Authors: Molly Knight
Chief among them was pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, a former Dodger pitcher in his eighth season as a coach with the club. Honeycutt was so important to the success of the Dodgers rotation that A. J. Ellis said: “He’s the most indispensable member of the organization.”
Zack Greinke believed that most pitching coaches were either strong at breaking down a hurler’s mechanics or at concocting a game plan. When he joined the Dodgers he was surprised to discover that Honeycutt excelled at both. While watching video, Honeycutt had an uncanny knack for noticing when something was off for one of his guys, be it a slight hitch in his hip rotation or a degree drop in his arm slot imperceptible at first blush. By getting the most out of every arm given to him, he had a gift for resurrecting careers, which might have been one reason Ned
Colletti signed so many broken former closers to fill out the club’s bullpen.
In 2011 the Dodgers lured one of the best base stealers and baserunning coaches of all time, Davey Lopes, away from the Phillies, and his impact was felt right away. Though every first-base coach uses a stopwatch to clock the time it takes between when the pitcher makes
his first move toward home plate and when the ball reaches the catcher’s mitt, Lopes was deft at reading pickoff moves and peppered his base runners with intel to keep them out of danger. But there was another reason the Dodgers were so keen on Lopes. The baserunning guru’s best friend was Matt Kemp’s agent, the former pitcher Dave Stewart. When Lopes came to L.A., Kemp was coming off the worst season of his career, during which he hit .249 and stole 19 bases while being caught 15 times. Stewart was optimistic that Lopes could help Kemp regain his form, and he was right. During Lopes’s first season with the Dodgers, Kemp stole 40 bases in 51 attempts.
Over at third base was Tim Wallach, a man who many thought would be a better choice to manage the Dodgers when Mattingly got the job. Two years before Mattingly took over as skipper, Wallach led the club’s Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes to a franchise-record eighty wins and was named Pacific Coast League manager of the year. Respected for his sharp baseball intellect, Wallach was unaware of the unspoken agreement that Mattingly would succeed Torre and thought he had a shot at becoming the Dodgers’ manager when Torre stepped down. Being overlooked had been a disappointment. Nevertheless, Wallach and Mattingly got along well. Should Mattingly get fired during the season, many thought Wallach would take over as interim manager. As much as Wallach wanted a chance to manage, he didn’t want to be given that opportunity at Mattingly’s expense.
The team got a gift when another ex-player who wanted to be closer to his children fell into its lap. Former superstar slugger Mark McGwire, he of the 583 career home runs, had worked with Cardinal hitters for the previous three seasons to rave reviews. Many exceptional athletes are so naturally gifted that when they try to teach what they do to others they just can’t. McGwire was a rare exception. And because he hit most of his home runs while they were kids, players lined up to receive his secrets. McGwire had starred for St. Louis, and the Cardinals had even named the third deck in left field at Busch Stadium “Big Mac Land” in his honor. But McGwire’s wife and five young
children were living back in Orange County, California, and he missed them. So when the Dodgers offered him their hitting coach position, he jumped at the chance to go home.
While minor on the surface, this move wound up having major implications six months later.
But of all the men surrounding Mattingly, perhaps the most important was his bench coach, Trey Hillman. Since a manager’s typical day is filled with the exhausting balancing act of tap-dancing for media, keeping the front office happy, and massaging player egos, he isn’t able to devote full use of his brain to setting a lineup and studying potential late-game matchups. That’s where bench coaches come in. Hillman had managed in the Yankees’ farm system from 1990 to 2001, and he got to know Mattingly when he came back to the organization as a part-time instructor. After the 2002 season, Hillman moved to Japan to manage the Nippon-Ham Fighters for five years, before the Kansas City Royals hired him as their skipper in the winter of 2007. While the Royals were stuck in a never-ending rebuilding slump thanks to a series of bad drafts and uninspired free agent signings, Hillman was fired six weeks into his third season.
During his brief tenure in Kansas City, Hillman noticed something that began to drive him nuts. The small market Royals hadn’t made the playoffs since 1985 and had pinned their hopes to the influx of prospects rising up through their system, because they couldn’t afford to outspend other teams in free agency. But when Kansas City promoted these youngsters to the big leagues, Hillman realized the kids weren’t as prepared as they could have been had the organization’s farm system been, well, organized. In a perfect world, each team in a club’s minor-league system would use all the same signs and preach identical philosophies on things like advancing runners and defensive positioning, so that when players were called up to the majors they wouldn’t be so overwhelmed with new information. In reality, communication was a mess. Nothing was streamlined. Hillman was certain that every team could benefit from an emphasis on this kind of organizational synthesis. So, jobless and looking to continue his baseball career in a
new capacity, he mailed a folder with his ideas to all thirty teams after the 2010 season ended. The Dodgers had just hired Mattingly as their manager, but they had yet to name a bench coach. When Ned Colletti called Hillman and expressed interest in interviewing him,
Hillman assumed it was for the position of minor-league instructional czar, a post he hoped to create. Hillman met with Colletti and told him his ideas. At the end of the meeting, Colletti surprised him by offering him the job as the Dodgers’ bench coach.
It was a curious hire. A bench coach functions like a first mate, often serving as the manager’s eyes and ears from the dugout, running through strategy and substitution ideas and acting as a sounding board during the tense late-inning decisions that come to define that manager’s competence. Hillman had managerial experience, and he could craft
a mean Excel sheet, but he had never coached in the National League before. To baseball purists, managing in the American League versus the National League was akin to the difference between playing checkers and chess. Because pitchers don’t hit in the AL, there are far fewer in-game substitutions that need to be choreographed to outmaneuver the opposing skipper; and there are seldom any double switches. Mattingly had only ever played in the American League. Hillman had only ever coached in it. Some worried they would be overmatched. Mattingly was well aware of his limitations. So to help himself prepare to be a skipper someday, while he was still just a hitting coach he would sit in front of his television during the playoffs with a stack of note cards and write down what he would do in each scenario that unfolded in front of him.
But while his coaching staff focused on micro, Mattingly’s most important objective was keeping twenty-five grown men who lived in uncomfortably close proximity to one another for nine months out of the year from killing each other. Hillman believed Mattingly was up for the task. In the three years they worked together, the two men became close friends. And, because they were both living away from their families, they bunked together in a rented home in Hermosa Beach and
rode to and from the ballpark together every day. Of Mattingly, Hillman said:
“I’ve never been around someone who always unwaveringly has seen the best in everyone.”
Goodness came naturally to Don Mattingly. Heading into the 2013 season, his unbridled optimism was his greatest attribute. It took him ten days to fly into a rage.
• • •
Zack Greinke wasn’t trying to hit Carlos Quentin. His teammates knew this for certain, because he told them so, and he wasn’t any good at lying. And even if Greinke were capable of massaging the truth—if when he was asked a question he did not want to answer, his dimples didn’t betray him by widening across his face and his dark blue eyes didn’t fixate on the ground like a young child caught in a fib—he would not have wanted to, because he viewed anything other than the truth as a grand waste of time.
Greinke had no energy for suffering fools, either, and, as if channeling Holden Caulfield, he referred to journalists who attempted to butter him up with small talk as phonies and ball washers. When the Dodgers signed Greinke in the winter of 2012, they became World Series favorites that afternoon. A team needs to win three games to advance past the first round of the playoffs, then four victories to make the World Series, then another four to win it all. With Kershaw and Greinke taking the mound twice in each round as the team’s number-one and number-two starters, they could, in theory, do that on their own. The club finally had a Don Drysdale to Kershaw’s Koufax.
After Greinke signed, he
exchanged a few polite text messages with his new catcher, A. J. Ellis, about where he and his wife, Emily, should look to buy a home in L.A. On the morning Greinke threw his first bullpen session for the Dodgers the following spring, Ellis approached him and asked how he liked to warm up. Some pitchers liked to throw nothing but fastballs and curveballs for the first few weeks of training camp and wait until mid-March to mix in their slider because it’s harder on the elbow. When Ellis asked him about how he preferred
to get loose, Greinke smirked and stared at his feet. “I’m pretty easy,” he said. “You go stand over there and I’ll stand over here. I’ll throw the ball and you catch it. Then you throw it back to me.” Ellis couldn’t contain his laughter. He laughed again when, weeks into the season when the Dodgers were stuck in a painful slump, he asked Greinke what roster moves he might make to improve the team. Greinke considered the question carefully, as he always did, then came back to Ellis later with his answer.
“Well, the first thing I’d do is trade you because your value will never be higher,” Greinke said. “And then I’d sign Brian McCann in the off-season to play catcher so we can upgrade the position offensively.” He was serious. Unsure of how to respond, Ellis told him: “Oh yeah? Well, I’d trade you, too.”
Greinke wasn’t trying to be rude. He just lacked the ability to sugarcoat words as they stumbled off his tongue. Once, after Greinke had been riding Ellis hard for being so slow on the base paths that Greinke’s bunts had to be perfect to sacrifice Ellis over, a teammate told Greinke that for every five mean things he said to someone he had to pay one compliment. He was half joking, but Greinke took it to heart. The next day, Greinke approached Ellis between innings and told him he’d done a nice job framing a low pitch.
Ellis wondered what the hell he was talking about. Then he remembered Greinke’s new orders to be nice. He laughed again.
Zack Greinke knew he was different, but he didn’t want to be seen as a jerk. When he threw a pitch that missed too far inside he would often shout, “Look out!” to the batter from the mound. And when a hitter laid off a tough pitch, Greinke would yell, “Good take!”—not to patronize, but because he loved the game so much he couldn’t hide his respect for those who were good at it. (Kershaw followed suit in his own way, sometimes tipping his cap to a hitter who resisted swinging at a nasty borderline strike, too.) When the Dodgers played the Tigers at Comerica Field in Detroit, Greinke, who had spent most of his career in the American League, knew he would face some batters he’d seen many times before, so he tried to mix things up. After he threw a
first-pitch changeup for a called strike to Ian Kinsler, the second baseman stepped out of the box, impressed. Batters tend to look up at the scoreboard after each pitch to check the radar gun reading to help them figure out what type of pitch they just saw. A number in the 90s meant fastball. Eighties could mean changeup or slider; 70s a curveball. But the gun on the scoreboard wasn’t working that day. So when Greinke noticed Kinsler looking around the stadium for help, he began waving his arms at him. “Hey!” he shouted.
“It was a changeup!” Kinsler shook his head and chuckled. “That’s beautiful,” he said, and nodded at Greinke in appreciation.
Some people looked at Greinke and saw a brilliant eccentric with a wicked sense of humor. Others saw something else. When Carlos Quentin stepped into the box against Greinke on that fateful April night, he’d already been plunked by 115 pitches in his short major-league career, including the night before by Dodger reliever Ronald Belisario. Despite playing in only eighty-six games in 2011, he’d led the league in hit-by-pitches with twenty-three. He was hit more times than anyone else in 2012, too, even though he played in only eighty-six games. It was no secret that hitters and pitchers fought for control of the plate, with some batters crowding it to have a better shot at making contact with pitches that were thrown outside. But Quentin’s stance was extreme. He was twenty times more likely to get hit by a pitch than the average batter; he leaned so far over the plate that at least four of the balls that struck him could have been called strikes. Greinke had hit him twice before, but then so had seventeen other pitchers. One had plunked him four times. In fact, Quentin had been hit once in every twenty-four plate appearances, the highest rate of anyone in the history of the game.
It was the bottom of the sixth inning in San Diego, during that glorious time of the year when every team, even the bumbling Padres and their modest payroll, believed they had a chance. With their roster they did not, of course—but perhaps they could hang in for another month. San Diego had beaten its rich rivals two nights before, and could win
the series if it pulled out another victory. So when the club’s big left fielder stepped up to the plate to lead off the inning with his team trailing by a run, he was in position to tie the game with one swing.
Though Greinke had limited the Padres to just one run through the first five innings, he had been frustrated by his lack of command that day. When Greinke was on, which was most of the time, he threw seeds that hit their target some sixty feet away over and over again, like a world champion dart maestro. In his two seasons before coming to L.A., he used a heavy sinker and a tight slider to go 31-11 for contending teams in Milwaukee and Anaheim, with 401 strikeouts in 384 innings. And in 2009, when that slider was so good that he could throw it in any count, to any batter, and know it would not be touched, he posted one of the best seasons for a pitcher this century and won the American League’s Cy Young Award. But what was most remarkable about Zack Greinke was that he was even playing baseball at all.