slumps can gnaw away at the confidence of even the most talented players. When a guy struggles, often the worst thing a skipper can do is panic and change his role, especially if he needs something out of that player down the road. The Dodgers were committed to League for two and a half more seasons. The last thing Mattingly wanted to do was add to his self-doubt. Even though League was a millionaire many times over, the money didn’t make the humiliation of public failure any easier. Dodger fans booed him at the stadium and cursed him on social media. The pain struggling players go through is rarely as bad as the anguish their families feel, sitting in their aisle seats at the stadium for quick exits or in front of their televisions at home, peering at the carnage through their fingers, helpless to stop it. Pitchers’ next of kin had it the worst. Their wives are often as nervous during May games as the team’s most die-hard fans are during the postseason: sometimes one pitch away from vomiting. In the middle of League’s ninth-inning shellacking his wife, Sasha, burst into tears.
Most Dodger players loved how patient Don Mattingly was, except for when they needed him to hurry up and make a decision. “Leaguer’s our guy,” Mattingly would say over and over again whenever he was asked about the closer’s status after a poor outing. Players respected Mattingly for his loyalty, but in this case his optimism was hurting the club. While management worried Jansen might come down with a case of the youth yips if Mattingly named him the new closer, his teammates thought the Dutch Caribbean righty had the best stuff in the bullpen and the perfect temperament to finish games. Jansen seemed to exist on island time, as if his growing up so close to the changing ocean tides taught him he could not stop the waves from breaking but he could learn how to surf. Jansen never got too high or too low and he spent more time living in his right arm than in his brain. His relaxed attitude was given away by his uniform pants, which he wore so long they often caught and ripped on his spikes. He never seemed to worry about tripping and falling.
While some closers grew enormous beards or sprinted into the game to the throbbing of heavy metal music, Jansen kept his hair a smidge longer than a buzz cut and jogged in to Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which mostly made the crowd want to get up and dance. He wore number 74 because it was the address of the house he grew up in back in Curaçao. His first big-league paychecks had gone toward paying off what his family owed on it, and he never wanted to forget his roots. Mattingly didn’t want to make a closer change, but League’s struggles didn’t leave him much choice. The following day he named Jansen the new closer.
• • •
No one would remember June 11, 2013, as the day the Dodgers finally made Kenley Jansen their ninth-inning guy. No one would remember it as the day that Chris Withrow—a former first-round draft pick whose fastball touched 100 mph—was called up, either.
While the new Dodger owners packed their team with all-stars, the front office of their small-market division-rival Diamondbacks realized that their window for winning the NL West might have closed when McCourt was run out of town. Arizona had been interested in signing Hyun-Jin Ryu before the season, and submitted a bid to his Korean team during the auction process. Their general manager, Kevin Towers, told the press that the Dodgers had blown everyone away with their $25.7 million posting fee for Ryu, which was double the second-highest rumored bid for the lefty, which came from the Cubs. The Diamondbacks had been in on Puig, too, but didn’t offer anything close to what the Dodgers paid to get him. “When you have that wherewithal financially it doesn’t mean you’re the best scouting organization,” a frustrated Towers said in a radio interview in mid-July. “You just have the wherewithal to go out and buy whatever you want.”
Determining an international player’s value was a fool’s errand, since overseas stats didn’t necessarily translate. The Cubs never confirmed what they bid on Ryu, but they had been aggressive in the international market, inking Jorge Soler to the $30 million deal months earlier that inspired the Dodgers to sign Puig. If Los Angeles had outbid the next-highest offer for Ryu by tens of million of dollars in the blind auction, was it still bad business if Ryu was worth more than they paid? Mark Walter had already demonstrated that he didn’t care that others thought he was overpaying when he bought the Dodgers because he believed everyone else was undervaluing the club. He was right. Perhaps because they did not want to miss out on another Soler or Puig, the Diamondbacks would change their philosophy and sign twenty-four-year-old Cuban third baseman Yasmany Tomas to a six-year deal for $68.5 million in 2014.
Because they would never have the cash to outbid teams like the Dodgers on the free agent market for players like Greinke, Kershaw, or Kemp, the D-backs embraced the philosophy that there was a right way to play the game, and a wrong way. The right way involved a strict adherence to baseball’s unwritten rules: runners were to be advanced station to station, a man should play for the name on the front of his jersey and not the name on the back, the tallest weed was to be plucked, etc. In that way, the culture clash between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks was a microcosm of the battle between capitalism and communism. For Arizona, the team was more significant than any single player. And any opposing player caught celebrating a personal accomplishment for one second longer than necessary was to be greeted with a fastball to the numbers in his next at-bat. Towers made it clear the following off-season that if one of his pitchers shied away from throwing at opponents on purpose when asked, he would be traded. He even hinted that the club’s pitching coach, Charles Nagy, was fired because his staff didn’t do it enough. Whether it was jealousy of the Dodgers’ new financial freedom, personality clashes, or a little of both, the Diamondbacks’ front office seemed to resent the way the Dodgers did business. That anger trickled down to their coaches and players. Puig would push them over the edge.
The Diamondbacks were managed by Kirk Gibson, the man who had enjoyed the most famous at-bat in Dodgers history. Forget just Dodger history: the image of a hobbled Gibson limping around the bases after hitting that improbable ninth-inning pinch-hit home run off the Oakland Hall of Fame closer Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series was one of the more enduring moments in the history of baseball. It was so sweet a memory in Los Angeles that Gibson could have lived off it there for the rest of his life, like his manager, Tommy Lasorda. But Gibson wasn’t the type. While his teammate Orel Hershiser allowed himself to be embraced by Dodger fans after his playing days were over by returning as a broadcaster, Gibson was never comfortable with the sentimentality of hanging around. He later sold his World Series trophy and NL MVP award from the 1988 season, and also his bat, jersey, and batting helmet from the at-bat that made him a Dodger legend. And when the Dodgers decided to do a Kirk Gibson bobblehead giveaway when the Diamondbacks came to L.A. in 2012, Gibson refused to be shown on the video board and tried to hide from the camera. “I think it’s totally ridiculous,” he said at the time.
The Dodgers should not have been surprised when Puig stepped into the box on June 11 and was greeted with a fastball to the nose. As Puig sat on home plate, team trainers ran through a concussion test, before stopping halfway through and realizing they needed a translator. The Diamondbacks’ pitcher, Ian Kennedy, had not meant to hit Puig in the face but showed no remorse. Perhaps he meant to brush him back. The ball had left his hand in a straight line for Puig’s head, and it was traveling too fast for the young right fielder to duck out of the way. Puig was lucky the ball glanced off the cartilage covering the tip of his nostrils. Had it tailed a quarter inch to the right the bones in his cheek and eye socket might have been shattered, similar to what would happen to Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton a year later. Puig stayed in the game and took his base.
When Greinke hit Miguel Montero in the back with a fastball the following inning in retaliation, the Dodgers thought it was over. The Diamondbacks disagreed. After Greinke stepped up to the plate in the bottom half of the inning, Kennedy threw a first-pitch fastball at his neck. Greinke held his ground and shrugged his shoulder high so that the ball hit it instead. The force of the blow was so hard that it knocked his helmet off. Greinke stood expressionless in the batter’s box, then smirked as if to say, Great, I’m going to be in the middle of a brawl again. And instantly it was on. Every player and coach from both teams emptied onto the field until five dozen men were shoving each other near the visiting on-deck circle. Puig roundhouse-punched Arizona utility man Eric Hinske in the back of the head. Dodger reliever J. P. Howell pushed Diamondbacks assistant hitting coach Turner Ward over the railing that divided the crowd from the field, as if he were a WWF wrestler. Schumaker pushed his way into the middle of the scrum, looking for Kennedy. “I’d never seen a pitcher throw at two different batters’ heads before,” he said after the game. “He ran to the bench right after he hit Greinke.” It had taken Puig only a week in the majors to incite a riot. But Puig was just a subplot in the bizarre drama that was taking place on the field. It seemed unlikely that Ian Kennedy thought of hitting Greinke all on his own, and after the game he didn’t seem to care that he got Puig in the face. “He plays with a lot of arrogance,” Kennedy said later of the Dodgers’ young right fielder. But even if Puig’s beaning had been an accident, that fastball to Greinke wasn’t. There was no doubt in Mattingly’s mind it had come from Gibson.
It wasn’t the fact that Dodger batters were being hit that enraged Mattingly. The culture of the game dictated that if a player was plunked, his teammate had the right to retaliate and hit a batter on the other team. Macho tough-guy stuff was not only tolerated, it was celebrated. Anything from the backside down the legs was fair game. But Mattingly believed that if a guy couldn’t throw inside without hitting someone on or near his head, then he shouldn’t throw inside. In 1920, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman had been killed by a beanball to the temple. Today’s batters wore helmets but they weren’t indestructible. Besides, the ball thrown at Greinke was headed for his neck, which could have severed an artery.
An angry Mattingly wanted Gibson. As he ran toward the D-Backs’ manager, he pushed Arizona’s bench coach, former Tigers great Alan Trammell, out of his way and to the ground. He felt bad about that later, saying he didn’t even realize he had steamrolled his friend Tramm. Fights were not uncommon in the sport, but it was rare to see opposing coaches scrap. By the time Mattingly reached Gibson, McGwire had already grabbed a fistful of Gibson’s jersey at the neck, and was screaming and cursing at him. When the Diamondbacks’ third-base coach, Matt Williams, tried to intervene, McGwire grabbed him by the collar, too, and held them both by the throat at the same time. After both teams were separated, the Dodgers came back and won the game 5–3. Jansen pitched a perfect ninth to close it, striking out two. Some predicted that after two months of mediocrity, maybe the second brawl would be the catalyst to help the Dodgers turn the corner. It wasn’t. Los Angeles dropped six of its next eight games.
Making matters worse, the following week news leaked that Kershaw had turned down a record-breaking contract extension. Kershaw was furious. The report lacked key details about the terms of the contract, including the fact that the Dodgers had wanted to lock him up for the next fifteen years plus an additional personal services contract after his playing days were over. He had not declined to sign the deal because he thought $300 million was too low a figure; he said no because the idea of signing a lifetime contract at twenty-five years old was terrifying. What if something went wrong? What if he tore his labrum or snapped his ulnar collateral ligament during the second year of a fifteen-year deal and could no longer pitch and was still owed all that money and his salary obligation hurt the team and the fans hated him for it? What if the Dodgers were terrible and he never got his shot at a ring? What if Colletti and Kasten filled the locker room with megalomaniacs who didn’t care about winning? Kershaw thought about these things more than he thought about the money. He hated that the report made him seem greedy. But what he hated even more was the idea that someone had leaked the news to a reporter to make him look bad. Kershaw didn’t play games through the media. He was as private a man as he was proud. The report felt like a betrayal. Some of Kershaw’s teammates wondered if this was the sort of thing that would drive him to free agency. Between this leak and the way the team was playing, it was beginning to look as though Clayton Kershaw would walk when his contract expired at the end of the 2014 season.
Meanwhile the Dodgers’ roster was still a mess. While Mattingly refrained from criticizing the front office to the press, friends said he was beyond frustrated by the construction of the team. Among other problems, with Kemp on the disabled list he had no center fielder on his roster. (How could he be expected to win more games than he lost with no one to play the most important outfield position?) Kasten did not want to fire Mattingly. “I don’t think anyone thought he was the problem, or that making that change was going to magically fix everything,” Kasten said later. “But as we were looking, searching, struggling for answers that was obviously a thing you think about.”
Kasten knew the Dodgers’ malaise wasn’t Mattingly’s fault. He hadn’t hired these players, and he didn’t run around taking a mallet to their arms and legs. Mattingly wanted young players who were hungry; Colletti kept stuffing his roster with washed-up veterans. The disconnect between the two men became obvious in their stalemate over the club’s backup catcher. During the first week of the season, Colletti had traded Aaron Harang to the Rockies for the aging Ramon Hernandez with the idea that he would be A. J. Ellis’s backup. Mattingly preferred twenty-five-year-old rookie Tim Federowicz. Because Mattingly didn’t have the power to cut Hernandez, the Dodgers carried three catchers for nine games in May, instead of the usual two. Mattingly started Federowicz twice and used him as a pinch hitter in five other games. He didn’t play Hernandez once. Colletti responded by optioning Federowicz down to Triple-A, to the ire of the coaching staff.
On June 22, the Dodgers sat in last place with an abysmal 30-42 record, nine and a half games out of first and trending downward. Mattingly woke up on that Saturday morning, the second day of summer, still the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.