The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (20 page)

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Before Puig ever set foot in big-league camp, his legend preceded him. The Dodgers’ longtime clubhouse manager, Mitch Poole, had heard about Puig’s hellion reputation, so he assigned him number 66 in spring training as a joke.
“I thought it’d be funny to give him number
sixty-six to reference 666, like he was Diablo,” said Poole. Puig wanted to wear 14, but that number belonged to Mark Ellis. Poole told Puig that after the regular season started he could pick a different number whenever he was promoted to the majors. Puig wasn’t expected to make the Dodgers’ twenty-five-man roster out of camp in 2013 because he had yet to play a full season in the minors. But he clobbered opposing pitching from the start, collecting thirty hits in twenty-seven spring games, and accounting for more hits than outs en route to a .517 average—best in the Cactus League among players with at least fifty at-bats. Though he was the Dodgers’ best hitter during camp, he was sent to Double-A Chattanooga to get more experience. On his way out, he approached Poole with a new request.
“Papi,” he said with a smile. “Can I keep sixty-six?” He believed the number had brought him luck.

What began as a joke turned into an omen. Puig lived his life like the present moment was the only place safe enough for him to be. He rarely fell asleep before dawn, and when he did, he told friends he slept with one eye open so that he might see evil approaching. He wore the two sixes on his back like a crucifix to ward off the devil.

Puig had a gift for turning mundane baseball tasks into exciting ones. Routine fly balls became circus basket catches. If he was on second base and a ground ball was hit to an infielder, he might try running all the way home. People searched for other baseball players to compare him to, but Puig’s style was more comparable to Michael Jordan’s, or to his hero’s, the Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. For starters, he seemed offended by the idea of hitting singles. Every time he whacked a baseball into the outfield he charged out of the batter’s box as if he could make it to second before anyone caught him. He didn’t just round bases, he blew past them, daring fielders to throw at him to make him retreat. And when he fielded the ball in right and the other team’s runners were circling the bases, he didn’t bother with relaying the ball back toward home plate via a teammate. He believed, with all of his heart, that he could throw a ball four hundred feet faster than any human could run ninety. To take your eyes off Yasiel Puig was
a mistake, because he might do something you’d never see again. Because of its slower pace, Major League Baseball had been having a hard time attracting young fans who were more entertained by football and basketball. Puig was just what the game needed.

Opposing teams who saw how big and strong he was—how he could fling his bat at a baseball traveling 95 mph and three feet out of the strike zone and send it over the outfield fence—swore he was thirty years old. People who engaged him in conversation wondered if he was fifteen. His loud, booming voice entered rooms before he did. It wasn’t uncommon for him to sit in his corner locker and yell “Pow! Pow! Powpowpow!” like machine-gun spray in a video game when he thought that he was not getting enough attention.

Though he hit the ball better than anyone else on their squad during spring training, the Dodgers had no intention of putting Puig on their opening day roster because he wasn’t mature enough emotionally. In a perfect world, the young outfielder would have stayed in the minor leagues for the entire 2013 season so that he could make whatever mistakes he needed to make as far from the limelight as possible and arrive in L.A. the following April a year wiser for it. Some players could handle the pressure of being called up while they’re still young enough to be playing college ball. Kershaw had made his major-league debut in 2008, two months after he turned twenty. But the self-possession Kershaw displayed as a teenager was exceptional; he handled pressure better than many players who were ten years older. Puig was still a kid: his favorite television show was the cartoon
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
During the first week of the season, Don Mattingly was asked why Yasiel Puig didn’t make the Dodgers’ opening day roster despite his obvious talent. “I heard a guy say one time, you feed babies baby food,” Mattingly said.
“You don’t give them steak when they’re six months old.”

A Dodger executive explained it this way:
“Go to YouTube and type in ‘Puig bat flip’ and you’ll see why.”

He was talking about the way Puig disposed of his bat after he hit a baseball with positive results. When he smacked home runs (or
sometimes even singles), Puig flipped his bat high in the air behind him, handle up, barrel down, like a Spanish exclamation point. Opposing pitchers hated the way he celebrated his success against them and often retaliated by buzzing him with high fastballs during his next at-bat. The Dodgers saw it as an annoying extension of the youthful exuberance that made him great. Their tricky task was to get him to cool off the showboating without watering him down into a lesser player. But there was an even greater challenge when it came to Puig, with more serious ramifications: his joy turned to rage at a terrifying rate that he seemed unable to control. When opponents vented their exasperation with his antics, Puig puffed out his chest and hollered back. In the minors, he even dropped his bat to the ground in disgust after a called
strike two
. He was a man of high highs and low lows, the kind of player whose changing moods terrified coaches. It didn’t help his cause that he pouted when he was assigned to Double-A out of training camp.

But with their backs to the wall and their season already circling the drain, the Dodgers in their desperation considered promoting Puig just weeks after Mattingly compared him to an infant. Team officials decided to delay his call-up, however, after he was arrested in the early morning hours of April 28 for doing 97 in a 50 mph zone, and charged with reckless driving, speeding, and driving without proof of insurance. The next day the Dodgers were embarrassed by the Rockies at home, falling 12–2 in the game that Skip Schumaker pitched in relief. Almost a month had passed since Puig’s brush with the law when Colletti went to see him, and perhaps he had endured enough overnight bus rides and Double-A cold-cut spreads to atone for his transgression. While Puig might have done his penance, the Dodgers’ front office was reluctant to promote him unless he was in line for significant playing time. What the young right fielder needed most were at-bats; a warm seat on major-league pine would just delay his maturation by another year.

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That’s where Mike Trout came in. In the year and a half he had been in the big leagues, Trout had already established himself as the best player in baseball. In his first full season with the Angels, the twenty-year-old center fielder became the first player in MLB history to hit 30 home runs, steal 45 bases, and score 125 runs in a season. He reminded many of Mickey Mantle. But at six foot two and 230 pounds, Trout was three inches taller and thirty-five pounds heavier than the Mick. As if his personal accomplishments weren’t enough, he also collected the hit that forced the Dodgers to call up Yasiel Puig.

During the last week of May, the Dodgers and Angels played four straight games, two in Los Angeles then two in Anaheim. The Dodgers had taken the first two games of the series at home, but were trailing in the seventh in the third game, 3–1, when Trout stepped into the batter’s box to lead off the inning.

Maybe it was because Trout was up to bat, or maybe it was just a coincidence. But while Kemp was slowed for most of 2012 with injuries, Trout had established himself as the best center fielder in Southern California, winning the American League’s Rookie of the Year award and finishing second in MVP voting. When Trout whacked a 1-2 fastball from Dodgers reliever Javy Guerra toward the wall in right-center field, Kemp took off sprinting after it with more ferocity than usual. His first two steps toward the ball were fine. But when he took his third stride he pulled up lame and slowed into a trot. At first glance it wasn’t clear what was wrong with Kemp; his face registered no pain, and he didn’t grab at any part of his body. The ball ricocheted off the top of the wall and bounced into his glove, and he chucked it back into the infield well after Trout had arrived at second base. It wasn’t until Guerra was removed from the game two batters later that anyone knew Kemp was injured. He motioned toward the dugout, and one of the Dodgers’ trainers jogged out to talk with him during the pitching change. After some discussion, Kemp left the field, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him. Someone in the Dodgers’ dugout yelled
out to Schumaker, who was playing second, that they needed to move him to center, so he had better grab an outfielder’s glove.

“What happened?” Schumaker asked Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire as Schumaker approached the dugout.

“I don’t know,” said McGwire as he handed him a bigger glove. Schumaker shook his head. If Kemp’s injury was bad enough to require a trip to the disabled list, he would become the twelfth Dodger to land on the DL in the club’s first fifty-one games. The team had only twenty-five men on its roster: the wounded almost outnumbered the well. The Angels held on to win the game, 4–3. The Dodgers remained in last place, trailing the division-leading Arizona Diamondbacks by seven and a half games.

When the club announced that Kemp pulled a hamstring, yet again, the postgame locker room gave off an even more morose vibe than usual. “It’s not as bad as last year,” Kemp said after the game, and he may have believed it. “But you’ve got to take it easy and make sure you’re careful with it because it can get worse. I’d rather maybe miss a couple days or whatever and not miss a month like I did last year.” When Kemp hurt himself chasing down Trout’s hit, he could not have imagined it would trigger a sequence of events that threatened his job.

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At first, Mattingly tried to deny Puig was on the way to L.A. by suggesting instead that the Dodgers needed someone who could fill Kemp’s position. “Obviously we’ll need a player who can play center,” Mattingly said. That was true: the loss of Kemp meant Los Angeles didn’t have a true center fielder on its roster, as Puig’s natural position was right. The Chattanooga Lookouts also featured a young center-field prospect named Joc Pederson, who had been the Dodgers’ eleventh-round pick in the 2010 draft out of high school. He was better than where he was selected, though, and the club gave him the second-highest bonus of any of the players they drafted that year, hoping he would sign with them instead of going to play ball at the University of
Southern California, as his father had. A year and a half younger than Puig, Pederson entered the 2013 season as the Dodgers’ fourth-best prospect according to
Baseball America
, and the youngest member of the Lookouts. Pederson was a better defender in center than Kemp was, and his arm was just as good. But he appeared overmatched in the batter’s box and was striking out in 25 percent of his plate appearances versus Double-A pitching. To give themselves more time to mull their decision on Puig, the Dodgers promoted outfielder Alex Castellanos from Triple-A Albuquerque as a stopgap and headed off to Colorado for a series with the Rockies on the first weekend of June.

Privately, the front office had settled on Puig. The week before the club called him up, Kasten flew to Chattanooga and pleaded with the young outfielder to behave.
“Please,” said Kasten. “Do it for me.” While there were doubts that Puig was ready to become a starting outfielder in the big leagues, the club had little choice but to rush him. The Dodgers were not only losing, they were playing the kind of snoozy, uninspired ball that horrified their new owners, whose main objective was to showcase stars on their upcoming multibillion-dollar cable network. Puig was raw, sure, but he played like he had bumblebees in his pants. Even if he failed, he would not be boring. The front office had hoped he would roust the club from its season-long dirt nap. The decision to promote Puig was made even easier three days later when Carl Crawford reached out and slapped a ball down the left-field line at Coors Field, sprinted around first base, and grabbed the back of his right leg on his way to second. Hamstring injuries were now spreading through the Dodgers’ clubhouse like a nasty flu bug. On the morning of May 29, there had been no roster spot for Puig. But in the span of seventy-two hours, the Dodgers lost both Kemp and Crawford to the disabled list. Puig flew in to Los Angeles while the club was still in Colorado, and was told to keep his promotion a secret until it was made public the following day. For the next twenty-four hours,
Puig referred to himself as “El Secreto.” As an homage to the secrecy surrounding his call-up, when he was asked to pick a song that would play
in the stadium whenever he walked up to bat, Puig chose a tune by Dominican musician Secreto El Famoso Biberon.

Three hours before his first major-league game on June 3, Puig stood behind home plate during batting practice and fastened white batting gloves tight on his hands as he took in the scene with Mark McGwire. Dodger Stadium hadn’t yet opened its turnstiles to the public for that evening’s game, which meant he was still a mystery to fans. But by the time the last out was recorded, few in the crowd would remember the Dodgers before Puig existed. He had come a long way since Logan White first saw him on that field in Mexico a year earlier when he was overweight and out of shape. Where his body used to contain curves, there were now right angles. The fat around his belly, thighs, and backside had fallen away and been replaced by muscle.

McGwire, who would become a sort of father figure to Puig over the course of the season, quickly
ran through basic English with him, making sure the young Cuban knew how to say “fastball,” “change-up,” and “curve.” As the two sluggers conversed in a language they cobbled together on the fly, Mattingly addressed the media and admitted he had lied about Puig’s call-up. “I was basically bullshitting the whole time,” Mattingly said of his comments the previous week that the team would promote a center fielder instead.