On what Mattingly figured to be his day of reckoning, the ball found its way into Zack Greinke’s right hand, as it always seemed to in the season’s biggest moments. Though he’d been a Dodger for only three months, Greinke had already been at the center of mega-brawls with two division rivals. And now here he was, back on the same mound where his clavicle was snapped in one of those dustups just weeks earlier, pitching to save his skipper’s job. While Puig had been awesome in his three weeks with the Dodgers, smacking home runs and gunning down runners and generally playing like an inspired maniac fans couldn’t take their eyes off, he couldn’t stop the club’s free fall by himself. Heading into their June 22 contest at San Diego, Los Angeles had dropped six of its last eight.
Players knew Mattingly’s job was at risk, so they scoured social media and texted their agents and traded gossip. One popular theory was that Gerry Hunsicker, whom Kasten hired in the off-season as senior advisor of baseball operations, would take over for Colletti and replace Mattingly with Rays bench coach Dave Martinez. Hunsicker had been the Astros’ GM from 2005 to 2014 before going to work as an executive for Tampa, and was thought to be close with the popular, bilingual coach. Martinez would have made sense. The Rays were respected throughout the industry as a model organization that made the most out of their limited resources by adhering to the sabermetric vision of their bright young general manager, Andrew Friedman. Plus, Tampa’s coaches and front-office executives had earned the reputation of being loyal to Friedman and to each other, which influenced the Rays’ strong clubhouse chemistry. When Mattingly spoke of the need to get his players to rally around each other he liked to use the analogy of a group of men tugging on the same end of a rope, even though he knew it was corny. The Rays were famous for doing just that; so deep was the organizational trust that Friedman worked without a contract, despite being one of the most sought-after executives in baseball. Though their payroll had never crossed the $100 million threshold, the Rays made it all the way to the World Series in 2008. The rich Dodgers, meanwhile, were spiraling into chaos, with their coaches, players, general manager, scouting department, and player development executives pointing fingers at each other in an effort to stay employed.
Another rumor had both Mattingly and his bench coach Trey Hillman fired, with Tim Wallach promoted to interim manager. The veracity of the gossip didn’t matter: the point was, it was getting louder by the day. No one knew for sure what Kasten and Walter were waiting for, but many players and staff members thought that if the Dodgers failed to win both weekend games in San Diego, Donnie Baseball would be gone.
While most of his players continued to like Mattingly, some covering the team wondered if the club might do better with another skipper in charge. Mattingly was a good man, but perhaps his innate kindness hurt his ability to lead. Maybe the club needed a screamer who didn’t suffer superstar egos. And perhaps a guy with a weaker conscience wouldn’t agonize over demoting a struggling player like Brandon League.
Though he was no pushover, Kasten was notorious for hating to fire people, as if the potential to upgrade a position wasn’t worth giving off the impression that his organization was in turmoil. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Looking at the starting pitching matchup, the Dodgers had the clear advantage in sending Greinke to square off against the erratic Edinson Volquez on June 22. But in a testament to Mattingly’s rotten luck, Volquez took a no-hitter into the sixth inning. He then regressed to his usual self, however, walking the bases loaded and allowing a run to score on a Skip Schumaker groundout. The Dodgers hung four more on San Diego in the sixth behind an Adrian Gonzalez home run and two Padre errors. That cushion was more than enough for Greinke, who gave the Dodgers eight dominant innings, allowing just one run in his last frame of work. The next day Los Angeles beat San Diego 3–1 on back-to-back ninth-inning blasts from Gonzalez and Hanley Ramirez. Then they went home to play the Giants and won the next game and the game after that. And when Kenley Jansen fooled San Francisco’s pinch-hitter Brandon Belt with a cut fastball that caused him to pop out to short to end the game the following night on June 26, the Dodgers completed the series sweep and took their fifth game in a row. The home crowd erupted with full throats usually reserved for playoff victories, as if sweeping their rivals meant that after months of misery the season was not lost. Mattingly’s decision to make Jansen the closer had paid immediate dividends. Jansen had struck out twenty-eight since his last walk; he hadn’t walked a batter in six weeks.
The mood in the Dodgers’ locker room seemed to lighten a tick with each victory, as if someone were controlling the dimmer switch where players dressed. Kershaw had started the June 26 game and gave up two runs in eight innings before turning the ball over to Jansen. The Dodgers’ ace had walked Giants second baseman Marco Scutaro to lead off the top of the fourth inning, then given up a home run to catcher Buster Posey. Under normal circumstances Kershaw would have berated himself post-game for walking a weak hitter before an opposing team’s best player. But after the game Kershaw stood in front of his locker and smiled. Because of how rotten the season’s first eleven weeks were, this winning streak felt better to him than a shutout ever did. “Winning does a lot,” he said. “It puts aside a lot of differences, it puts aside bad blood.” He caught himself and added: “Not that we had any of that.” By the time the Fourth of July rolled around, the club that had been left for dead had won ten of eleven. Meanwhile, the other teams in the division were collapsing. On June 22 the last-place Dodgers trailed the rest of the NL West by a combined 28.5 games. By Independence Day they had trimmed that deficit to 2.5.
As the Dodgers starters began to get well, the club’s front office started cutting bait on players who weren’t performing. After Hanley Ramirez returned from the disabled list the day after Puig’s call-up, opening-day shortstop Justin Sellers played only one more game for the Dodgers’ big-league club. They released backstop Ramon Hernandez and third baseman Luis Cruz, installed rookie Tim Federowicz as backup catcher, and put Uribe back at the hot corner. They designated reliever Matt Guerrier for assignment, then traded him to Chicago for Carlos Mármol. That move surprised many around the team, since Cubs president Theo Epstein was thought still to be smarting over Colletti’s reneging on an agreement the two men made the previous summer to send pitcher Ryan Dempster to Los Angeles. Some insiders thought Epstein was so angry that he would try to avoid trading with Colletti again. But the Guerrier-for-Marmol swap was much smaller stakes, and it was executed at the behest of the Cubs’ catching coach and Joe Torre’s godson, Mike Borzello—the same guy who had encouraged Kershaw to throw a slider years earlier when he worked for the Dodgers.
Then, on July 6, the Dodgers traded three minor-league pitching prospects to the Marlins for starter Ricky Nolasco. That move turned out to be deft. After trotting out middling bush leaguers to replace injured members of their rotation only to watch them get torched during the first few months of the season, the Dodgers were much better with Nolasco on the mound as their number-four starter. The club won ten of his first twelve starts. To help things along, the Dodgers got Matt Kemp and Carl Crawford back, too. Kemp’s return was short-lived, however. After just ten games back from his hamstring injury, he felt something in his left shoulder pull, and landed back on the disabled list. But this time the Dodgers kept winning.
A month after their brawl with the Diamondbacks the Dodgers flew to Arizona on July 8 with a newfound swagger in their step. Perhaps Puig’s confidence was rubbing off. He had good reason to be cocky. That day, he became only the second player since 1950 to hit over .400 through his first 130 major-league at-bats. When he collected his second hit of the game in the fifth inning, his average stood at .415. Each time Puig stepped into the batter’s box at Chase Field, the Arizona faithful booed him louder than they cheered any of their own players.
• • •
While hecklers had no problems shouting Puig down, nobody in the Dodgers’ organization wanted to be the bad cop. He often arrived to the ballpark late and wasn’t punished for it. He made reporters stand by his locker and wait an hour to interview him, only to tell them through a PR person that he wasn’t talking that day. He tested limits of behavior like a small child, and was smart enough to learn quickly that he could get away with a lot. Team rules became optional because breaking them brought no consequences. Some Dodger players who were frustrated with Mattingly’s reluctance to discipline Puig wondered if he was not free to do so without the approval of the front office. Puig, it seemed, was Kasten’s baby. After all, it was Kasten who gave the go-ahead to sign him for a hefty sum that was mocked by the rest of the league in what was turning out to be a genius move. Puig was the feather in the new ownership group’s cap. Did the Dodgers really want to bench a guy they were building a marketing campaign around?
Mattingly had good reason to avoid being a disciplinarian when it came to Puig. He had witnessed firsthand what happened with Matt Kemp when Joe Torre went all tough love on him, and he couldn’t afford to alienate Puig in the same way. “He’s not a bad kid,” Mattingly said before a game during that series in Arizona when a reporter asked him for a character assessment. While Mattingly’s affection toward Puig seemed genuine, that warmth was no doubt influenced by the fact that the kid had helped him keep his job. As Mattingly defended Puig that day in the Chase Field dugout, Puig was taking batting practice some thirty feet away and launching home runs off the scoreboard.
Did it fall on Colletti, himself a former public relations man, to tell Puig to show up on time? One of the biggest misconceptions about Puig was that he was a dumb, naïve kid thrown into a new culture without a clue of how to handle himself. In reality, despite the language barrier, Puig was able to read situations well and manipulate those around him to get his way. Most rookies do what they are told because they’re worried about making waves. But Puig never acted like a rookie in the clubhouse. When the Dodgers’ PR staff asked him to do interviews, he often shrugged, knowing they were optional for him. He also seemed to have a photographic memory, especially when it came to slights. When an out-of-town reporter lobbed a question he didn’t like at him after a game at Dodger Stadium, Puig looked at the man and said: “You asked me that question at Yankee Stadium a few weeks ago.” It had been six weeks. He had not forgotten.
One reporter who had covered famous players on the Dodgers beat for decades—from Valenzuela to Piazza and Nomo and Manny Ramirez—said he had never seen anything like Puig’s distaste for reporters. In fairness to Puig, the media demands were so excessive that if he had honored every request he would not have had time to eat or sleep or hit. But the club did him no favors with the press by allowing him to make up rules as he went along. When Fernando Valenzuela was a rookie, to help him deal with the onslaught of reporters the Dodgers made him available via press conference before the first game of every series, and after each of his starts. The media was to leave him alone the rest of the time, so that he might have room to breathe. This worked out well for everyone involved. If a writer complained about Valenzuela’s unavailability, the club could say, “Well, you should have been there Monday when he talked.” The Dodgers set no such parameters with Puig. But even if their public relations staff had tried to fix a schedule like that, it seemed questionable that Puig would do what they told him to. Most fans don’t care if an athlete gets along with a newspaper reporter, and that’s reasonable. But because Puig was now the most talked-about player in the game, and his past was such a question mark and he shared nothing about himself, the people he blew off were left scrambling to fill in the blanks. Puig’s fear that the media would bury him became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This became evident when a national television reporter went to San Francisco the weekend before the Arizona series to film an interview with Puig about his first month in the big leagues. Whether Puig had agreed to do it or club officials just hoped he might, when Puig backed out, the reporter was understandably upset. Later that day, Uribe chided Puig within earshot of reporters, saying he should be forthright with media so they could get what they need and leave the locker room. Every clubhouse is open to the press three and a half hours before the game until the team goes to stretch, and then again after the game. Players understood that reporters had to invade their space to do their jobs, but what they hated more than anything was when media stood around in there forever. “Who are you waiting for?” a team’s PR person would ask a lingering scribe, as if to say, If you aren’t waiting to speak to someone in particular and are just loitering then get the hell out. Puig making media wait by his locker for an hour after each game irked the rest of the team, who preferred being naked around as few strangers as possible.
The conversation between Puig and Uribe had been lighthearted, as Uribe usually took a humorous tack when trying to get his point across. The men were shocked when they learned that the journalist Puig blew off reported that Dodger players were tired of Puig’s act, as evidenced by the affable Uribe screaming at him. The story gained traction because Puig had been involved in a shouting match with the Giants’ fiery closer, Sergio Romo, earlier that day. Romo had retired Hanley Ramirez to end the previous day’s game, and mocked the Dodgers’ shortstop by mimicking the celebratory hand gesture Ramirez made to teammates after someone did something good. Puig took notice. The next day, Puig flipped his bat after singling off Romo in the ninth inning, then taunted him five batters later as he jogged home to score the go-ahead run off an A. J. Ellis double. The drama between Romo and Puig was, for the most part, benign. Though both men often let their emotions get the better of them on the diamond, their actions toward each other were more annoying than malicious. The story about Puig and Uribe was different. Puig heard the report and was hurt by it. The reporter was fluent in Spanish, so he had understood the conversation with Uribe. Puig’s friends say the incident ended any possibility of mending his relationship with the press.
The young right fielder’s tiff with the reporter continued into Arizona, and got even more personal. Before the first game of the series, Puig was standing behind home plate waiting his turn during batting practice when a group including retired Diamondbacks great and Cuban American Luis Gonzalez walked up. Puig shook Gonzalez’s hand and said hello, then walked off. Gonzalez was not impressed by Puig’s lack of interest in chatting with him. The reporter then went on TV and said that some felt Puig had disrespected his legendary countryman. The “arrogant” narrative marched on. The Dodgers didn’t hire a professional translator for Puig; they asked one of the farm system’s English teachers, Tim Bravo, to do the job. Bravo became a guardian to Puig, living with him, teaching him how to order American food in a restaurant, grocery shop, and use an ATM. While Bravo was off working with Puig, his seven-year-old son, Zechariah, was back home in New Mexico battling a rare type of cancer. Puig was so grateful for Bravo helping him transition to life in the United States that he offered to pay for the boy’s treatments and the family’s living expenses. During the televised report about Puig disrespecting Gonzalez, the reporter also said that Puig often dispatched Bravo to collect phone numbers from women in the crowd during games. Bravo’s wife saw the report and was furious. Though his family needed him during his son’s illness, his wife was okay with him being away to help this extraordinary player assimilate. She knew her husband loved Puig, and that Puig loved him. Plus, it was his job. But now she was hearing on national television that part of that job was to be Puig’s pimp? No. If that’s what you’re doing you have to come home, she told him. So Bravo quit.
The report about the phone numbers created even stickier problems for Puig, who had quietly been in an on-off relationship with the daughter of a Dodgers minor-league instructor for most of his year in the United States. The young woman was pregnant with his child. Whether or not Puig was carousing didn’t matter. Puig’s teammates thought the dispatch was unfair. Even those around the team who thought Puig’s relationship with a coach’s daughter was a potential train wreck agreed the report was unnecessary and offside. To Puig, this story hurt worse than the fastball he took off the nose from Ian Kennedy. Losing Bravo devastated him. What little trust he had left in the media was gone. The Dodgers beat writers paid the price. His petulance baffled many on the beat who felt they’d done nothing but praise him since his call-up. And it was true. While it would be hard to blame a guy for not wanting to talk about being in a slump, Puig was having the best first month for a rookie since the Great Depression, yet he seemed to detest the very people who reached for superlatives to describe his stellar play.
And it wasn’t as if having an opinion on Puig was optional. The Luis Gonzalez incident was all the ammunition Puig’s detractors needed to prove he had no respect for the game, which was the sport’s gravest sin. Though baseball doesn’t request that its players bash opponents’ heads in, in many ways the game is more tribal than football, and rookies are expected to genuflect before old-timers to gain admittance to the sport’s inner sanctum. It went back to the fundamental tenet on which the Diamondbacks were built: that the way one played the game was more important than the result. While Gonzalez is not a Hall of Famer, he is the best player in the young franchise’s history. Puig’s perceived disrespect of him infuriated the Arizona fans even more. One NL all-star pitcher summed up how the rest of the league felt about Puig in a text message to a Dodger starter. “I love him. I love watching him play. But I can’t fucking stand him.”
A debate raged between those who said Puig blew off Gonzalez on purpose because he felt like he was more important than anyone who came before him, and others who argued that the kid had no idea who the Diamondback legend was since he grew up on a communist island with limited access to Internet. Both sides were wrong. While it’s true that Puig didn’t know Gonzalez was Arizona royalty, he knew the guy being introduced to him was wearing a polo shirt with the Diamondbacks logo on it. After being bad-mouthed repeatedly by Arizona players and hit in the face with a fastball by their pitcher in his first week, Puig wanted nothing to do with any of them. In that way, Puig was more old-school than anyone on either team. He didn’t care who you were: if you wore Diamondback red you were his sworn enemy.
That hatred was mutual. The only thing Yasiel Puig did better than hit baseballs was get under the skin of opponents. The preposterousness of his background made for no better hero. The way he carried himself on the diamond made for no better villain.
• • •
Eight men were suspended for their roles in the Dodgers-Diamondbacks brawl at Dodger Stadium, including Gibson, McGwire, and Mattingly. Ian Kennedy got the worst of it with a ten-game ban. Greinke, Puig, and Montero were fined but not held out of play. Skip Schumaker elected to begin serving his two-game suspension during the last night of the series in Arizona, on July 10.
Because he was suspended, Schumaker wasn’t allowed to be in the Dodgers’ dugout or clubhouse for the game. But since the team was flying home to Los Angeles right after the contest, he had to be at the ballpark so he could board the bus to the airport when the game was over. So, Schumaker decided to watch the game from the stands at Chase Field, moving around to different sections during each half inning so no one in the visiting crowd would recognize him. (“As if someone would recognize him!” Nick Punto joked later.) It seemed like a decent plan at first. He didn’t anticipate the game going fourteen innings.
At quarter to midnight, with Schumaker sitting by himself on the aisle in the lower bowl trying not to draw attention, A. J. Ellis stood in the on-deck circle next to Hanley Ramirez, bleary-eyed and exhausted and hoping to break the tie. The game had just inched into its sixth hour, and Ellis’s knees ached from squatting down behind home plate for all 211 of the pitches he had caught that night. The Dodgers had been chasing Arizona the entire season, and now they had a chance to cut the D-backs’ division lead to one and a half games. On the mound for the Diamondbacks in the top of the fourteenth was Josh Collmenter, a long reliever and sometime starter who looked as though he could pitch another fourteen innings. Los Angeles had exhausted its bullpen, and only Jansen and League remained. Ellis knew that if his side didn’t score soon, they’d probably be forced to burn the following day’s starting pitcher.
Between innings, the Dodgers’ catcher had received a scouting report on Collmenter from Mark Ellis. “If the ball’s away, it’s cutting,” Ellis told him. “But if it’s in it’ll stay straight.” A. J. Ellis was swinging a hot bat. In the ninth inning, he had collected the two-out, game-tying base hit. But few in the National League were as hot as Hanley Ramirez. For all the attention Puig got for bringing the Dodgers back, Ramirez was the real catalyst. The slugging shortstop would play in eighty-six games for the Dodgers in 2013. The club went 55-31 in those contests, and 37-39 without him. That he was more valuable than even Puig was due to the fact that shortstop tends to be an anemic position offensively. Ramirez hammered the ball. In the thirty games since he had returned from the disabled list on June 4, he hit .398 with six home runs and a .694 slugging percentage. Those gaudy numbers were no fluke. Ramirez looked like the player he was when he hit .342 and won a batting title at age twenty-five for the Marlins in 2009. Nobody had noticed that Ramirez was quietly the team’s MVP because his return to health happened the day after Puig’s call-up.
While the Boston trade had grabbed all the headlines in August 2012, the Dodgers’ move to acquire Ramirez a month earlier seemed poised to have an even bigger impact. At twenty-nine years old, Ramirez was the second-best-hitting shortstop in the majors, just a smidge behind the Rockies’ superstar Troy Tulowitzki. After coming to the Marlins in a trade that sent his future teammate Josh Beckett to the Red Sox, Ramirez flourished in Miami, winning the Rookie of the Year award in 2006, and finishing second in MVP balloting in 2009. But injuries and an attitude that could most generously be described as apathetic wrecked his final two seasons with the Marlins, who, in the end, became more than willing to dump him. Ramirez’s time in Florida was both offense-happy and offensive. He hit .342 with twenty-four home runs one year, and stole fifty-one bases twice. He was also benched for loafing after baseballs on defense, got into regular screaming matches with coaches, and came to public fisticuffs with his double-play partner, Dan Uggla. In his last half season with the Marlins, he dogged his way into hitting .246. When he wanted to, Hanley Ramirez could hit a baseball as hard as anyone in the major leagues, except for maybe his former teammate Miguel Cabrera. The ball off his bat screamed like a shotgun blast. But when he was in a mood, the mercurial shortstop had a reputation for phoning it in. Coming into the 2013 season, no one was sure which Ramirez the Dodgers would get.
His Miami malaise was not without merit. After all, he’d suited up for the Marlins’ controversial owner, Jeffrey Loria, for his entire career. Loria had given McCourt a fight in the worst-owner sweepstakes, persuading Miami taxpayers to buy his team a new stadium by promising to field a competitive team, only to slash payroll by selling off all his good players once he got his ballpark. With two and a half years left on his Marlins contract, Ramirez feared he would be left to rot. Sensing a rare opportunity to land one of the best hitters in the game for fifty cents on the dollar, the Dodgers gave up Nate Eovaldi, a solid but not otherworldly young pitching prospect, to get him. Colletti and Kasten were optimistic that a change of scenery would do wonders for the sulking shortstop.
Ramirez arrived in Los Angeles acting like a hostage who had been freed. He showed up every day with a grin on his face and often talked about how all he wanted to do was help his team win. He was affectionate with teammates, granted interviews to reporters, and even posted cheesy inspirational quotes under the headline “Attitude is everything!” on his social media accounts. Many wondered if this happy-go-lucky chap was the same guy who almost got decked in his own clubhouse in Miami more than once.
People had often asked Ramirez about his unusual first name. It was an accident. His mother had wanted to name him Juan Jose, and call him J.J. for short. His father objected. “Too many J’s for him,” said Ramirez. His grandmother had an idea. A voracious reader of Shakespeare, she loved the tale of a man who could never make up his mind about what he wanted to do. She told her son to name the baby Hamlet. So they did. But the clerk who filled out his birth certificate spelled it wrong. From that day forward, he went by Hanley. “I don’t really know why they didn’t change it back,” said Ramirez. “But that’s okay because I love my name. It’s a good name, right?”
Before he suited up for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, Ramirez had never played for anything meaningful before. The closest his Marlins had ever finished to the top of the NL East was six games back. In his final full season in Miami, his club wound up a pathetic thirty games out of first. But the WBC was different. When he buttoned up that red and blue uniform and took the field with his countrymen, he experienced a sense of pride on the diamond that he’d never felt before. Ramirez didn’t know how different it felt to play in games that mattered. The Dominicans dominated the 2013 tournament, sweeping their way to gold, undefeated. Ramirez had a blast, and friends said it changed him profoundly. He remembered that baseball was supposed to be fun.
Ramirez was the rare athlete who was talented enough to perform in the top 20 percent of hitters in the league while putting in only half the effort. But if he busted his ass, really gave a damn about winning every single at-bat, he could be one of the best in the game. Under the bright blue Los Angeles skies, and with the promise of a fresh start, Ramirez had the best possible opportunity to move forward. But like his intended namesake, the famed fictional prince of Denmark, the choice was his.
The timing was ideal for Ramirez to snap out of his snit and rediscover his old form. He was entering the penultimate year of his contract, and he knew the Guggenheim group was handing out blank checks to superstars. All he had to do was hit. And even though hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing to do in sports, Ramirez didn’t think it would be a problem. He was so locked in at the plate when he bothered to be, so naturally good at driving baseballs to the wall and over it, that many of his teammates thought he was somewhat of a genius, that annoying kid in school who aced every exam without ever studying. The Internet had created a never-ending trove of material for pitchers and batters to sift through to gain a competitive advantage. Ramirez never read scouting reports. He rarely even bothered to find out the names of the pitchers he would have to face in advance of a series, and didn’t believe in watching any film, either of himself or of his opponent.
Every at-bat was like a blind date. His hands were so fast and his instinct so sharp it didn’t matter. He had no use for any ammunition other than a bat—all that information, what the pitcher liked to throw against righties like him, how the ball spun out of his hand, what his ERA was—all of that was just noise that could confuse him. While his teammates reviewed charts for hours, Ramirez would spend that time in the training room prepping his body for battle, stretching, getting massaged, and hooked up to suction devices as part of an ancient Chinese medicine treatment known as cupping. His goals for the season were simple: he would show up early, he would hit, he would smile, and then Mark Walter would pay him a lot of money to stay in Dodger blue so he could do it all over again for years to come.
Unfortunately, his newfound attitude was challenged by bad luck. In the championship game of the WBC, Ramirez dove for a ground ball and jammed his right thumb. At first, the injury wasn’t thought to be serious. But an MRI later revealed a torn ligament that required surgery. Effort had its consequences; Ramirez would be sidelined for two months. Still, when he was able to handle a bat again and take a few rounds of hacks with his teammates, they couldn’t help but be excited by the way he stung the ball. Ramirez would start batting practice by spraying line drive after line drive to right, center, and left field, then encore with a home run exhibition. The Dodgers tumbled into last place without Ramirez. When he came back, the tenor of the season changed.
• • •
After Collmenter finished warming up to begin the top of the fourteenth, Ramirez began his slow walk toward the batter’s box. Ellis called after him from the on-deck circle. “Show me why you’re the best hitter I’ve ever played with,” he said. Ramirez said nothing. Ellis didn’t think he had heard him. A month earlier, a heartbroken Ellis had told his wife, Cindy, that because the team was so terrible it would be all right if she wanted to start making vacation plans for October. A lot had happened in the last thirty days, though, to bring the playoffs back into focus. But there was still work to do. Collmenter set his feet on the rubber and pumped a first-pitch cutter toward Ramirez. The ball was up and away, out of the strike zone. It wasn’t a good pitch to hit but that didn’t matter to Ramirez. His eyes widened, and he unleashed his black bat at the baseball. The ball screeched out to right field and cleared the fence on a line drive. Ramirez rounded the bases alone, and pointed to the sky with both hands when he crossed the plate. Then he skipped toward Ellis and slapped him five. As Ellis began to walk toward the batter’s box, Ramirez turned around and said to him, “That’s why.”
Mark Ellis’s scouting report proved correct. Collmenter’s seventh pitch to A. J. Ellis left his hand looking like it was headed toward the inner half of the plate. It stayed straight. Ellis whacked it for another home run. Of the few thousand fans who remained at Chase Field, the ones in blue began to chant Let’s go Dodgers! Let’s go Dodgers! Jansen closed out the game for the win. Later, after the players showered and dressed, no one said it out loud. They didn’t have to. Though there were seventy-two games left, and the Dodgers’ record was now at just .500, the NL West race was over. Los Angeles was playing like the team everyone thought it would be when the season began. The underdog Diamondbacks didn’t build up a big enough lead while the Dodgers were wrecked by injuries, and they would not be able to hang with them now that their players were emerging from the disabled list. Arizona’s lead was now one and a half, but it felt as if Los Angeles was up by ten. The Dodgers had won fifteen of eighteen, and there was the sense that they’d only get better when Kemp came back.
But some of his teammates wondered if the club might be better off without him. Though Kemp was happy the team was winning, it was frustrating to watch them succeed without him. While Kemp praised Puig in public, many of this teammates thought he was privately terrified of being replaced. The Dodgers were playing so well that as they headed into the all-star break they were perhaps the only team in baseball not looking forward to it. Fair or not, Kemp irritated some teammates by heading to Cabo San Lucas for the break instead of rehabbing his injury.
After the break, the Dodgers flew to Washington and activated their center fielder. He said his hamstrings felt good as new, and that his shoulder was continuing to heal. And he did well in his return versus the Nationals on July 21, collecting three hits and a walk in four at-bats with a home run that helped lead the Dodgers to a blowout 9–2 victory. But in the top of the ninth, Kemp was on third with the bases loaded and two out with Carl Crawford at the plate. Crawford tapped a slow roller to first and hustled down the line to beat it out. Because he didn’t think he’d have enough time to get the speedy Crawford, Nationals first baseman Chad Tracy threw the ball home to try to force out Kemp. Not expecting the ball to be anywhere near him, Kemp had been trotting toward the plate. When he realized there would be a play at home, he hurried his pace and awkwardly dove, rolling his left ankle in the process. After being thrown out, he screamed, grabbed his foot, and tucked into a ball in the dirt. Kemp had been an active member of the roster for less than twenty-four hours, and he was about to be lost again.
If Kemp had been worried about being replaced, this game was the ultimate metaphor. With him back in the fold, the Dodgers enjoyed the luxury of having their four outfielders healthy on the same day for the first time all season. Puig had been given a rare game off. But with Kemp unable to take center in the bottom of the ninth, Puig subbed for him. An MRI later revealed an ankle sprain bad enough to land Kemp back on the disabled list. His failure to hustle in his first game back would cost him the next fifty-two.
The next day Los Angeles took over first place in the NL West for good.
• • •
The resurgent Dodgers went 19-6 in July. This run included five- and six-game winning streaks. They went a month without losing a game on the road. By the time the trading deadline arrived on July 31, they led the Diamondbacks by two and a half games. Colletti had made at least one trade on deadline day every year since he took over as GM before the 2006 season. Among other players, his July 31 haul over the years included Greg Maddux, Julio Lugo, Scott Proctor, Manny Ramirez, Octavio Dotel, Ted Lilly, Ryan Theriot, and Shane Victorino. Each man was added on the annual trade cutoff day in hopes that he might be the final piece to push the Dodgers to a championship. None ever was. At the 2013 deadline, the Dodgers circled a deal with the Angels for second baseman Howie Kendrick that would have sent pitching prospect Zach Lee, their first-round draft pick in 2010, to Anaheim. The club was also rumored to be sniffing out a Matt Kemp for Cliff Lee trade with the Phillies that would ease the Dodgers’ outfield logjam and basically represent a salary swap of oft-injured players. But the club was playing so well that the front office decided against making any major moves. Colletti was able to keep his streak alive, however, by working out a small deal for Twins catching farm hand Drew Butera, who would provide insurance should Ellis or Tim Federowicz get hurt.
On July 31, the Yankees came to Dodger Stadium to face Clayton Kershaw. L.A.’s ace pitched eight scoreless innings, despite more than a few obstacles to his regimented pregame routine. Since the Yankees visited Los Angeles only once every three years in interleague play, the Dodgers’ marketing department capitalized on the high-profile series and treated it like a playoff game. Normally, before Kershaw started warming up in the bullpen he would sit in the Dodgers’ dugout alone, staring at the ground or off into space while he gathered his concentration. But the pregame festivities turned the dugout into a mess. Magic Johnson and Mark Walter stood on the top step, while dozens of media members crammed around them. Nicole Scherzinger of the pop girl group the Pussycat Dolls and her handlers weaved their way through the crowd toward home plate so that she might perform the national anthem. Before that could happen, the Dodgers paid tribute to retiring Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, with Walter and Johnson presenting him a giant deep-sea fishing rod after a video tribute blared through the stadium. Just before the Rivera ceremony, the soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo had been kicking a ball around on the infield grass with Puig. As Kershaw sat with his eyes fixed on the ground, the ball whizzed by his head, narrowly missing it. After Scherzinger finished singing, the actor Samuel L. Jackson read the starting lineups for the Dodgers and Yankees over the public address system. Then, new sports agent Jay-Z took his seat behind home plate a few rows from Scott Boras, who had just lost the Yankees’ star second baseman Robinson Cano as a client to the rapper-agent months earlier.
Jay-Z, Jackson, Ronaldo, and Scherzinger were exactly the kind of patrons the club’s marketing department hoped to attract to their Dugout Club, the section that made up the ten rows behind home plate at Dodger Stadium. Folks who spent nine hundred dollars a ticket were treated to unlimited free food (gourmet and ballpark fare), wait service, televisions, and a private cash bar. Over the years, the Lakers had become known for their celebrity courtside clientele, and the Dugout Club was the closest thing the Dodgers had to the same starry incubator. If the new Dodger owners got their way, the club would become like the ultimate Hollywood lunchroom, with actors, pop stars, models, and studio heads mingling and mugging for the cameras. In some ways it already was: all the major talent agencies and entertainment law firms in town owned season tickets in the premium spot, and their clients popped in and out of those seats every night. The stars who attended the game versus the Yankees matched those on the field. Television ratings for the game that night were the highest for any MLB regular-season game in the Los Angeles market on record. This was no small thing, because the Dodgers were as much a media and entertainment company as they were a baseball team.
The Yankees were the closest business model the new Dodgers hoped to emulate, with a few caveats. Walter said when he took over that he didn’t want to price families out of the stadium; that if the Dodgers were going to raise ticket costs he’d rather tax the rich down in the Dugout Club and surrounding seats than stick it to the people in the cheap seats. For the most part, he kept his word. It was still possible to buy season tickets in the upper deck for $5 per game.
Despite all the pregame pomp and circumstance, Kershaw delivered the first pitch at 7:11, just a minute behind schedule. It had been a long summer for the big lefty. Though the Dodgers’ brass loved him best of any player, members of the club’s front office were growing more exasperated with his contract situation. When the Dodgers were flailing in last place with a record comparable to the awful Astros, it was hard to blame Kershaw for being wary of signing on for fifteen more years. But the Dodgers were winning now. What did he want?
• • •
While the club’s front office fixated on Kershaw, fans, teammates, and the press continued to obsess over Puig. The right fielder ate it up. Now that Bravo was gone, Puig had no handler to tuck him in at night and make sure he got to the stadium on time. The Dodgers traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, sent regular group text messages to players about things like when to show up for a game and when to pack a suit for a travel day. A small whiteboard in the team’s clubhouse next to Puig’s locker also posted the same information. To help Puig with his chronic tardiness, McGwire told the kid to find out whatever time the Dodgers were due to begin stretching on the field that day and show up to the park two hours earlier. That advice didn’t take. He arrived twenty minutes late for a team meeting in July and Schumaker told him to clean it up. Puig just glared at him.
When teams are at home, players are responsible for getting themselves to the ballpark. When they’re on the road, the club organizes two buses to transport players and staff from the team hotel to the stadium. The league was pretty much divided between early bus guys and late bus guys. Puig fell into the latter group. Mattingly defended that. “I’ve seen guys that are in the Hall of Fame that came on the second bus,” he said. “Rickey Henderson was a late bus guy. Dave Winfield was another late arriver. And honestly I wasn’t one of those guys who was at the ballpark early. But in those days I guess there wasn’t much reason to get there early. There weren’t full batting cages in every city back then. There weren’t full kitchens. There was just a candy rack.”
The late bus was fine, as long as a player was on it. But during a series with the Marlins in mid-August, Puig—who made his off-season home in Miami—opted to sleep in his own bed and drive himself to the ballpark. He showed up thirty-five minutes late. A ballplayer missing stretch was a rare occurrence. Longtime Dodger beat writers couldn’t recall a player ever showing up that late. Nick Piecoro, a reporter who had covered the Arizona Diamondbacks every day for seven seasons, said that he remembered a player missing stretch once, and that happened during spring training with a random reliever who had no shot at making the team anyway. “He said he was jet-lagged from flying in from Australia,” said Piecoro. While Puig was prone to oversleeping and getting stuck in traffic, his constant tardiness was made more serious by the fact that the organization had arranged a private security firm to watch over him because of the drug cartel threats. Teammates wondered if one day Puig wouldn’t show up at all.
Mattingly benched him that night but told reporters he had planned to give Puig the day off. Barring Puig from playing in Miami was enough to get the kid’s attention. Since his defection from Cuba, many of his relatives had joined him in the United States, and made their homes in and around Miami. Puig’s mother, sister, cousin, and many other friends were on hand to watch him play at Marlins Park. Not to get to run out onto the field in front of them was painful, and perhaps what Mattingly needed to do to get his young slugger in line. But the skipper ultimately decided he needed Puig’s bat more than he needed to teach him a lesson. Since his call-up on June 3, Puig had led Major League Baseball in batting average, runs, hits, and total bases. In the eighth inning with the game tied 4–4, Puig came off the bench and hit the first pitch he saw for a mammoth home run to center field, giving the Dodgers a lead they would not relinquish. If any message was sent, it was that Puig could break rules and still be handed a bat, because winning mattered most.
And, oh, were the Dodgers winning. The club won fifteen of the first sixteen games it played in August, and would win twenty-three games that month—the most wins in any month in Los Angeles Dodgers history. June 22 could have been the day Mattingly got fired. Instead, it was the day the Dodgers hit the rocket booster on their season. From that game that Greinke won in San Diego to the gem Kershaw pitched in Philadelphia on August 17, the Dodgers went a mind-boggling 42-8, the best fifty-game stretch for any team in over seventy years. They had gone seven weeks without losing two consecutive games. On June 21 the club was 30-42, tied for the fourth-worst record in MLB. On August 17 the Dodgers were 72-50 and tied for the second best. “Anything less than a World Series championship at this point would be a disappointment,” said Ethier that week. His teammates began calling Ethier “Joke,” due to the frequency of his repeating the phrase “we’re so good we’re a joke.” And the club’s bullpen began calling itself the “Dot ’Em Up” pen, in reference to the laser-like accuracy they were using to locate pitches.
They had a point. During that incredible fifty-game run, the Dodgers’ pitching staff posted the following ERAs:
Kershaw |
1.40 |
Greinke |
2.25 |
Ryu |
2.84 |
Nolasco |
2.97 |
Rodriguez |
0.47 |
Howell |
0.52 |
Belisario |
0.90 |
Jansen |
1.35 |
Over fifty-three games, Hanley Ramirez hit thirteen home runs, stole nine bases, and tallied an OPS of over 1.000. The Dodgers were pitching, they were hitting, and when they got a lead, their bullpen did not blow it. In thirty-one innings since Mattingly’s D-Day, Jansen had given up just four runs while striking out forty-nine. The rest of the staff was nearly as good: the Dodgers combined to pitch eight shutouts in August, and finished the season with an MLB-leading twenty-two. The Reds and the Rays each threw the next most, with seventeen. The Phillies staff tossed just three. While impressive, these raw statistics didn’t tell the whole story. It wasn’t as though the club clobbered the competition every night. During their historic fifty-game stretch, twenty-two of their forty-two wins were decided by two runs or fewer. The team that couldn’t stand each other weeks earlier when they were losing now seemed to be one of destiny, and found ways to pick each other up and win games they trailed night after night. Winning, it seemed, healed all rifts.
On August 9, the Dodgers trailed the Rays 6–0 in the seventh inning and rallied to win 7–6. That tied the largest deficit they’d overcome since moving to Los Angeles. The next week, the Mets came to town for a three-game set and started three talented young pitchers, including phenom Matt Harvey. The Dodgers fell behind early each night, only to rally late with the help of a different hero. In the first game, Puig hit a sacrifice fly to break the tie in the sixth, and little Nick Punto clubbed just the seventeenth home run of his thirteen-year career to pad the Dodgers’ lead in the seventh. In game two, A. J. Ellis collected a two-out, two-run single off Harvey that made the difference. And in a wild game three, Ethier came off the bench after sitting out with a calf injury to smack a pinch-hit, opposite-field two-run home run to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth. Adrian Gonzalez won it with a walk-off double that plated Puig in the twelfth. The wins were so improbable that Vin Scully began referring to Dodger Stadium as the Magic Castle.
Not everything around the stadium was magical, however. When Tim Bravo left, he took with him any hope of keeping the riffraff away from Puig. “Oh to be twenty-two and a Dodger,” Scully said of Puig, and he was right. Puig lapped up the Hollywood nightlife, becoming a constant presence on the club scene and chronicling his run-ins with other celebrities via his social media accounts. While his escapades were, for the most part, innocuous, his presence in these venues made it easier for grifters and snake oil salesmen to approach and befriend him. Soon he had an entourage of new buddies, including a guy whom Puig began referring to as his best friend despite having known him only for days. Puig’s new crew began showing up at Dodger Stadium hours before each game, every day, and stood on the field during batting practice as his guests. The ringleader seemed to know everyone, though nobody really knew how or what he did. Hanley Ramirez knew him from Miami. When the Yankees came to town, Cano walked over and hugged him. Even Cristiano Ronaldo seemed familiar with him. Another member of Puig’s entourage carried a binder with pictures of shoes and other swag he claimed to have access to, and approached Dodger players during batting practice.
These men roamed between the locker room and the field with guest passes from Puig hanging from their necks every day from around 4:30 until the time the game started. And when they got kicked out of the clubhouse between the end of batting practice and game time, they’d go hang in the dugout, to the chagrin of stadium security, who had a hard time getting them to leave. If a guard tried to kick Puig’s entourage out of the dugout minutes before, say, Kershaw arrived for his pregame ritual, one of the guys would simply call Puig, who would then leave the locker room and come to the dugout to hang with them. And then the guards could do nothing. Players tended to see the locker room as their sacred space; most thought the media’s pregame window was too long and were relieved when writers left. When the locker room was closed to everyone but players and staff, they were free to be themselves without worrying about saying or doing something that would be shared with the world. While Puig’s friends weren’t media, their presence in the locker room and dugout annoyed his teammates who did not appreciate the violation of personal space. And because nobody in a position of authority wanted to say no to Puig, it continued for the rest of the season.
A week after the Miami incident, Puig put another foot wrong. In an afternoon game against the Cubs, he struck out in the bottom of the third, then took his time walking to his position in right between the third and fourth innings. He often was the last Dodger onto the field after their side was retired, only this time he was so late getting to his spot that he wasn’t fully facing the batter’s box when Ricky Nolasco delivered the inning’s first pitch. Between pitches, outfielders demonstrate their attentiveness by slapping their gloves, bending their knees, or bouncing in place. The best outfielders move their feet in preparation with every pitch. Puig annoyed coaches and teammates by standing flat-footed with his hands on his hips. He thought the other stuff was a waste of time, because he believed he could catch with one hand any ball that was hit to him. The first batter of the inning, Anthony Rizzo, lined a ball to Puig, which he caught. He snagged the third out as well. After Nolasco finished the inning and the Dodgers retreated back to the dugout, Mattingly asked Puig if anything was wrong. Puig told him he was tired. So Mattingly pulled him from the game and subbed Schumaker. When Mattingly told Puig he was benched, Puig begged Mattingly, through Adrian Gonzalez, to stay in the game. But the skipper had made up his mind. Puig stomped into the tunnel in a rage. Nick Punto stopped him from redecorating the locker room. After the game, a cryptic Mattingly told the media he made the change because he felt Schumaker gave the club the best chance to win. Nolasco was a bit more forthright. Though he didn’t divulge what happened, he said simply, “Puig knows what he did.” As other players left the stadium, Puig met with Mattingly and Colletti for a half hour and apologized. “I always give my best but honestly today there was some fatigue and I wasn’t prepared,” he said to reporters through a translator after the game. He was back in the lineup the next day, and stole two bases and collected four hits, lifting his batting average to .354.
• • •
There was one more move Colletti wanted to make before the Dodgers began their stretch run. Though Jansen had been brilliant, Colletti wasn’t comfortable entering the last legs of the season with a first-year closer and no real insurance if he got hurt or flamed out. Plus, the kid had never finished a game in October before. So Colletti signed the eccentric former Giants closer Brian Wilson to the roster for depth. Wilson was coming off his second Tommy John surgery and had not pitched in a game in sixteen months. Dodgers officials watched him throw a bullpen session at UCLA in secret and were impressed by the mid-90s velocity on his fastball. Hoping to keep the potential deal under wraps, Colletti set up a clandestine meeting with Wilson at a hotel near the campus. His cover was blown when the hotel valet took his keys, smiled, and asked if he was there to sign Wilson. With Wilson it seemed nothing could be clandestine.
When he took the mound for the Dodgers for his debut outing on August 22, there was no question his stuff was electric. The first batter he faced was the Marlins’ superstar power hitter Giancarlo Stanton. He struck him out looking. Wilson would go on to appear in eighteen games in August and September for the Dodgers, usually in front of Jansen as the eighth-inning man. He gave up just one earned run. But Wilson was known as much for his peculiarities as he was for his talent. He looked normal enough during his first few seasons with the Giants, then he decided to grow an unruly beard down to his chest and dye it jet black, like a disguise. No one knew what he was hiding from. Wilson developed a new persona as well. He gave clipped, bizarre answers to questions about baseball, and often walked around the clubhouse with a plate full of unidentifiable purple and gray food he referred to as whale puke.
Wilson had won two World Series rings with San Francisco in the last three years, but his time with the Giants did not end well. When the Dodgers visited San Francisco in mid-September, Wilson walked across the field after a game to confront Giants CEO Larry Baer about why he hadn’t yet received his latest World Series ring. Though San Francisco said they had invited Wilson to their on-field team ceremony earlier in the season and the pitcher hadn’t responded, Wilson was irate, and screamed at Baer for keeping the ring from him, while stunned fans and former teammates looked on. Colletti knew Wilson well from his time with the Giants and was aware of the pitcher’s erratic behavior. Still, he had signed him only to a one-year deal worth a million bucks. If things got too weird he could always cut him.
During the second week of September, when the Dodgers were a few victories away from clinching the division, something strange happened: they started losing. The Giants took three of four in Los Angeles, including a 19–3 drubbing. Then they traveled to Arizona on September 16 and dropped the first of a three-game set. At that point, the Diamondbacks were the only team that could catch them in the division, as they trailed the Dodgers by nine and a half games with twelve to play. Los Angeles needed two wins to clinch.
Before the second game of the series, Mattingly addressed the team. He told his men they were playing to clinch instead of playing to win, and that it was making them tight. All they had to do, Mattingly said, was put the division title out of their heads and just play for the day. Those in the room said it was an effective speech. When he was finished, Zack Greinke stood up. “I’ve got something to say,” Greinke told the room. This was unusual, not just because Greinke wasn’t prone to public speaking, but also because he was pitching that day, and most pitchers don’t even like to make eye contact with other humans in the hours leading up to their starts.
“I’ve been noticing something,” Greinke said. His teammates leaned in. Greinke was generally thought to be the smartest, most observant guy on the roster. The room became silent. This was going to be good.
“Some of you guys have been doing the number two and not washing your hands,” said Greinke. “It’s not good. I noticed it even happened earlier today.”
More silence.
“So if you guys could just be better about it that would be great,” he said, and then he sat back down.
His teammates looked around the room at each other, stunned. They were expecting an insight into why they were losing, some kind of brilliant observation that would help them bounce off the schneid. But Greinke wanted to talk proper bathroom hygiene. At first the players weren’t sure if he was kidding. But as the meeting broke up and they began heading out to the field and they realized he was serious, they laughed hard and long enough to shake off their tightness. When Puig’s translator told him what Greinke had said, Puig didn’t believe him. He asked Adrian Gonzalez if it was true, and Gonzalez confirmed that it was. Of Greinke, Puig said, Man, that guy is crazy, and laughed. One player said later that Greinke’s public service announcement was just what the team needed to relax. The Dodgers went out and thumped Diamondbacks ace Patrick Corbin for four runs on five hits in the first inning, and won the game 9–3. Two days later they won the division.
After knocking Arizona out of the race on their own turf, the Dodgers decided they wanted to go swimming. Arizona’s Chase Field has a swimming pool behind the right-field fence that fans and companies can rent for parties. Dodger players took it over. They jumped, they danced, they cannonballed into the water. The Diamondbacks were not amused. While some thought it was just an impromptu celebration, in fact, veteran players planned to jump into the pool after they clinched and hold a chicken fight tournament. A few had even practiced on the shoulders of teammates in the locker room the day before. Finally, some drama happened that Puig wasn’t responsible for.
After the players traipsed out of the water and wandered back to the clubhouse, they continued their celebration with hoots and hollers and champagne spray. Matt Kemp had just returned from the disabled list three games earlier after a two-month absence. During the festivities, a reporter thought he heard Kemp bragging about a celebratory piss in the Diamondbacks’ pool. Kemp had said it as a joke. It didn’t matter. A blogger picked up the story that the Dodgers had peed in the Chase Field pool, and it went viral. The Diamondbacks’ front office raged. “I could call it disrespectful and classless, but they don’t have a beautiful pool at their old park and must have really wanted to see what one was like,” said Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall. Even Senator John McCain weighed in. “No-class act by a bunch of overpaid, immature, arrogant, spoiled brats!” the Diamondbacks fan wrote on Twitter. “The Dodgers are idiots.” In response, Magic Johnson offered his thoughts. “That wasn’t nothing!” he said. “We got a lot of things happening in the NBA on other people’s court, guys jumping on tables. I’ve seen it all. We apologized, but I’m happy for my players.” Johnson later told Jay Leno that even though he couldn’t swim, he would strip down to a Speedo in solidarity if the Dodgers won the World Series.
The pool headache wasn’t as big of a nuisance as the Dodgers’ crowded outfield, however. Even though they entered the season with three highly paid outfielders in Crawford, Kemp, and Ethier, and added Puig along the way, finding room for all four was never an issue because they were never healthy for a full nine innings at the same time. Until now. When Kemp returned from the disabled list, Kasten met with Mattingly to ask what he intended to do with four guys for three positions. Mattingly told Kasten about how he planned to play matchups and platoon the men, as two were right-handed and two were lefties. A person with knowledge of the chat said Kasten told Mattingly that a rotation was fine, but if Puig wasn’t in the starting lineup they would have a problem.
Later, Mattingly summoned all four men into his office and told them that with the division sewn up, he would work out a rotation to keep all four outfielders fresh for the playoffs. Puig and Crawford shrugged. Ethier told Mattingly he would do whatever was best for the team. Kemp fought for playing time. “I’m a starter,” he said to his skipper, in front of the other three. If Mattingly and Kemp had once been close, their relationship now seemed over.
But Mattingly didn’t need to worry about juggling his four outfielders after all. Days after the platoon conversation, Kemp’s slow-healing ankle was reevaluated and team doctors discovered that the injury was much more significant than previously thought. One of the bones in Kemp’s foot was so swollen that if he continued to put any weight on it he risked snapping it and ending his career. Kemp was told he’d need surgery on the final day of the season. It was the second time in as many years that he had played through a freak injury that had been missed. Another disastrous season, complete.
The Dodgers had invited their fans to stay in the stadium after that game for a playoff pep rally. Players gathered on the field and some spoke to the jubilant crowd. After starting the season with a 30-42 record, the Dodgers had finished the season at 92-70, winning the National League West by eleven games. A division title wasn’t really what the Dodgers were after, however. They wanted a world championship. And as the players looked around at each other, they believed they had the talent and the momentum to do it.