Authors: Molly Knight
But Kemp never wanted to be a professional baseball player. No. He was going to play in the NBA. Baseball may have been cool for suburban white boys, or Latin American kids looking to move their families to the United States to enjoy a better life, but it was not Matt Kemp’s first choice. Besides, he was always better at basketball than he was at baseball, and starred for Midwest City High next to future Duke and NBA player Shelden Williams. He thought he had a good shot at making it just as far as Williams. But Williams grew to be six foot nine in high school, while Kemp graduated at six two and a half. So unlike Mattingly or Kershaw or even Ned Colletti, Matt Kemp didn’t choose baseball as much as baseball chose him. Or, more specifically, the Dodgers chose him in the sixth round of the 2003 MLB draft, and offered him $130,000 to sign. That was more money than he and his
mother had ever seen. Years later, after he became an all-star and companies fell over themselves to get him to use their products, he sat at his locker thumbing through boxes of nonslip astronaut-ish socks that an eager sales rep had dropped off for him, unsolicited, and shook his head:
“It’s only after you’re rich that people start giving you free shit,” he said. “There wasn’t nobody around to give me stuff when I was a kid when we couldn’t afford anything.”
Kemp finished his 2005 season with the Dodgers in high-A ball. But his development was so rapid that two months into the following season he was promoted to the big leagues—a remarkable achievement for someone who had been playing baseball full-time for only three years. In 2009, he hit twenty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases, earning himself a Silver Slugger, winning a Gold Glove, and finishing tenth in National League MVP voting.
Then everything fell apart.
Even though Kemp had proven he was good enough to make it to the big leagues and emerge as a star, in his darkest moments during that nightmare 2010 season, he started to feel again as though he had never belonged. His caliber of play in center field seemed to be affected by however he’d done in his last at-bat, making it even more difficult to shake things off. When he struck out, the sting of it seemed to linger in his eyes until his next at-bat, clouding his vision in the outfield until he could somehow redeem himself on offense. That blindness caused him to fall deeper into the abyss. Sometimes, Kemp forgot to back up second base when the Dodgers’ catcher attempted to throw out a runner from stealing, and he appeared to sulk after fly balls he misjudged, allowing them to sail over his head. He spent his days standing alone in the center of a huge field of grass, painfully exposed, as if the handsome man who now posed for Gap ads was still the pudgy, self-conscious boy. Baseball is a meditation on failure. Even Ted Williams, the best hitter in the game’s history, failed to make it to a base more often than succeeded. Besides a bat and a glove, the other tool the game requires most is a short memory. Matt Kemp didn’t have
that.
“So many nights I just went home and cried,” Kemp said later, of that season. He couldn’t shake the boos. He cared too much what others thought.
It was true that a change of scenery might have done the young outfielder some good. While Kemp hadn’t yet reached his full potential on the field, as the boyfriend of the global pop star Rihanna he needed no help realizing the full scope of what playing in Hollywood had to offer. As his relationship with Torre soured and Colletti blasted him publicly, his agent could have demanded a trade, all but forcing Colletti’s hand. But Kemp had a warm relationship with Mattingly, whom he affectionately called Donnie B., and when the Dodgers brass reassured Kemp’s inner circle that Mattingly would succeed Torre, Kemp breathed a sigh of relief.
When Colletti ultimately decided to stick with Kemp and ownership promoted Mattingly, the new skipper knew one of his main objectives was to save the troubled slugger from himself. For outsiders, it was difficult to figure out what the problem was. Kemp was a good-looking, healthy, twenty-five-year-old man dating one of the most beautiful women in the world, getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to play center field for a famous baseball team. But he was miserable. And when Matt Kemp was upset, there was no hiding it. When he played well, he was a great teammate, all smiles and high-fives, perched on the top step of the dugout, snapping off enormous chewing gum bubbles night after night. But when he struggled his misery had a unique way of infecting everyone around him, like some kind of hellacious airborne virus resistant to antibiotics or pep talks. He was not an easy man to read. One night,
he might notice a sick child in the stands, jog over to him unannounced after the game ended, and hand him his cap, cleats, and the jersey off his back. The next day, he might stroll into the clubhouse, notice his name wasn’t written on the lineup card, and yell:
“Trade me to the fucking Astros!” in frustration in front of his teammates.
Still, Mattingly’s relaxed presence and exhausting patience had a
better chance of soothing Kemp than shouting him down did. Kemp returned to spring training in 2011 with a renewed focus, having spent the entire off-season in Phoenix—some four hundred miles from the clubs on the Sunset Strip—hitting, lifting, and running every day. It worked. Kemp obliterated National League pitching that year, leading the league in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and total bases. Any pitch thrown to him on the inner half of the plate was a mistake. That year, twenty-two different pitchers looked at him standing there in the batter’s box and thought, To hell with this, and intentionally walked him, figuring that giving him a free base was better than risking surrendering four. Kemp also
stole forty bases, and finished the season just one home run shy of forty homers and forty steals—a feat that has been accomplished only four times in the game’s history.
• • •
After his huge 2011, Colletti rewarded Kemp with an eight-year, $160 million contract extension before the 2012 season. And even though it was the largest deal in the club’s history up until that point, at the time it seemed that the Dodgers were getting a hometown discount. He had just turned twenty-seven, and Los Angeles had sewed up the rest of his prime. A few months after Kemp signed that contract, the Guggenheim group bought the Dodgers. Kemp had grown up idolizing Magic Johnson and was ecstatic. At the start of the season, the two men appeared on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
together, announcing the triumphant liberation of the Dodgers from bankruptcy.
In 2012 Kemp picked up right where his 2011 campaign left off, homering on opening day and clubbing a Dodger-record twelve home runs in April, on his way to being named the NL’s Player of the Month. Around that time, Scott Boras stood in the front row at Dodger Stadium during batting practice and watched Kemp hit; he marveled at his prowess. But Boras
turned to a reporter and mentioned how the Dodgers ought to consider moving him out of center field or they’d run the risk of his legs crumbling underneath him, like Ken Griffey Jr.’s. Griffey had enjoyed one of the best decades ever to start his career,
and seemed poised to shatter Henry Aaron’s all-time home run record, before a series of hamstring injuries robbed him of the chance. Of course, it was also possible that Boras’s concern for Kemp’s health was really just a clever way to clear a position for his client
Jacoby Ellsbury, Boston’s center fielder, who was about to hit the free agent market. Boras knew the new Dodger owners were rich, but he had yet to taste that Guggenheim dollar. A few weeks later he was proven right. In the Dodgers’ thirty-fourth game of the season, Kemp hit the ball to short and pulled up lame on his way to first base. Mattingly removed him from the game with a left hamstring injury. Despite his protests, he was placed on the disabled list, snapping his consecutive-games-played streak at 399, the longest in baseball. Unable to handle being sidelined, he sat out for the minimum of fifteen days before returning. But it was too fast. He came back for two games, injured it worse, and missed another five weeks. He returned in mid-July, but he wasn’t the same player. The club kept him in center field, and on August 28 he crashed into the outfield wall at Coors Field in Colorado so violently he writhed on the ground for several minutes. The team called it a knee contusion. Kemp sat out for two games, then played nearly every day in September. But he endured lingering shoulder pain from the collision, and hit .220 in the season’s final month. The Dodgers knew his shoulder was injured. But when they cut him open after the season ended, they discovered a torn labrum and rotator cuff damage. Kemp was stunned. He should not have been playing at all.
Entering 2013 with a surgically repaired shoulder, Kemp told reporters he was healthy, confident, and ready to go. But on the inside he was terrified. He could not lift his left arm above his head to reach the top shelf of his locker, let alone extend his heavy wooden bat high enough to drive a baseball with any authority. His new teammate Adrian Gonzalez had undergone the same surgery for a torn labrum two years earlier, and afterward declared that he was no longer a power hitter.
Kemp approached Gonzalez and confided his fear that he would never hit another home run.
It only got worse for him. In mid-May the Dodgers were in Atlanta to face the Braves, and Kemp still had only one home run on the season. An opposing fan began heckling him, telling him that he was horrible at baseball. After a couple of innings of enduring his taunts, Kemp sassed the fan back, retorting that, basically, he was laughing his way to the bank.
A few of Kemp’s teammates heard this and became enraged. It wasn’t just that he was struggling at the plate. Even the best hitters go through slumps, and everyone knew he was coming off a major injury that impacted his ability to hit. It was his effort in center field that drove them nuts. He’d fallen back on old habits, and his terrible at-bats were bleeding into the next half inning and poisoning his ability to concentrate in center field. Some coaches wondered if he just didn’t care about defense. Since repeatable pitching and hitting mechanics are an important key to success, every team’s video department offers playback that can be broken down into milliseconds, so that players can pinpoint the tiniest of hitches that can derail an at-bat, or, in some cases, a career.
To amuse themselves, when Dodger pitchers watched game film they began counting the number of clicks it took Kemp to move when a ball was hit in his general direction.
His response to that Braves fan made a bad week worse. The Dodgers were in last place, and struggling to field nine healthy players each night. And now Matt Kemp, the supposed face of the franchise, was pointing out to some drunk guy that sticks and stones would never break his bones because he would always be rich. A teammate yelled at Kemp to shut up. Kemp did not. More words were exchanged. At a loss for how to curb their center fielder’s downward spiral, the
Dodgers’ front office dispatched a club executive to speak with Kemp’s mother, who attended almost every home game, about what the team might do to help her son. Was he having girl problems? they wondered. Was there something else going on? Whatever it was, they just wanted to help. When his mother told him that a team employee had approached her, Kemp exploded. “You don’t know me!” he screamed at the executive, in front of stunned teammates. “You don’t fucking know me!
Don’t go talking to my mom!” In their attempt to support Kemp, the front office had poked at his deepest, most paranoid fear: that he was alone and the world was against him. With the situation deteriorating fast, the Dodgers panicked. Magic Johnson was in New York fulfilling his duty as a television analyst for ESPN during the NBA playoffs. Feeling that perhaps Johnson was the only one who could calm Kemp down, the team flew him to Los Angeles to meet with the brooding slugger.
After getting swept during that disastrous Atlanta series, the Dodgers set off for Milwaukee looking to turn things around. “Hopefully we’ll get drunk on the plane and tell each other how we really feel,” said one player. Don Mattingly felt sick. His job was to facilitate a winning season by keeping the locker room from imploding, and that wasn’t going very well. It didn’t help matters that after each loss Mattingly knew he would have to return to the stadium the following afternoon, sit in the dugout surrounded by cameras fixed on his face, and answer questions from reporters about whether he thought he was going to be canned. It reached a boiling point when
a respected national columnist wrote a piece speculating that Mattingly’s firing was imminent. Even members of Mattingly’s own family thought he was out. The injuries weren’t Mattingly’s fault; the ghost of Earl Weaver couldn’t have led this wounded club to a championship. But the Guggenheim group did not spend billions on a baseball team to watch it flounder in last place.
Mattingly had proven he could keep his team from rioting during the upheaval of the franchise under McCourt, but his in-game decisions baffled observers. He and Hillman seemed so
transfixed by the double switch that they employed it as much as possible, often pulling bats from games that weren’t yet decided to move a relief pitcher down a few slots in the batting order, only to watch it backfire later. As the noise around his potential firing grew louder, Joe Torre called to console him.
Mattingly had been around the game long enough to know that
any day he pulled on his Dodger uniform could be his last. Milwaukee was his make-or-break series, and he knew it. Colletti flew to Wisconsin, and many wondered if he packed his hatchet in his carry-on. Dodger players felt awful. They loved their skipper and didn’t want him to be punished for their poor performance. With Mattingly’s job hanging in the balance, Kershaw took the mound. The southpaw tossed a complete game, giving up just three hits and a run. Kemp homered for the first time in weeks, and Ethier added another solo shot and a triple.
Then the Dodgers got an unexpected lift. When Greinke hurt himself, the training staff told him he’d miss eight weeks. He replied that he’d be back in two. They split the difference. While Greinke admitted he wasn’t 100 percent, he returned to the mound after being away for just four and a half weeks because he knew the Dodgers needed help. He took the ball in the second game of the Milwaukee series, but wasn’t sharp, giving up five runs on nine hits in just four innings. “I just had no feel out there,” Greinke said afterward. “I made no adjustments. It started out bad and never really got better.” The Dodgers lost, 5–2.