The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse (25 page)

The conversation between Puig and Uribe had been lighthearted, as Uribe usually took a humorous tack when trying to get his point across. The men were shocked when they learned that the journalist
Puig blew off reported that Dodger players were tired of Puig’s act, as evidenced by the affable Uribe screaming at him. The story gained traction because Puig had been involved in a shouting match with the Giants’ fiery closer, Sergio Romo, earlier that day. Romo had retired Hanley Ramirez to end the previous day’s game, and mocked the Dodgers’ shortstop by mimicking the celebratory hand gesture Ramirez made to teammates after someone did something good. Puig took notice. The next day, Puig flipped his bat after singling off Romo in the ninth inning, then taunted him five batters later as he jogged home to score the go-ahead run off an A. J. Ellis double. The drama between Romo and Puig was, for the most part, benign. Though both men often let their emotions get the better of them on the diamond, their actions toward each other were more annoying than malicious. The story about Puig and Uribe was different. Puig heard the report and was hurt by it. The reporter was fluent in Spanish, so he had understood the conversation with Uribe.
Puig’s friends say the incident ended any possibility of mending his relationship with the press.

The young right fielder’s tiff with the reporter continued into Arizona, and got even more personal. Before the first game of the series, Puig was standing behind home plate waiting his turn during batting practice when a group including retired Diamondbacks great and Cuban American Luis Gonzalez walked up. Puig shook Gonzalez’s hand and said hello, then walked off. Gonzalez was not impressed by Puig’s lack of interest in chatting with him. The reporter then went on TV and said that some felt Puig had disrespected his legendary countryman. The “arrogant” narrative marched on. The Dodgers didn’t hire a professional translator for Puig; they asked one of the farm system’s English teachers, Tim Bravo, to do the job. Bravo became a guardian to Puig, living with him, teaching him how to order American food in a restaurant, grocery shop, and use an ATM.
While Bravo was off working with Puig, his seven-year-old son, Zechariah, was back home in New Mexico battling a rare type of cancer. Puig was so grateful for Bravo helping him transition to life in the United States that he offered
to pay for the boy’s treatments and the family’s living expenses. During the televised report about Puig disrespecting Gonzalez, the reporter also said that Puig often dispatched Bravo to collect phone numbers from women in the crowd during games. Bravo’s wife saw the report and was furious. Though his family needed him during his son’s illness, his wife was okay with him being away to help this extraordinary player assimilate. She knew her husband loved Puig, and that Puig loved him. Plus, it was his job. But now she was hearing on national television that part of that job was to be Puig’s pimp?
No. If that’s what you’re doing you have to come home,
she told him. So Bravo quit.

The report about the phone numbers created even stickier problems for
Puig, who had quietly been in an on-off relationship with the daughter of a Dodgers minor-league instructor for most of his year in the United States. The young woman was pregnant with his child. Whether or not Puig was carousing didn’t matter. Puig’s teammates thought the dispatch was unfair. Even those around the team who thought Puig’s relationship with a coach’s daughter was a potential train wreck agreed the report was unnecessary and offside. To Puig, this story hurt worse than the fastball he took off the nose from Ian Kennedy. Losing Bravo devastated him. What little trust he had left in the media was gone. The Dodgers beat writers paid the price. His petulance baffled many on the beat who felt they’d done nothing but praise him since his call-up. And it was true. While it would be hard to blame a guy for not wanting to talk about being in a slump, Puig was having the best first month for a rookie since the Great Depression, yet he seemed to detest the very people who reached for superlatives to describe his stellar play.

And it wasn’t as if having an opinion on Puig was optional. The Luis Gonzalez incident was all the ammunition Puig’s detractors needed to prove he had no respect for the game, which was the sport’s gravest sin. Though baseball doesn’t request that its players bash opponents’ heads in, in many ways the game is more tribal than football, and rookies are expected to genuflect before old-timers to gain admittance to the sport’s inner sanctum. It went back to the fundamental
tenet on which the Diamondbacks were built: that the way one played the game was more important than the result. While Gonzalez is not a Hall of Famer, he is the best player in the young franchise’s history. Puig’s perceived disrespect of him infuriated the Arizona fans even more. One NL all-star pitcher summed up how the rest of the league felt about Puig in a text message to a Dodger starter.
“I love him. I love watching him play. But I can’t fucking stand him.”

A debate raged between those who said Puig blew off Gonzalez on purpose because he felt like he was more important than anyone who came before him, and others who argued that the kid had no idea who the Diamondback legend was since he grew up on a communist island with limited access to Internet. Both sides were wrong. While it’s true that Puig didn’t know Gonzalez was Arizona royalty, he knew the guy being introduced to him was wearing a polo shirt with the Diamondbacks logo on it. After being bad-mouthed repeatedly by Arizona players and hit in the face with a fastball by their pitcher in his first week, Puig wanted nothing to do with any of them. In that way, Puig was more old-school than anyone on either team. He didn’t care who you were:
if you wore Diamondback red you were his sworn enemy.

That hatred was mutual. The only thing Yasiel Puig did better than hit baseballs was get under the skin of opponents. The preposterousness of his background made for no better hero. The way he carried himself on the diamond made for no better villain.

•  •  •

Eight men were suspended for their roles in the Dodgers-Diamondbacks brawl at Dodger Stadium, including Gibson, McGwire, and Mattingly. Ian Kennedy got the worst of it with a ten-game ban. Greinke, Puig, and Montero were fined but not held out of play. Skip Schumaker elected to begin serving his two-game suspension during the last night of the series in Arizona, on July 10.

Because he was suspended, Schumaker wasn’t allowed to be in the Dodgers’ dugout or clubhouse for the game. But since the team was flying home to Los Angeles right after the contest, he had to be at
the ballpark so he could board the bus to the airport when the game was over. So,
Schumaker decided to watch the game from the stands at Chase Field, moving around to different sections during each half inning so no one in the visiting crowd would recognize him. (“As if someone would recognize him!” Nick Punto joked later.) It seemed like a decent plan at first. He didn’t anticipate the game going fourteen innings.

At quarter to midnight, with Schumaker sitting by himself on the aisle in the lower bowl trying not to draw attention, A. J. Ellis stood in the on-deck circle next to Hanley Ramirez, bleary-eyed and exhausted and hoping to break the tie. The game had just inched into its sixth hour, and Ellis’s knees ached from squatting down behind home plate for all 211 of the pitches he had caught that night. The Dodgers had been chasing Arizona the entire season, and now they had a chance to cut the D-backs’ division lead to one and a half games. On the mound for the Diamondbacks in the top of the fourteenth was Josh Collmenter, a long reliever and sometime starter who looked as though he could pitch another fourteen innings. Los Angeles had exhausted its bullpen, and only Jansen and League remained. Ellis knew that if his side didn’t score soon, they’d probably be forced to burn the following day’s starting pitcher.

Between innings, the Dodgers’ catcher had received a scouting report on Collmenter from Mark Ellis.
“If the ball’s away, it’s cutting,” Ellis told him. “But if it’s in it’ll stay straight.” A. J. Ellis was swinging a hot bat. In the ninth inning, he had collected the two-out, game-tying base hit. But few in the National League were as hot as Hanley Ramirez. For all the attention Puig got for bringing the Dodgers back, Ramirez was the real catalyst. The slugging shortstop would play in eighty-six games for the Dodgers in 2013. The club went 55-31 in those contests, and 37-39 without him. That he was more valuable than even Puig was due to the fact that shortstop tends to be an anemic position offensively. Ramirez hammered the ball. In the thirty games since he had returned from the disabled list on June 4, he hit .398 with six home
runs and a .694 slugging percentage. Those gaudy numbers were no fluke. Ramirez looked like the player he was when he hit .342 and won a batting title at age twenty-five for the Marlins in 2009. Nobody had noticed that Ramirez was quietly the team’s MVP because his return to health happened the day after Puig’s call-up.

While the Boston trade had grabbed all the headlines in August 2012, the Dodgers’ move to acquire Ramirez a month earlier seemed poised to have an even bigger impact. At twenty-nine years old, Ramirez was the second-best-hitting shortstop in the majors, just a smidge behind the Rockies’ superstar Troy Tulowitzki. After coming to the Marlins in a trade that sent his future teammate Josh Beckett to the Red Sox, Ramirez flourished in Miami, winning the Rookie of the Year award in 2006, and finishing second in MVP balloting in 2009. But injuries and an attitude that could most generously be described as apathetic wrecked his final two seasons with the Marlins, who, in the end, became more than willing to dump him. Ramirez’s time in Florida was both offense-happy and offensive. He hit .342 with twenty-four home runs one year, and stole fifty-one bases twice. He was also benched for loafing after baseballs on defense, got into regular screaming matches with coaches, and came to public fisticuffs with his double-play partner, Dan Uggla. In his last half season with the Marlins, he dogged his way into hitting .246. When he wanted to, Hanley Ramirez could hit a baseball as hard as anyone in the major leagues, except for maybe his former teammate Miguel Cabrera. The ball off his bat screamed like a shotgun blast. But when he was in a mood, the mercurial shortstop had a reputation for phoning it in. Coming into the 2013 season, no one was sure which Ramirez the Dodgers would get.

His Miami malaise was not without merit. After all, he’d suited up for the Marlins’ controversial owner, Jeffrey Loria, for his entire career. Loria had given McCourt a fight in the worst-owner sweepstakes, persuading Miami taxpayers to buy his team a new stadium by promising to field a competitive team, only to slash payroll by selling off all his good players once he got his ballpark. With two and a half years left on
his Marlins contract, Ramirez feared he would be left to rot. Sensing a rare opportunity to land one of the best hitters in the game for fifty cents on the dollar, the Dodgers gave up Nate Eovaldi, a solid but not otherworldly young pitching prospect, to get him. Colletti and Kasten were optimistic that a change of scenery would do wonders for the sulking shortstop.

Ramirez arrived in Los Angeles acting like a hostage who had been freed. He showed up every day with a grin on his face and often talked about how all he wanted to do was help his team win. He was affectionate with teammates, granted interviews to reporters, and even posted cheesy inspirational quotes under the headline “Attitude is everything!” on his social media accounts. Many wondered if this happy-go-lucky chap was the same guy who almost got decked in his own clubhouse in Miami more than once.

People had often asked Ramirez about his unusual first name. It was an accident.
His mother had wanted to name him Juan Jose, and call him J.J. for short. His father objected. “Too many
J
’s for him,” said Ramirez. His grandmother had an idea. A voracious reader of Shakespeare, she loved the tale of a man who could never make up his mind about what he wanted to do. She told her son to name the baby Hamlet. So they did. But the clerk who filled out his birth certificate spelled it wrong. From that day forward, he went by Hanley. “I don’t really know why they didn’t change it back,” said Ramirez. “But that’s okay because I love my name. It’s a good name, right?”

Before he suited up for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, Ramirez had never played for anything meaningful before. The closest his Marlins had ever finished to the top of the NL East was six games back. In his final full season in Miami, his club wound up a pathetic thirty games out of first. But the WBC was different. When he buttoned up that red and blue uniform and took the field with his countrymen, he experienced a sense of pride on the diamond that he’d never felt before. Ramirez didn’t know how different it felt to play in games that mattered. The Dominicans dominated the 2013
tournament, sweeping their way to gold, undefeated. Ramirez had a blast, and friends said it changed him profoundly. He remembered that baseball was supposed to be fun.

Ramirez was the rare athlete who was talented enough to perform in the top 20 percent of hitters in the league while putting in only half the effort. But if he busted his ass, really gave a damn about winning every single at-bat, he could be one of the best in the game. Under the bright blue Los Angeles skies, and with the promise of a fresh start, Ramirez had the best possible opportunity to move forward. But like his intended namesake, the famed fictional prince of Denmark, the choice was his.

The timing was ideal for Ramirez to snap out of his snit and rediscover his old form. He was entering the penultimate year of his contract, and he knew the Guggenheim group was handing out blank checks to superstars. All he had to do was hit. And even though hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing to do in sports, Ramirez didn’t think it would be a problem. He was so locked in at the plate when he bothered to be, so naturally good at driving baseballs to the wall and over it, that many of his teammates thought he was somewhat of a genius, that annoying kid in school who aced every exam without ever studying. The Internet had created a never-ending trove of material for pitchers and batters to sift through to gain a competitive advantage. Ramirez never read scouting reports. He rarely even bothered to find out the names of the pitchers he would have to face in advance of a series, and didn’t believe in watching any film, either of himself or of his opponent.