The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (15 page)

A superb athlete growing up in the suburbs of Orlando, Greinke excelled at just about any sport he tried. As an eight-year-old, he was one of the best tennis players in the country, compiling a 50-0 record before deciding it wasn’t fun anymore and quitting the sport altogether. The pressure he put on himself to be perfect outweighed the sweetness of victory. And so he walked away, and turned his attention to baseball. He thought maybe a team sport, where a loss could not be pinned just on him, might be easier on his psyche. And it was, for a while. He struck out 118 batters in 63 innings his senior year of prep school, and like Kershaw,
was named Gatorade’s National High School Baseball Player of the Year. But unlike Kershaw, Greinke didn’t become a starter until the twelfth grade. Before that, he was a slugging shortstop who fell into pitching by accident when coaches noticed how hard he threw the ball one day and put him on a mound. The Royals took him with the sixth overall pick in the 2002 draft, certain he’d be a star. And even though he had converted into a full-time pitcher, his athleticism on the diamond stood out. His excellent fielding
reminded Colletti of Greg Maddux, who won eighteen Gold Gloves. After he stole second base in
a tie game in September, a reporter asked him if the coaches told him to do it.
“They didn’t tell me not to,” he said.

Greinke’s adjustment to life as a professional baseball player wasn’t easy, however. He had dealt with anxiety since childhood, since those tennis days as an eight-year-old when he’d make himself so nervous before matches he’d remind himself, “Just breathe, Zack,” while choking down the vomit as it rose into his throat. The further he advanced in his career, the worse his anxiety got. His agile mind betrayed him by imagining everything that could go wrong in any given situation. Though he had some of the best pure stuff of any pitcher in baseball, he analyzed and reanalyzed every hitter’s tendencies as if the key to his success lay not in his strengths but in their weaknesses. Greinke’s intellect was his greatest asset and his biggest obstacle. “Sometimes,” he said,
“I try too hard and it backfires.”

Greinke envied teammates who didn’t think at all. In his second season with the Royals, he lost seventeen games, the most of any pitcher in the American League. By the time the 2006 season rolled around, his anxiety became so debilitating that he considered retiring at twenty-two years old. Two weeks after reporting to spring training that year, he told the Royals’ brass he could no longer continue.
On the mound, he was fine. Always. But he hated all the downtime that being a ballplayer entailed. Showing up to the ballpark five hours before each game and having to deal with writers and other people he didn’t know or trust was as agonizing as waiting four days between each start. There was too much time to think. Unhappy with his routine, how antsy it made him to just sit and stew for a living, day after day, he thought about asking the Royals to convert him back to a position player so he could play every day. But there was no shot of that happening, not with his talent on the mound.

So, he told his bosses he needed a break. And he walked away from baseball, maybe forever if that’s how long it took, to get his head right.
He devoured self-help books with little results. Depression had run in his family, but he didn’t think that was what was wrong with him. He
had never thought of taking his own life, not even once. But then he saw a doctor who put a name on the cause of his suffering.
Social anxiety disorder.
The label didn’t matter much, except that a diagnosis of a genuine illness meant that perhaps there was medicine out there that could fix it. By the time that doctor handed him a piece of paper with the word “Zoloft” scribbled on it, Greinke was ready to try anything. Two months later he picked up a baseball again, only this time the noise that pushed him out of the game was just a whisper. He could deal with whispers. And far from feeling embarrassed that he needed an antidepressant, his only regret was that he hadn’t gone on the drug sooner. Three years after his diagnosis he won the American League’s Cy Young Award.

As Greinke inched toward free agency, he knew the Royals didn’t have the money to keep him. Kansas City wasn’t going to let him walk with no consolation prize, however, and Greinke hoped they would trade him for prospects before the final year of his contract came up. The Royals had finished last or second to last in the AL Central in each of his first six seasons with the team, and he was sick of losing. So Greinke, ever the patron saint of honesty, stood in front of his locker, faced the cameras, cleared his throat, and said he wanted out. He was traded to Milwaukee. Years later, Greinke addressed the situation with his usual candor.
“I was pretty rude on my way out,” Greinke said. “But I wanted to be traded, so I had to be rude.”

Greinke didn’t like to talk about his anxiety disorder. He hated how it was mentioned in every lengthy story written about him, as if it were just another fact to rattle off, like his height or his hometown or his ERA. When Greinke showed up to his first spring training with the Dodgers in 2013, he addressed the media about his past struggles in hopes that he would never have to talk about them again. “In life you have to do things you don’t want to do, but I was raised to do what you enjoy doing, whether you are making several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or thirty thousand per year,” Greinke said. “That was my thought: Why am I putting myself through torture
when I didn’t really want to do it? I mean, I enjoyed playing but everything else that went with it, I didn’t.”

But it wasn’t just the playing he enjoyed. Zack Greinke loved baseball more than perhaps anyone else in the sport. No major-league games to watch on television? No problem. He’d flip on a college contest and scout the players—thinking, thinking, always thinking—and anticipate who he might face one day. Hell, he even went to watch high school games, too, if his schedule allowed it. As the most talented pitcher on the free agent market in November 2012, Greinke had many suitors. He chose the Dodgers not just because they offered him a lot of money and had a good chance of winning, but also because he wanted to play for a National League team because he loved hitting so much. When he sat down with Stan Kasten to discuss signing with Los Angeles, he praised the club’s most recent first-round draft pick, a high school shortstop named Corey Seager. (Greinke was right. The Dodgers stole Seager with the eighteenth pick overall, and the lanky kid tore his way through the minors and entered the 2015 season as one of baseball’s top-five prospects.) A team’s intelligence in the draft room mattered to Greinke when he set out to choose whom he would play for. Only a few clubs could afford his salary, of course, but he wanted to win. And if two teams offered him the same amount of money, Greinke would choose the club with the more competent front office—which he didn’t mind saying out loud to members of those front offices.
Kasten later called his meeting with Greinke the best, most interesting sit-down he’d ever had with a player in his thirty-plus years working in sports.

After Greinke signed with the Dodgers, baseball experts questioned whether he would wilt under the bright lights of a big city. Those who knew him and were well acquainted with his fierce competitiveness chuckled at the predictions of armchair psychologists and their weak grasp of the nuances of anxiety. His past afflictions had nothing to do with sold-out stadiums. After all, he’d quit the Royals, who in 2005 had played in front of an average home crowd of 17,000 people every night, second lowest in MLB. And anyway, that was eight seasons ago.

Greinke thought he might be a general manager someday, which was another thing about him that didn’t jibe with the perception that he was an oddball who lived alone in a forest and came out of isolation to pitch every fifth day. He loved the strategy of the game, the cost-benefit analysis of signing certain players, and the way a twenty-five-man roster had to be solved like a puzzle. But a GM would have to socialize and schmooze with people for a living like Colletti, himself a former PR man. So Greinke resolved that one day he would run a team without anyone knowing it, and hire a good talker to deal with the media for him. And if he decided against taking a front-office job, because the hours were so long, he had a backup plan when he retired.
“I could be in the lawn business, mowing grass,” he said. “I could probably do whatever I want, not needing to get a salary involved. It could be fun. You could be outside a bunch and if you’re running your own business you could make your own hours. Like if you needed a day off sometimes you could take a day off pretty easily.”

As fun as lawn care sounded to Greinke, it was difficult to imagine him ever staying away from baseball for any length of time. He was so obsessed with it, so consumed with uncovering the game’s mysteries, that the first thing he did after every start was pull up pitch-charting websites on a clubhouse computer and review the exact location of every ball and strike he had thrown that day, his velocity, the umpire’s strike zone, and what he threw that batters swung at and missed.

•  •  •

With Quentin in a full count and the Dodgers leading the Padres 2–1, Greinke wound up to deliver the at-bat’s deciding pitch, knowing his control was off that day. The lone Padres run had scored when he threw a fastball in the dirt that skipped to the backstop, and he’d cursed himself over it. Now Ellis put down the sign for another fastball, and Greinke rocked and fired. But instead of finding Ellis’s mitt, it tailed away from him and popped Quentin between his left shoulder and elbow, right in the meat of his bicep. At first Quentin just stared at Greinke. And then something in him burst. Perhaps he didn’t like
that Greinke had rolled his eyes, frustrated with himself and annoyed that Quentin had taken three steps toward him. Or maybe Quentin was chafed that Greinke’s body language didn’t display concern for his throbbing arm. Whatever it was, Quentin charged at Greinke, all 240 pounds of him, all blood and guts and rage. Ellis was so stunned he didn’t have time to react to stop him; he chased after him in full catcher’s gear minus his mask, white as a sheet. Hitting a batter on purpose in the middle innings of a one-run game is as unusual as it is stupid. But Quentin was certain it was no accident. So the brawl was on.

When Greinke saw Quentin sprinting at him, he chucked his glove to the ground, in equal parts defiance and resignation, and turned his left side toward home plate so that if there were a collision, his nonthrowing arm would absorb the blow. Though he was fifty pounds lighter than Quentin, he did not flinch. Quentin tackled Greinke and crushed him under his weight. Both benches cleared.

Matt Kemp watched the pitch leave Greinke’s hand from center field, and saw it tail to the right of its intended target and smack Quentin on the arm. He thought it might have been retaliation for his almost getting hit in the face by a pitch in the first inning, but he couldn’t be sure. He and Greinke had been teammates for only six weeks of spring training and nine regular-season games and hadn’t yet said more than two words to each other. As Quentin charged toward Greinke, Kemp sprinted in from the outfield, screaming, looking for payback. Though he arrived too late to stop Greinke from getting squashed, he continued to yell and looked as though he might try to fight the entire San Diego bench.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” he yelled at Padres manager Bud Black, who tried to calm him down. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”

After the heap of bodies on the ground was untangled, Greinke emerged with his shirt untucked and approached the Dodgers head athletic trainer, Sue Falsone, holding his collarbone. “It’s broken,” he said, expressionless. And because Greinke was not prone to hyperbole, his teammates knew it was true. By the time word of the injury reached Kemp, he became unhinged again. He pushed his way back toward the
Padres dugout, which caused both teams to erupt again. Kemp was looking for Quentin, but he was long gone, having been tossed right after he hit Greinke. Even after it was announced that Greinke had indeed suffered a broken collarbone, Quentin held firm in his conviction that the pitcher had it coming. “Myself and Greinke have a history. It dates back a few years. It’s documented,” he said. “There’s a reason I reacted the way I did. It was the final straw.”

Kemp, Greinke, and Hairston were also ejected. Alexi Amarista entered the game to pinch-run for Quentin. A shell-shocked Chris Capuano replaced Greinke, and threw a wild pitch that allowed Amarista to take second. Then, in a 3-2 count, Capuano lobbed a sinker that didn’t sink, and Yonder Alonso singled to center, scoring Amarista to tie the game. With the game still knotted at two in the eighth inning and the pitcher’s spot due up, Mattingly looked down his bench and told Juan Uribe to grab a bat. Dodger fans in attendance groaned. One writer in the press box quipped that perhaps the club would be better off letting relief pitcher Matt Guerrier, who had two at-bats total in his ten-year career, hit for himself. With Luke Gregerson, one of the Padres’ best pitchers, on the mound, the slumping Uribe didn’t appear to have a chance. He worked the count full. And on the sixth pitch of the at-bat, Gregerson hung a slider Uribe did not miss. The ball cleared the left-field fence, untying the game. Uribe sprinted around the bases with his jaw clenched tight, trying to keep the chewing tobacco from falling out of his right cheek. Vin Scully remarked that it looked as if Uribe was trying to hold back tears. His teammates mobbed him. Who better to save this awful game than the best-loved player in the clubhouse, who was coming off two abysmal seasons? The Dodgers held on to win, 3–2, and remained a half game behind the first-place Giants.

Moments after the game, the reality of what was lost in victory sank in. The usually stoic Mattingly let his emotions get the better of him, and snapped at a local reporter who asked about Greinke’s role in the brawl. Kemp was still so incensed hours after the incident that he confronted Quentin in the tunnel under the stadium that led to the
Dodgers’ team bus, shouting obscenities at him in front of teammates’ family members. Further drama was prevented when Padres pitcher Clayton Richard, one of the largest men in baseball, grabbed Kemp by the wrists and restrained him.