The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (13 page)

In a strange twist, he succeeded Torre as manager in Los Angeles, after coming over with him from New York and serving as the Dodgers’ hitting coach. By the time Torre landed in Hollywood, he’d won four World Series rings and was in the gloaming of his storied career. In that respect, though Mattingly was bitten by inexperience, some felt his hunger made him a better fit to run a team that was so desperate for a championship. There was no question Mattingly wanted a ring as much as his players did, maybe even more. His pedigree had earned him the skipper’s cap, but he knew the goodwill he enjoyed as a bygone icon would wear thin if he didn’t win. On the day that he sent Greinke out to face San Diego to find out if his arm was all right, he was not Donnie Baseball. In his mind, he was Donnie Lameduck.

In 1990, Mattingly had been the highest-paid player in the game, earning $3.8 million. In 2013, the Dodgers would pay twenty-one players more than that.
Only twenty guys across both leagues would earn more than $20 million that season. Los Angeles employed four of them. Though Mattingly was entering his third season as the Dodgers’
manager, he was not guaranteed a contract beyond 2013. The Guggenheim group hadn’t hired him, and no one knew how long they intended to keep him around. That gnawing uncertainty bugged Mattingly. To keep his job, he knew he had to win the NL West, and probably go deep into the postseason. To do that, he had to inspire players who would be paid ungodly amounts of money even if they lost—and who perhaps would be there long after he was gone—to care about winning as much as he did. Some never would, no matter how hard he tried to convince them otherwise. He knew that.

It wasn’t as if any of these Dodgers
wanted
to lose. Evolution dictates that, on a primal level, human beings are hardwired to want to beat nearby competition as a matter of life and death. (And being rich didn’t make striking out any less embarrassing.) But most of these players had never won anything, and trying to describe the magnificence of something they’d never experienced was like trying to sell chocolate to someone with no taste buds. While baseball can be fraught with deep, tortured attachment for lifelong fans, some of these players had been Dodgers for a matter of weeks and had no emotional investment in the team or the city of Los Angeles. They weren’t all like that, but to the mercenaries baseball would always be just a job.

Before Greinke’s April 11 start in San Diego, Mattingly arrived at his office in the visiting clubhouse at Petco Park and fiddled around with his lineup card before posting it on a wall in the locker room:

Matt Kemp was struggling in his return from shoulder surgery and had collected just five hits in thirty at-bats in the first week of the season, with eight strikeouts. But it was way too early to consider dropping him from third in the batting order. Gonzalez was entrenched behind Kemp in the cleanup spot. But other than those two slots, Mattingly was juggling: every other spot in the batting order had already seen more than one name.

In some ways, managing less talented, younger players under the dysfunctional pall of bankruptcy was easier for Mattingly than culling through his new roster of high-profile veterans.
“We had a lot of guys making less money that were fighting as they were reaching free agency,” Mattingly said of his years managing under McCourt. “We didn’t have quite the resumes in our clubhouse, so we had to do the little things better than everyone else. Play to the top of our capabilities, basically, and get some breaks along the way to be able to compete.”

The new Dodgers would not be out-talented by anyone. But Mattingly worried they could be outplayed every night. Motivation was something that couldn’t be taught. Mattingly knew Kershaw was in talks to sign a contract extension for hundreds of millions of dollars, but he also understood that Kershaw’s payday wouldn’t change his work ethic or how badly he wanted to win. If anything, the kid would only push himself harder so he could feel like he was earning his keep. That edge was something Mattingly couldn’t will upon his men, especially the ones who had already been paid. It either came from within or it didn’t exist.
“They need to be self-motivated, number one,” Mattingly said. “And they have to want to win. Some of these guys have already reached that carrot financially but now what else is there? There’s gotta be more than that. Because there’s a lot of people out there who are rich who aren’t necessarily happy or fulfilled, and there’s a lot of people out there who don’t have money that are.”

What kept Mattingly up nights was the minutiae he feared would saddle the Dodgers with dumb losses, the nebulous stuff that cost good people their jobs when added up but was rarely considered in contract
negotiations. Things like remembering to throw a ball low enough so a teammate could cut it off on its way to home plate if necessary; taking a walk and passing the baton to the next guy; showing up early without being asked to field more grounders after a defensive clunker—basic fundamentals talented players didn’t need to bother themselves with to be handed a check with a lot of zeroes on the end of it. The Padres entered the 2013 season with a payroll hovering around $70 million, or less than a third of the Dodgers’ dole. To compete, they had no choice but to bust their asses. Mattingly worried about the Dodgers’ want. As he looked around the clubhouse, it was starting to become clear that the guys he needed the most were the ones who needed him the least.

•  •  •

Don Mattingly had loved baseball his whole life, and baseball had loved him right back. It wasn’t just that he was so good at it from the time he was a young child, though that had helped. He got hooked on the subtle parts of the game: the challenge of having to face a different pitcher every night, the focus and concentration it took to stand in the batter’s box and hit a 95 mph fastball. He clung to the idea that if he got good enough at hitting these tiny dancing spheres that were in the air for only one second, he could make a life out of it, and get paid to play a children’s game every day for almost nine months out of the year for decades.

Mattingly grew up in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest of five children. His father, Bill, delivered mail to support the family. He attended all of his son’s ball games and never raised his voice. His mother, Mary, stayed home to raise the family. As the star first baseman in a proud midwestern town, Mattingly lived the dream adolescence as a high school jock hero, leading Reitz Memorial to fifty-nine straight wins and a state championship. The left-hander hit .463 as a prep, and still holds the Indiana state record for career triples, with twenty-five. Indiana State signed him to a scholarship, but when the Yankees took him in the nineteenth round of the 1979 draft, he begged off college and set out for A-ball.

Mattingly hit right away in the minors, but the Yankees thought he might be too scrawny to play first base in the big leagues. At six feet tall, 175 pounds, Mattingly was on the small side for a first baseman, and coaches considered shifting him over to play second. But like shortstops and third basemen, second basemen are almost never left-handed, because it’s so difficult to turn double plays goofy-footed. Mattingly was ambidextrous, though, a talent he put on display later as manager of the Dodgers when he fielded throws at first base during batting practice with a righty’s glove. In a testament to his physicality, had the Yankees moved him over to play second he would have covered the position with his off hand.

In the end, though, they thought better of making that change. And it was a good decision, too, because Mattingly was just as good at picking throws out of the dirt at first as he was at whacking line drives. The Yankees called up Mattingly for some quick licks at the end of the 1982 season, when he was just twenty-one years old. In his first full year in the majors two years later, he hit twenty-three home runs and won the American League batting title. He earned the MVP award the following year as an encore. In 1987, he homered in eight straight games and hit an incredible six grand slams, still a major-league record. (By comparison, the entire Dodgers team would hit one grand slam in 2013.)

During his time with the Yankees, Mattingly showed up to work each day and went about his business with a quiet dignity that endeared him to millions. Although the team included more exciting players like Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, television and radio commercials implored fans to come to Yankee Stadium to watch Donnie Baseball. He played hurt and he played sick. And no matter how high his star ascended, he never quite shook his underdog status, as the slightly undersized son of a mailman. Perhaps it was his noted ability to keep an even keel in the Bronx Zoo that had qualified him to run the Dodgers despite having no managerial experience whatsoever when he was hired. After playing under Yankees owner George Steinbrenner
and managers Billy Martin and Lou Piniella for the Bombers, Mattingly seemed to have reached the point where it would take an actual bomb to faze him. That’s not to say he was a robot. Toward the end of his tenth season with the Yankees he decided to grow a mullet to match his famous mustache. When the club’s management asked him to cut his hair to adhere to the organization’s famously strict grooming policy, Mattingly refused. He was pulled from the lineup, benched, and fined. Lest anyone confuse his levelheadedness with resigned acquiescence to bullshit, following the game he complained to reporters that the club’s general manager, Gene Michael, only wanted players who were puppets, and suggested he might not belong in the organization anymore.
“He hardly ever gets mad,” said his son Preston. “But when he does, man, look out.” (Mattingly cut his hair and stayed.)

As a late-round draft pick who became an idol in America’s biggest city, Mattingly had all the requirements of a folk hero. But he did not want to be defined by the one thing he wasn’t. In his mind, the truest measure of a man was how his children felt about him. During his playing days, a generation of young baseball fans grew up wanting to be just like him. He worried that if he kept on playing for them, his own sons wouldn’t know him. While he was a Yankee, he and his first wife, Kim, made a home for their three young sons across the Hudson River in Tenafly, New Jersey. But the brutal nature of his baseball schedule meant that half his nights were spent in hotel rooms scattered across the country. Mattingly hated missing months of his kids’ lives every year. So he made a decision.
“Everybody always thinks it was my back,” Mattingly told ESPN later, about why he retired. “But it was really about my kids. I had kind of figured how to play with the back. I went a couple of years where I couldn’t find my swing, I was messing with different stances, and a couple years were lean for me. But the last year, I was rolling. I was really crushing.” After the 1995 season, the Yankees offered him a multiyear contract. He turned it down. His eldest son, Taylor, was ten. Preston was eight, and the youngest, Jordon, was four. “If I re-signed, Taylor was going to be in
high school, Preston was going to be right there,” he said. “And I knew they weren’t going to know me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live my life with them not knowing me.”

So at age thirty-four, Mattingly retired and moved back to Evansville. And because he was still a young man and he didn’t know what else to do, he bought an RV so he could drive his boys all over the country so they could see all the things he’d seen—and many things he hadn’t. He stayed away from the big leagues for nine years, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t wanted. Steinbrenner had tried to lure him into joining the Yankees coaching staff, to no avail. Mattingly wanted to be with his boys. From 1997 to 2003 the Yankees’ boss was able to coax him into working as a special hitting instructor during spring training with the idea that if he just got Mattingly back into those pinstripes, even for a couple of weeks a year, Donnie would someday crave an even bigger role. The Boss was right. The year Taylor turned nineteen and Preston hit seventeen, Mattingly accepted a position as the Yankees’ hitting coach under Torre.
“Before he took the job he asked us if it was okay if he went back,” said Preston. “We wanted him to. We pushed him to do it.” Mattingly coached the Yankees for four years, until Torre wore out his welcome with management and went to Los Angeles. Mattingly interviewed for Torre’s old job, but when the position went to another former Yankee, Joe Girardi, Mattingly followed Torre out west and became the Dodgers’ hitting coach. Mattingly’s hard luck continued. The year after he and Torre left for L.A., Girardi’s Yankees won another title.

There was a silver lining attached to Mattingly’s pilgrimage west, however. What no one knew then was that part of the reason Mattingly was talked into moving three thousand miles away was that he was promised he would succeed Torre when Torre retired, despite never having managed before. Mattingly had already accomplished enough in his career and didn’t need to prove anything. With his children mostly grown, his reason for becoming a coach was simple.
“I liked helping guys,” said Mattingly. “I think at the end of my career
I had a good feel for hitting. I had a good vision of—I could tell good swings from guys that didn’t have good swings. [Lou] Piniella taught me how the swing worked. And how one thing creates another. I knew mechanically how to break it down, how it pieced together.”

During those three years in Los Angeles under Torre, Mattingly earned the affection of players with his relaxed attitude and approachability. Compared to Torre, third-base coach Larry Bowa, and the Dodgers then bench coach, Bob Schaefer, Mattingly was the laid-back stepdad who didn’t have to discipline the kids because it wasn’t his job. When Torre walked away after the 2010 season, in part because he was tired of trying to get through to young players he just couldn’t reach, Mattingly would step into a role that was quite different from anything he’d done before. So the Dodgers’ front office made sure his coaching staff was full of former ballplayers who were more than capable of helping him out.