The 2014 season did not start out well for Yasiel Puig.
After splitting time between Los Angeles and Miami in the off-season, the young right fielder reported to spring training weighing twenty-five pounds more than at the end of the 2013 season. But unlike the muscle that seemed perfectly concentrated in his arms and upper back the year before, these new pounds hung like Christmas garlands from his belly and backside. He looked like the chubby kid who had auditioned for major-league scouts in Mexico.
Portly Puig collected just eight hits in forty-eight chances during spring training, with no home runs or stolen bases. It was a small sample size, to be sure, but the Dodgers’ coaching staff wasn’t happy. How could a twenty-three-year-old baseball player whose game relied on his legs already weigh over 250 pounds? What did that say about his commitment to his career? Puig wanted to be the best player in the game, but he also hated working out. Could he ever achieve the former without the latter?
His off-season had not been as quiet as his bosses had hoped, either. With a reckless driving charge from the summer already on his record, a few days after Christmas Puig was pulled over by a Florida Highway Patrol officer for doing 110 on Alligator Alley through Naples at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. He was contrite, but when the officer noticed he was speeding with three passengers including his mother, he went ballistic.
“This is your mom? Oh, you’re going to jail. You are putting your mom in danger, oh hell no,” the trooper said to Puig in Spanish, in audio captured by a police recording of the incident. “Why were you driving that fast? You don’t care about anyone’s life in the car?”
“Yes, I do care. I’m sorry,” Puig responded. “Please forgive me.” But the officer was unmoved.
“Officer, I’m sorry. I’m begging you, sir,” Puig said. “I’ll do anything. I’ll never drive again. Please don’t take me to jail.”
After placing Puig in his squad car, the officer returned to Puig’s vehicle to explain to his mother, his cousin, and another passenger why he was being arrested.
“The reason why we’re in this situation is because he didn’t care about his mother’s life, or your lives, and he’s going to jail,” the cop said over Puig’s mother sobs.
In the backseat of the squad car, Puig berated himself. “Why do you have to drive so fast, Puig?” he said. “You have to learn.” This marked Puig’s second arrest for reckless driving in eight months. He subsequently promised the Dodgers he would hire a driver.
By the time the regular season started, Puig had dropped most of the off-season weight. The Dodgers opened the 2014 season in late March with a two-game series against the Diamondbacks in Sydney, Australia. The trip was supposed to help spread baseball fever to Oceania. But it was such a long haul to take on the eve of a grueling 160-game season that Dodger players didn’t want to go. Puig rebounded from his dismal spring, going three-for-ten with a couple of RBIs in two games to help the Dodgers sweep Arizona. His antics also returned to midseason form. After he struck out in the late innings of the second contest he grabbed his back and asked to come out of the game. When reporters inquired about his injury, Mattingly chuckled. He had protected Puig throughout his rookie campaign, but the young slugger’s flair for the dramatic was exhausting his manager’s patience. During the off-season the club had awarded Mattingly a three-year contract extension. He was now free to talk without worrying he’d get fired. “He grabs something every time he takes a swing and misses,” Mattingly said of Puig. “Shoulder yesterday, back today. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do. We may not do anything.”
Puig’s baserunning blunders had also reappeared in game two. He tried to stretch a single into a double in the third inning and was easily thrown out. And when a pitch in the dirt rolled away from Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero in the sixth, Puig tried to steal third and was nailed again. After the game, reporters heard Puig and Adrian Gonzalez shouting at each other through the clubhouse walls. The chatter of Puig’s imminent implosion got louder, as beat writers began reporting on the rift between Mattingly and management on how to handle their young star. It became clear that Mattingly was ready to rein in his wild horse. But after a year of Puig doing as he pleased without consequences, was it too late?
Two days after they returned from Australia the Dodgers held their first workout of the season at Dodger Stadium. It was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. Puig walked into the locker room in street clothes at 10:27. Most of his teammates had been there for hours. He muttered something about his back and disappeared into Mattingly’s office with the team’s vice president of medical services, Stan Conte. After Mattingly and Puig discussed Puig’s tardiness, the two men walked into the clubhouse together. Mattingly told Dodger players that Puig wanted to address them. The men fell silent. Puig walked to the center of the room. “Okay,” he said to his teammates, through a translator. “You guys tell me how you want me to play.”
Juan Uribe went first. He told Puig to just show up on time. Then it was Hanley Ramirez’s turn. He shook his head. “I just don’t want your career to go the way my career went,” he said, of his time with the Marlins. “All my teammates hated me because of the way I played.” It was a profound admission from Ramirez, who despite his superstar status was still hurt by the way things had ended in Miami. Ramirez had spent his time in Los Angeles trying to undo his reputation as an aloof player who hustled only when it suited him and challenged teammates to dugout fistfights when they called him out on it. “I got a fresh start here. I got a chance to make things right,” he said. “This is a great place to play. This is a great place for you to start over.”
New Dodger Chone Figgins was the next and final person to speak. He told Puig the season was long and that he couldn’t get too high or too low or he’d burn himself out and take his teammates down with him. When Figgins finished, and nobody else spoke up, Puig walked back to his locker. Then Mattingly grabbed him by the arm and said, “We’re all proud of you.” A few Dodgers said it was the strangest team meeting they’d ever been in. It seemed to other players that Mattingly had put Puig up to it, that the fourth-year skipper was trying to get his embattled young star to be more accountable to his teammates so none of them wound up punching him. But did Puig really care what the rest of the locker room thought of him? Some Dodgers talked it over afterward, and though they agreed the summit was awkward, they were optimistic that good could come from it. Many of them had wanted to talk to Puig about how to behave during his rookie season, but they were afraid of how he’d receive it. They hoped that Mattingly’s ploy had at least opened that dialogue.
Skip Schumaker and Nick Punto had been two of Puig’s teammates most willing to get in his face when he acted like an ass during his first year, but they had both signed with other teams. Though Puig often rolled his eyes at them when they told him to clean it up, his friends said he secretly admired Punto and Schumaker a great deal. They had stood up to him and he respected them for it. Like Punto and Schumaker, Mark Ellis had been one of the most popular players in the clubhouse in 2013, and he too was gone. In exit interviews, the Dodgers’ coaching staff had told the front office how valuable those men were to keeping the locker room from combusting during the first three awful months of the 2013 season, and that they hoped at least two of them were re-signed. The front office let all three walk. That loss was felt deeply by the players.
• • •
There is a running joke among baseball writers that every player shows up to spring training proclaiming to be in the best shape of his life, every year. But for many of the 2014 Dodgers it was actually true; the bitter taste of a devastating playoff exit fueled long off-season hours of work. Kershaw spent the winter at home in Dallas adding muscle mass to his shoulders in hopes that the extra strength would give him more endurance in October. Knowing he’d be in a four-man fight for three outfield spots, Andre Ethier showed up as lean as he had been in years. Adrian Gonzalez and Hyun-Jin Ryu shed weight, too. With the end of his Dodger contract nearing and free agency on the horizon, Hanley Ramirez spent the winter months running and hitting and lifting more than usual. He showed up to camp trimmer in the waist and broader in the shoulders, motivated by the knowledge that a monster season could earn him a new nine-figure contract, and optimistic that Los Angeles would be the team to give it to him.
The Dodgers were in a tough spot with Ramirez. After his turbulent time in Miami, the talented shortstop had found his footing in Los Angeles. He had been a brilliant player and a good teammate in the year and a half he’d been a Dodger, and he was a favorite of Mark Walter, which was no small detail. Walter had locked up his other favorite player, Clayton Kershaw, to a $215 million deal weeks before spring training began. Ramirez made no secret of his wanting to play out the remainder of his career in Los Angeles. But he had just turned thirty, and his recent injury history was as frightening in its length as it was in its diversity: shoulder, thumb, back, hamstring, ribs. He’d missed seventy games in 2011 and seventy-six more in 2013. At the end of the previous season, he avoided telling reporters what hurt because everything did. Ramirez was seeking a six- or seven-year contract extension. The Dodgers preferred to overpay him for three or so years to save themselves risk on the back end. The two sides began the season at an impasse.
Clayton Kershaw’s 2014 started out better than Puig’s. On the day he finalized that seven-year deal with an opt-out after five for $215 million, Kershaw explained his thinking. “Five years is the max for me that I could see myself competing at the highest possible level that I’m comfortable with,” he said. “Anything else I don’t think I could’ve—I think it would have been too overwhelming to know—oh my gosh I’ve gotta do it for this much longer. This helps me by knowing that it’s not a sprint by any means but it’s not a marathon, either. It’s probably a win for the Dodgers to some extent because they don’t have to worry about paying for ten-plus years. I think it worked out perfectly for both and I’m really excited about it.”
Though the trip to Sydney messed with everyone’s biorhythms, Kershaw took the mound on opening day at 2 a.m. Los Angeles time and showed no ill effects, pitching into the seventh inning while allowing one run and striking out seven. But the following day, he felt pain in his upper back that he couldn’t shake. The Dodgers kept his injury quiet. With only two games in Australia and then a week off until their regular season resumed back in the States, club officials hoped Kershaw would heal before anyone found out.
He didn’t.
Even if Kershaw had not just signed the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, he would still have hated to start the season on the disabled list. The money just made it worse. Two days before the Dodgers’ stateside opener, Kershaw told Mattingly he was pain-free and wanted the ball. Mattingly was skeptical. The last thing he or anyone in the Dodgers’ front office wanted was for Kershaw to hurry back and hurt himself worse. The training staff had come under fire the year before for missing the severity of Matt Kemp’s ankle injury, and for letting him rush back too soon after shoulder and hamstring woes. The team’s poor physical health had sent it spiraling into last place and caused hurt feelings among training staff that lingered. Keeping a roster healthy over a 162-game season was a tall task. Preventing injury to a room full of veterans with dicey medical histories was damn near impossible. At the end of the 2013 season, the Dodgers fired their strength coach, and their beloved trainer, Sue Falsone, resigned.
The Dodgers’ 2014 opening day roster cost $240 million to field, ending the Yankees’ fifteen-year streak of having the highest payroll in baseball. L.A.’s starting lineup was packed with talent again, and the principal cast remained the same. The only major change the club made was replacing sure-handed second baseman Mark Ellis with the speedy youngster Dee Gordon. Originally, that spot was supposed to go to power-hitting Cuban refugee Alex Guerrero, whom the Dodgers signed to a four-year, $28 million contract in the off-season. But the coaching staff was surprised to find during spring training that the club’s international scouting department had overlooked a key detail: Guerrero couldn’t field the position. So they called on the diminutive Gordon to take over second base full-time. Even though Gordon had struggled to hit major-league pitching in his brief stints with the club, the Dodgers had little choice as the organization’s depth remained shallow. It would still take years before the new ownership group could replenish the farm system depleted by the McCourt regime; their newfound cash infusion could provide only a Band-Aid. After Ricky Nolasco left L.A. to sign a multiyear deal with Minnesota, Josh Beckett returned from his injury-plagued 2013 season to replace him as the Dodgers’ number-four starter behind Kershaw, Greinke, and Ryu. The club also signed veteran starter Dan Haren to fill out its rotation. But if any of their starting pitchers got hurt, the list of potential minor-league replacements offered them very little in the way of a safety net.
The day before the stateside opener, Kershaw played catch in the outfield at Petco Park in San Diego with head trainer Stan Conte, taking a few steps back after each throw so that he’d have to hurl the ball harder and farther each time. After toss number twenty-seven Kershaw felt a twinge in his back and stopped. The next day, a week after his twenty-sixth birthday, Clayton Kershaw was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his career.
He fought the decision, but the Dodgers were right to be cautious. The left upper back muscle he strained was responsible for holding his rotator cuff in place. If he pitched with a weakened upper body and it allowed muscle or tendon to tear in his shoulder, the injury could jeopardize his career. Spring training lasts about six weeks. The Dodgers had been forced to cut their camp two weeks short to go to Australia. Some wondered if the abrupt spring coupled with the fourteen-hour flight to Sydney contributed to Kershaw’s injury, which made them even more bitter about the trip. The morning Kershaw was placed on the DL, he was the first Dodger to arrive at the ballpark. He jogged to the outfield grass by himself armed with a stopwatch. He couldn’t pitch, but he could time his sprints. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He was anxious to avenge the end of his previous season. To sit and do nothing but wait to heal was torture.
For Matt Kemp, the wait had been long enough. Having to watch his team go on that record run the previous summer without him only to be eliminated by the Cardinals just two wins from the World Series (again without him) had been a nightmare. Feeling himself slip from being one of the stars of baseball to a mere afterthought on his own team had been worse. If there was one good thing that came out of his freak ankle injury it was that it gave his shoulder the rest it needed to heal fully. As the 2014 season approached, Kemp could finally swing the bat with his arms at full extension with no pain. Baseballs he hit once again screamed toward the outfield fence and over it. He was back.
The same teammates who months before had pointed out that the Dodgers played .800 ball without Kemp were now buzzing about how great he looked at the plate in batting practice. To be extra cautious, the Dodgers held him out of their first five games of the season, but told him he would be back in the lineup for the home opener against the Giants. But when Kemp arrived at Dodger Stadium that morning for the one o’clock start, Mattingly summoned him into his office. He had Conte break the news: Kemp wouldn’t be starting after all. They blamed it on his ankle, and told him they wanted to work him back into the mix slowly to protect him from getting hurt again. Kemp would get a chance to pinch-hit that day, but the club’s medical team wasn’t yet comfortable with him running around in the outfield.
Kemp was furious. He was convinced he was healthy and that the coaches and trainers knew it, too. He felt they were feigning concern over his ankle as a way to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they still had four starting outfielders. Some of his teammates wondered if he was right. The Dodgers were 4-1 so far without Kemp, and perhaps Mattingly didn’t want to tinker with the lineup that was working. Many of his teammates felt bad for him: after Kemp had waited months to play again, they didn’t think it was fair that Mattingly waited until that morning to tell him he wouldn’t be in the lineup. Kemp sat at his locker with his head down and thumbed through text messages on his phone. Ramirez saw him slumped down in his chair by himself and yelled: “Matt Kemp! Matt Kemp! Why you no talk today? In San Diego you wouldn’t shut up!” But Kemp ignored him. “What’s wrong with him?” Ramirez wondered aloud. Then Mitch Poole posted the lineup card next to Ramirez’s locker. The shortstop ran his index finger down the list of names, and saw Kemp’s wasn’t one of them. “Oh,” he said. “So that’s why he’s so sad.”
As the team took the field to stretch at 9:40, Kemp sat by himself in the dugout for a few minutes to watch. The last two years had been filled with disastrous injuries. Now he was living a different kind of hell. The idea of watching the Dodgers’ home opener from the bench as a healthy bystander made him sick to his stomach. But the club had bigger problems than Kemp’s hurt feelings.
Yasiel Puig had gone missing.
When twenty-five players and a dozen coaches and trainers take the field to stretch before every game, it’s difficult to notice who isn’t there if you’re not looking for him. Puig usually hit in the first group with four of the other best hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup. Group One came and went. He was nowhere to be found, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Uribe pulled Kemp aside and told him that even if Puig did show up, Kemp would be starting in his place, so he had better get his head right.
While all of this was going on, Mattingly—who had no idea that Puig wasn’t at Dodger Stadium—was busy describing to the media why Kemp was benched. Tim Wallach, the new Dodgers bench coach, jogged back into the clubhouse to find Mattingly. It had been only a week since Puig had stood in the center of the Dodgers’ locker room and asked his teammates to tell him how they wanted him to behave, and now he was late to opening day.
At 10:30, Puig finally emerged from the dugout and jogged onto the field, some fifty minutes after batting practice had started. He apologized to his teammates as they shagged fly balls and asked Adrian Gonzalez what he thought. “I think,” Gonzalez said, “that you need to get your ass here on time.” Puig told Mattingly that he’d been confused about what time he was supposed to arrive at the field, as he thought the game started at 5 p.m. The Dodgers’ traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, had texted players with game-time information, as he always did. But Puig had changed his phone number after the Australia series and didn’t tell anyone. And even though it was his first home opener as a big leaguer, he hadn’t bothered to check what time the game started. Some of Puig’s teammates who worried about his safety had already wondered if this was the day the cartel got him. After he showed up in one piece, the coaching staff debated what to do with him. Mattingly yanked Puig from the lineup and replaced him with Kemp.
It was an unnecessary headache for the Dodgers’ skipper. He’d angered Kemp by benching him earlier under the premise that the training staff didn’t think his ankle was strong enough to patrol the outfield. And now that Puig was grounded, Kemp’s ankle was fine? Kemp was upset with Mattingly, Mattingly was mad at Puig, and it was only opening day. If Mattingly couldn’t get Puig to change, he was determined to change the way he managed him. A year earlier Puig had shown up late for stretch before that game in Miami and Mattingly benched him only to sub him into the late innings and watch him hit the game-tying home run. Because the incident obviously hadn’t taught Puig anything, Mattingly told his coaching staff that this time he intended to keep the young right fielder on ice the entire game to send a message. If management got mad at him for holding Puig out on opening day, Mattingly didn’t care. The kid was still the prize signing of the new ownership’s group tenure, and a symbol of how smart they had been to sign him when other teams balked. They had built a marketing campaign around Puig, and millions of dollars were at stake. But management supported Mattingly’s decision to bench him. At some point, regardless of his talent, he was going to have to learn to abide by the rules. The next day, Puig apologized to Mark Walter on the field during batting practice.
The Giants jumped out to an 8–0 lead. Kemp misplayed a ball hit to him in center in the first inning, allowing a run to score. An inning later, he attempted to make a running catch, but the ball jarred loose as he crashed into the wall. Fans in the left-field bleachers began chanting “We Want Puig.” But Mattingly kept Puig on the pine. It was the first time ever that all four outfielders were healthy for a whole nine innings, and Puig didn’t figure to be the odd man out for long. After the game, Kemp affirmed his stance. “I want to play every day,” he said.
Two games later, Kemp clubbed two home runs off Giants starter Matt Cain during a nationally televised Sunday night game. After the game he didn’t mince words. “I know I can hit,” he said. “Opposing pitchers know it, too.” Uribe chimed in with his textbook ribbing: “Hallelujah, Matt! Hallelujah! It was time for you to do something for this team.”
With four healthy outfielders, Mattingly was now juggler-in-chief. He told the media that he believed the best three players would eventually distinguish themselves, and he was right. With Puig entrenched in right field and not going anywhere, and Matt Kemp hitting well enough to nail down the job in center, Crawford and Ethier began sharing time in left. It was an expensive platoon. The two men were paid $36 million combined in 2014, which was more than any single player in the league earned. Their time-share might have worked if they could spell each other against left-handers and righties. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, neither of them hit lefties. The coaching staff settled on Crawford as the starting left fielder because he was faster and more dynamic, and they thought he put together tougher at-bats. To Mattingly’s relief, Ethier showed exceptional class in handling his new bench role, telling reporters he wanted to do whatever he could to help the team win, and in not undermining the clubhouse with a sour attitude.
Then, on May 22, with Zack Greinke on the mound in Queens versus the Mets, Kemp let two balls sail over his head in center and misplayed a third into a triple. The coaching staff knew that after devastating injuries to his ankle and both hamstrings, Kemp had nowhere near the speed he used to possess in center field. They didn’t expect Willie Mays—but they did hope he would put in the work to improve. The previous year when Hanley Ramirez was coming back from his right thumb injury he took dozens of extra ground balls at shortstop every day with his good hand to stay sharp. Kemp had often struggled to read the ball’s trajectory off the bat, but in the past he had enjoyed the luxury of speed to compensate when he was slow reacting. With bum wheels he was a different player.
After the game, Mattingly called Kemp into a closed-door meeting and informed him he was no longer the team’s center fielder, and asked him to start shagging balls in left. Kemp was angry. Mattingly stressed to him that this change wasn’t permanent, that he’d have the opportunity to earn back his job, but Kemp didn’t take any solace in those words. Had the compromised bone in his ankle been found right when he injured it he could have had surgery in July instead of October and already be back at full strength. He had sacrificed his body by smashing into walls for this team and this is how they were repaying him? He felt stranded on his own little island again; he didn’t want to play in left.
The standoff began. Los Angeles played three games in Philadelphia and then headed home to take on the Reds on May 26. Kemp stayed on the bench. After he entered his second series in the doghouse his agent, Dave Stewart, aired his frustrations to the press. “In my opinion, not playing for four straight days is a little harsh,” he said. “Two years ago this guy ran into a wall, literally, for the ball club. He came back and injured his hamstrings, then his ankle. They feel he’s missing a step. When I played if you gave one-hundred percent and got hurt you have the right to come back and play your position.” At that point in the season, the Dodgers weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great, either. They had posted a 28-24 record and sat in second place behind San Francisco, five games out.
Kemp might have remained on the bench even longer had Carl Crawford not sprained his ankle. But on May 28, Kemp was back in the lineup in left field. He had faced many watershed moments during his nine-year career, but perhaps none was as critical to his future with the club. “It could be his last chance to prove us right or wrong,” one Dodger staff member said before the game. “If he doesn’t step up, I guess it’ll be time to move on.”
When Kemp shifted over to left field he was stuck in an 0-for-20 slump. The Dodgers lost three in a row and the Giants kept winning. San Francisco had cruised out to a 36-19 record, the best in baseball. And unlike the Diamondbacks team that the Dodgers overtook the previous year, this Giants squad didn’t appear to be smoke and mirrors. After all, they had won two World Series championships in the last four years. The Dodgers would need vintage Kemp to catch them.
• • •
They would need Kershaw, too.
He had returned from the disabled list on May 6 and appeared healthy, shutting out a very good Nationals team over seven innings and striking out nine. Though he downplayed the damage his NLCS collapse inflicted on his psyche, that failure seemed to change his demeanor on the mound. Before, he was content to best hitters with his creativity. Now he pitched mad. In his third start back from the disabled list on May 17, he tossed the worst game of his career, giving up seven earned runs in an inning and two-thirds of work against the Diamondbacks. He was so irritated afterward that he vowed to A. J. Ellis that he would never hang another breaking ball again. In the first 75 innings he pitched in 2014 he struck out 100 batters and walked just 9. It was the fewest walks issued against 100 strikeouts in franchise history. (The previous record was 19, set by Sandy Koufax in 1965.)
On July 4, Kershaw’s ERA dipped below two and would remain there for the rest of the season. Only eight pitchers in history had won three or more Cy Young Awards. Kershaw was hoping to become the ninth. At one point, he had a streak of forty-one consecutive scoreless innings. Ellis described how Kershaw had gotten even better. “He used to throw maybe ten pitches or so a game that a hitter could actually do something with,” he said. “Now he maybe throws three.” The left-hander did not load the bases until August 27, his twenty-second start of the season. He escaped the one-out jam without giving up a run.
On June 18, an otherwise unremarkable summer evening at Dodger Stadium, Kershaw nicked the corners of the strike zone with fastball after fastball, and used his slider and curve to knock the legs out from under Colorado hitters. Despite everything he had achieved in his young career, Kershaw had never come close to throwing a no-hitter. He took one into the ninth that night, and Ellis called the pitches behind home plate with tears in his eyes. When Kershaw struck out Corey Dickerson to end the game, he stood on the mound with his arms raised to the sky. His final line read nine innings, no runs, no hits, no walks, and fifteen strikeouts. It was the second-best nine-inning game score from a pitcher in major-league history, trailing only Kerry Wood’s twenty-strikeout one-hitter in 1998. Kershaw had needed only 107 pitches.
It would have been a perfect game, too, had Hanley Ramirez made a play on a ground ball hit to him in the seventh. Ramirez fielded the tough hop in plenty of time but threw the ball away, which drew an error. It wasn’t an easy play, but it was one most major-league shortstops would have made. By many statistical measures, Ramirez was the weakest defensive shortstop in the game, and the myriad injuries he had sustained during his first two seasons with the Dodgers did not help his fielding range. To his credit, Ramirez told club officials he was willing to move off the position and over to third base as long as he didn’t have to keep shifting back and forth. But the Dodgers still had Uribe at the hot corner, and the veteran infielder was quietly excelling at the position and hitting well. “I just want to get my four at-bats every day,” Ramirez said before the season. The Dodgers wanted that, too. They needed Ramirez’s bat in the lineup, but in reality he was probably best stashed in left field or at designated hitter. And since the Dodgers didn’t get the benefit of a DH in the National League and were already trying to cram four outfielders into three spots most of the time, they were forced to keep Ramirez at short.
Ramirez’s defensive deficiencies would perhaps not have been as bad if he were the only weak link in the field. But the Dodgers were paying their five outfielders (including backup Scott Van Slyke) a combined $62 million for 2014—and they still didn’t have a true center fielder. The bottleneck would have been best solved by an off-season trade of one of the outfielders, but the big contracts of Kemp, Ethier, and Crawford scared off potential suitors. Because of this mess, the team ranked last in fielding in center, too, which meant their defense up the middle was horrendous. It was especially frustrating because Los Angeles was paying its starting pitchers $64 million in 2014 and fielded a weak defense behind them.
Hanley Ramirez, it was becoming clear, was a shadow of his former self. The Dodgers had shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars since Ramirez was traded to the team in the summer of 2012, and now that his contract was expiring, they had suddenly tightened their purse strings. When it became obvious the Dodgers didn’t want him back, Ramirez sulked and often refused to speak to the media. He isolated himself from teammates, too, preferring to shuffle between the training room and sitting alone at his locker. Gone were the inspirational “Attitude is everything” quotes he had posted all over his social media accounts the year before. “I wish I could play one day without pain,” he said in a rare revealing moment. Sometimes he would smile and joke before games like the Hanley of 2013. Other times a person might say hello and ask how he was doing and get snapped at. Ramirez’s mood swings exhausted teammates and staff, and Mattingly admitted his contract uncertainty had created a distraction in the clubhouse.
Because of the knock on him that he couldn’t stay healthy, Ramirez vowed that in his last season before free agency he would try to play in as many games as possible. While on the surface it was an admirable endeavor, it wound up hurting the team. Ramirez kept getting injured almost as often as he had the year before, but he balked at going on the disabled list, in hopes that whatever ailed him wouldn’t take the full fifteen days to heal. If Ramirez was unavailable but not on the DL, that left Mattingly with one less able body on the bench—sometimes for up to a week. When Ramirez did play, many around the club didn’t think he gave maximum effort in the field, since diving for a baseball might result in injury that might hurt him in free agency. Skip Schumaker had signed with the Reds in the off-season, and when his new club played the Dodgers he gave a Cincinnati paper a telling quote. “That lineup is very good,” Schumaker said. “When certain guys want to play it’s even better.”
Schumaker wasn’t wrong. It was obvious Ramirez was playing hurt or with hurt feelings, and he just wasn’t the same guy he had been the year before. Through the first two months of the 2014 season, Ramirez’s on-base plus slugging was .772, some 270 points lower than his 2013 output. An unhappy Ramirez had hit .240 in his final two seasons with the Marlins. Some wondered if his good mood during 2013 was just an act, and if his Miami malaise was who he really was.
On June 3, a year to the day after his call-up, Puig was named the National League’s Player of the Month. During the month of May, he had led the league in batting average, home runs, RBI, on-base percentage, and slugging. Dee Gordon excelled, too. Though he wasn’t even expected to make the opening day roster when he first showed up to spring training, Gordon seized the opportunity when the job became open and flourished. Batting leadoff, he posted a .360 on-base percentage during the first six weeks of the season and terrorized opposing pitchers on the base paths. He was named to the NL all-star team and would finish the season with a major-league-leading sixty-four stolen bases and twelve triples. Puig was named to his first all-star team, too. He had a star shaved into the side of his head to mark the occasion.
The day after Puig won player of the month, the Dodgers trailed the Giants in the NL West by eight and a half games, despite their rotation and their lineup being better than San Francisco’s. Mattingly was angry. “I’m sick of talking about individual players,” he said before the game. “It seems like we keep talking about one guy or two guys instead of how we can win the game as a team. Last year when we got rolling it felt like we had a true team focus. Like we were a collective group.”
He continued: “The focus needs to just be on winning, and we haven’t felt that. I can’t pinpoint what it is, but the feeling just isn’t here,” he said. “I want guys to have a great season. I tell them that. There’s nothing wrong or selfish about wanting to have a great season because it helps everyone. Just take a walk. Swing at strikes. No matter who gets the game-winning hit it doesn’t matter.”
When asked for his thoughts on why the Dodgers had already fallen so far behind the Giants, Mattingly was blunt: “It’s just being basically shitty,” he said. “We’re just not that good.”
• • •
With Kemp moved to left, Mattingly inserted Ethier into center field and hoped for the best. But Ethier didn’t belong there, either. And after a particularly rough day in the field in Detroit, Mattingly fired Ethier from the position as well. The coaching staff wanted the front office to call up Joc Pederson, the organization’s top prospect, to play center. Pederson was not only the best defensive center fielder in the Dodgers’ organization, he was also tearing through Triple-A. In 2014, the twenty-two-year-old lefty would become the first player in the Pacific Coast League in eighty years to hit thirty home runs and steal thirty bases.
But Pederson still struck out too much. Also, there was a general sense among the Dodgers’ coaching staff that Colletti remained terrified of youth even though Puig had helped save their season the year before. Mattingly had tried to force the front office into calling Pederson up by starting the club’s fifth outfielder, Scott Van Slyke, in center even though he wasn’t used to the position, either. The coaching staff thought about playing Puig in center, too, but they worried that if they made him captain of the outfield he would run over teammates. They were especially concerned for the survival of Gordon, who weighed ninety pounds less than Puig. But when the front office stalled in calling up Pederson, Mattingly moved Puig to center, Kemp to right, and Crawford back to left.
Then, some luck.
The Giants went into free fall, thanks to a couple of key injuries and some atrocious play. The Dodgers caught them by mid-July and went into the all-star break with the best record in the National League. “It doesn’t feel that way, though, does it?” Stan Kasten said of his team’s place at the top of the NL at the time. He was right. While the 2013 team had rolled off a 42-8 stretch of baseball where they had seemed invincible, this club had quietly worked its way to the top, never losing more than three games in a row but never winning more than three in a row, either. Kemp was still unhappy, and Dave Stewart said his client would prefer to be traded to a team that played him in center. But Kemp eventually settled into his new position, and began mashing the ball as he did before his injuries. In the sixty-four games after the all-star break, Kemp hit .309 with an on-base percentage of .365 and slugging clip of .606. His seventeen home runs over that span would have put him on pace for forty-three over a full season—four more than he had hit during his runner-up MVP campaign in 2011. “He would never admit it, but I think he’s comfortable in right,” said one teammate.
But to recapture his form at the plate Kemp had to swallow his pride. During the first half of the season, he was still having trouble driving the ball with any consistency because of the bad habits he had developed to overcompensate for his injuries. So when the Dodgers returned from the all-star break with a series in St. Louis on July 18, Kemp went to the team’s hitting coaches and asked for help. Mark McGwire and John Valentin had noticed that back when Kemp was one of the most feared hitters in the National League his batting stance was much more upright. His leaning over the plate made it difficult for him to hit inside pitches, and also forced him to yank his elbow back farther than optimal when he swung, which sapped his power. McGwire and Valentin urged him to widen the distance between his feet and change the line from his head to his feet from eleven o’clock to five o’clock back to 12/6. It worked. In a way, Kemp looked as if he had unclenched his stance; his more relaxed approach helped him wait on the ball, which put him in a better position to drive it. On August 4, Kemp was named the National League’s player of the week. On August 6, he hit his sixth home run in nine games.
When Kemp’s power returned his good mood followed close behind. Gone was the brooding outfielder who announced he would rather play every day for a last-place team than sit on the bench for a championship contender. After two-plus years of ups and downs, Kemp was back on track at the plate and in the clubhouse. He was hitting even better than Puig, and seemed much more equipped emotionally to lead the Dodgers in October.
Kemp and Puig were never close, and their relationship became further strained in September during a game in Colorado. With Kemp on deck and Puig on first, Adrian Gonzalez singled to right and Puig trotted to second. Kemp then struck out. Puig came home a batter later on a Hanley Ramirez double. As Puig high-fived his teammates after scoring the run, Kemp chased him the length of the dugout and screamed at him. After being separated by Mattingly, an enraged Kemp stormed down the tunnel toward the clubhouse. It was an odd time for a quarrel. The Dodgers were in the middle of an eight-run inning, and would go on to win the game 11–3. Afterward, both Kemp and Puig declined to talk about what led to the incident, but the best explanation seemed to be that Kemp was angry that Puig, one of the team’s fastest runners, had failed to go from first to third on Gonzalez’s hit. Ironically, it was the same thing Puig had screamed at Gonzalez for the year before.
When asked about his relationship with Kemp months later, Puig told CBS Sports, “He stated he’s the best outfielder in the league. I think there are better outfielders.”
But at the time, Mattingly downplayed the incident. “Oh, just talking in the dugout, same old things,” said Mattingly. “We’re like the ’72 A’s.” He may have been trying to gloss over what happened, but in doing so Mattingly compared his squad to a club whose members hated each other so much that one locker room fight led to its starting catcher suffering a crushed disk in his neck.
Forty-eight hours later, Puig was involved in another altercation with his teammates. After the Denver series, the Dodgers flew to Chicago to play the Cubs. The club opted to do its annual rookie hazing on the trip. Veterans wanted rookies to come to the front of the bus to sing on the way from O’Hare to their downtown hotel, but Puig and others were playing dominoes, blocking the aisle. When some players asked to stop for pizza, the rest told the driver to continue to the hotel and circle back for the guys getting food. But Puig had opened the door to the luggage bay on the bus so he could retrieve his bag, and the driver couldn’t move until the door was shut. Greinke got out and threw Puig’s bag into the street. Puig responded by pushing Greinke, but J. P. Howell intervened to stop Puig.
The Dodgers had a more pressing issue than Puig not getting along with his teammates, however: their bullpen was melting down. Going into the 2014 season, Colletti had filled the Dodgers bullpen with expensive former closers way past their prime. He inked former Indians closer Chris Perez to a multimillion-dollar deal, and re-signed Brian Wilson to a one-year, $10 million contract for 2014 with a $9.5 million player option for 2015. At first blush the Wilson deal was seen as a steal. Since he had pitched so well for the Dodgers in September and October 2013, the club had hoped it could count on Wilson to set up for Jansen in 2014 as well. But he wasn’t the same player. Wilson gave up eight earned runs in his first six innings in 2014, and when Mattingly demoted him from the eighth-inning job, he pouted. Some of his teammates believed he threw his fastball in the mid-80s in protest and that he wouldn’t bother throwing hard and risking injury until the 2015 season, when he was pitching for another contract. Wilson’s kooky clubhouse behavior hadn’t bugged teammates as much the year before when he dominated on the mound. But now that he struggled, his oddball persona started to grate. He would finish the season with a 4.66 ERA and minimal life on his fastball.
Chris Perez was just as ineffective, striking out only thirty-nine batters against twenty-five walks and posting a 4.27 ERA. But unlike Wilson, who had pitched brilliantly the year before, Perez’s numbers were no surprise: they were almost identical to what he did in his final year in Cleveland. Because they were veterans, Perez and Wilson could not be demoted, and they were owed too much money to cut. As if that weren’t bad enough, the bullpen’s hardest thrower, Chris Withrow, suffered a season-ending injury early in the year, which left J. P. Howell and Jansen as the club’s only two reliable relievers. The Dodgers’ starting rotation would be brilliant in 2014, notching a 3.20 ERA—second-best in baseball. But their relief core posted a 3.80 ERA, which was twenty-second out of thirty teams. With stellar starting pitching but poor defense and relief pitching, the 2014 Dodgers roster seemed built to cannibalize itself. What good was getting out to a lead if you couldn’t protect it?
The club’s poorly constructed roster didn’t seem to matter much during the regular season, however, since talent usually wins out over the course of 162 games. The Dodgers streaked past the Giants in September and captured their second-straight NL West crown by six games. Despite the club not being nearly as exciting as it was the season before, the Dodgers’ ninety-four wins were two better than what they posted during their 2013 campaign.
• • •
But as the club was soon reminded, playoff baseball is a different game altogether. In October the best offense is often defense. Pitchers throw harder and fielders tighten screws. Scoring runs becomes much more difficult. The best way to survive and advance is to give up as few runs as possible.
The Dodgers weren’t built that way. With the exception of Adrian Gonzalez at first and Juan Uribe at third, every Dodger fielder was below average, which made it unlikely that the club’s pitchers would be bailed out by an incredible play that prevented runs from scoring. (Puig was an above-average right fielder, but he was playing out of position in center.) Compounding that problem: Dodger starting pitchers didn’t have the luxury of just getting through five scoreless frames and then turning the ball over to the bullpen to close out the game—the formula the Kansas City Royals used to make an improbable run to the World Series—because their relief corps was such a mess. J. P. Howell had been excellent for the Dodgers for the first five months of the season, but he broke down in September. He gave up just six earned runs in his first forty-six innings of 2014. In his final three innings before the playoffs began he gave up seven.
Clayton Kershaw was aware of the Dodgers’ bullpen struggles when he took the mound in Game 1 of the NLDS. The Dodgers drew the Cardinals in the first round, giving them a chance to avenge their 2013 exit. On the surface, they appeared to have more of an advantage. Matt Kemp was healthy. Michael Wacha—the St. Louis pitcher who shut them out twice in the 2013 NLCS—was not. And the Dodgers had home-field advantage in a short series, so Kershaw and Greinke could each pitch perhaps twice. Los Angeles was experiencing an unforgiving October heat wave, and when Game 1 started it was ninety-six degrees. Dodger Stadium is a pitchers’ park except on hot days before sunset, when the ball flies off the bat much farther than usual. The Cardinals’ seldom-used outfielder Randal Grichuk took advantage of the conditions and clubbed a first-inning home run off Kershaw just inside the left-field foul pole. Kershaw retired the next sixteen batters in order before giving up another solo home run to Matt Carpenter. But the Dodgers were cruising. They scored six runs to knock Adam Wainwright out of the game in the fifth, and Kershaw took a 6–2 lead into the seventh.
That should have been more than enough. Matt Holliday started the Cardinals’ seventh inning innocently enough with a single to center. Jhonny Peralta then singled Holliday to second. Yadier Molina singled on the first pitch he saw to load the bases for Matt Adams, who then singled Holliday home. With the bases loaded and no out, Kershaw struck out Pete Kozma on three pitches. But Jon Jay singled in Peralta to cut the Dodgers’ lead to 6–4. The Cardinals’ subbed talented rookie Oscar Taveras in as a pinch hitter, and Kershaw struck him out on three pitches, too. Then, Matt Carpenter stepped into the box.
It was Carpenter who had homered off him in his last at-bat. And it was Carpenter who had put together the interminable at-bat that derailed Kershaw—and the Dodgers’ season—in Game 6 of the 2013 NLCS. This was Kershaw’s shot at redemption.
Carpenter fouled off the first three pitches, which were Kershaw’s 103rd, 104th, and 105th offerings of the day. Dodger fans unstuck themselves from their sweaty seats and rose to cheer him on. Carpenter took pitch number 106 in the dirt, and watched number 107 sail high for ball two. He fouled off 108 and 109, a fastball then a slider. The Dodger Stadium crowd began to chant “MVP! MVP!” at Kershaw, in equal parts appreciation and encouragement. With the bases loaded, two out, the count 2-2, and nowhere to put Carpenter, Kershaw grooved a 95 mph fastball toward A. J. Ellis’s mitt. Carpenter hammered it. As the ball sailed through the air and toward the fence, the packed stadium became so quiet that it was possible to hear screams from the Cardinals’ bench. The ball didn’t clear the wall, but it may as well have. It clanked off the blue fence in the deepest part of center for a bases-clearing double. After all three Cardinals scored, St. Louis led 7–6.
This was not supposed to happen to Kershaw, not again. Not against the same team—the same batter!—as last year’s collapse. It was as if the thing he feared most was willed into being after it became a thought in his brain. And this fresh hell was playing out in front of fifty-five thousand people and millions more on television. Kershaw had been beaten when it mattered most the year before, and he had done everything within his power to make sure it would not happen again. He had failed. “Every time he wound up to make a pitch I was thinking, Okay, this is where it ends,” Ellis said about the Cardinals’ seventh-inning hit parade. But Kershaw couldn’t stop it. No matter how hard he worked or how closely he followed his routine to give himself some semblance of control, the devastating reality was he had very little.
The Dodgers mounted a rally, but lost the wild game 10–9.
It was such a shocking turn of events that afterward teammates and coaches struggled to find an explanation. It had to be the heat, right? Or maybe the Cardinals, who were known as some of the best sign stealers in the game, had seen the pitches Ellis called from second base and relayed that information to the hitter? Or maybe Kershaw was tipping what he was about to throw? “I know I’m going to stay up until three a.m. and second-guess every pitch I called,” Ellis said after the game. Kershaw stood in the hallway outside the Dodgers’ clubhouse to answer questions from a crowd of media looking for answers. He had none. “It’s a terrible feeling,” he said. “As a starting pitcher, it’s your game to lose. I did that.”
The Dodgers tried to rebound the next day by sending Greinke to the mound for Game 2. Greinke was terrific, allowing no runs on just two hits over seven innings. The Dodgers took a 2–0 lead into the eighth and needed just three outs to get the ball to Jansen. Since Greinke was at 103 pitches and would be facing the Cardinals’ lineup a fourth time, Mattingly called on J. P. Howell. The lefty reliever gave up a single to Oscar Taveras and then a first-pitch home run to Matt Carpenter—who else—to tie the game. Brandon League relieved Howell and got the Dodgers out of the inning with the score still knotted at two, but Greinke’s brilliant effort was wasted. Matt Kemp led off the eighth for the Dodgers and turned on a slider, homering down the left-field line. The Dodgers won the game 3–2 to even the series at a game apiece. Then they boarded a flight back to St. Louis for Games 3 and 4.
After sitting out for three weeks to nurse his tender throwing shoulder, Hyun-Jin Ryu turned in a gutsy performance in Game 3, giving up one run over six innings. Mattingly was prepared to let Jansen get the final six outs of the game, but someone still had to pitch the seventh. With no better ideas and the game tied at one, he turned to Scott Elbert, a seldom-used reliever who had just been recalled three weeks earlier after missing two years to recover from multiple arm surgeries. Elbert gave up a double to Yadier Molina and a home run to second baseman Kolten Wong. The Dodgers couldn’t solve Cardinals starter John Lackey and lost the game 3–1.
Kershaw got another shot in Game 4. Pitching on three days’ rest, he struck out the side to begin the game, then cruised through the first six innings, allowing just one hit and no runs while striking out nine. He took a 2–0 lead into the seventh. Had the Dodgers’ bullpen been solvent, Mattingly probably would have ended Kershaw’s night after six innings, as he had done in Game 4 of the Division Series against the Braves the year before—the last time his young lefty pitched on short rest. But Mattingly didn’t have any arms. He could bring Jansen in for the eighth and ninth, but he still needed those three outs in the seventh. So Kershaw went out to pitch the same inning that had caused him so much trouble in Game 1 and gave up a single to Matt Holliday, just as he had four days earlier. Then he gave up a single to Jhonny Peralta, following the script. The Cardinals’ big first baseman, Matt Adams, stepped into the batter’s box next. The left-handed Adams had hit .190 against southpaws during the regular season, with a .298 slugging percentage. Kershaw had not given up an RBI to a lefty in 2014 until the month of September. Those numbers didn’t matter. Ahead in the count 0-1, Kershaw hung a breaking ball to Adams, who hit it into the Cardinals’ bullpen. St. Louis took a 3–2 lead, which became final two innings later. The Cardinals advanced to the NLCS to face the San Francisco Giants. The Dodgers went home.