Authors: Molly Knight
In the end it came together quickly. On that Monday when Kershaw told me he was busy, he was in Florida for a private event thrown by Dodger ownership that had been on the books for weeks. He’d planned on flying home right after. But while he was still in the room, two of the team’s owners cornered him. Since buying the Dodgers in
May 2012, Guggenheim Partners, a financial services firm out of Chicago, had added over $700 million in salary commitments to players. But they worried that if they let Kershaw walk, Dodger fans would never forgive them. The CEO of the company, Mark Walter, considered re-signing Kershaw as one of the Dodgers’ top priorities. That night, two of the Dodgers’ co-owners, Todd Boehly, the president of Walter’s company, and Magic Johnson, the Laker icon, approached Kershaw. “What can we do to get this deal done?” they asked him. They had a jet. They were heading back to Los Angeles and wouldn’t take no for an answer until he agreed to join them. So the three of them hopped on the plane at 11 p.m. and landed in L.A. in the middle of the night. Close ironed out the details of the contract with the club’s front office. After a year of uncertainty, the impasse was over.
But first Kershaw had to take a physical. On Tuesday, the club stuck him in an MRI tube for what felt like forever. They did separate scans on both of his hips, his back, his throwing shoulder, and his elbow. Though Kershaw had never spent a day on the disabled list in his six-year career, $215 million was a lot of money—the most cash the Dodgers had ever promised an athlete, and by a long shot. The five MRIs took four hours. After they all came back clean, Kershaw flew home to Dallas Tuesday night. When I rang his doorbell the next day, Close was finalizing the deal.
I asked Kershaw if he wanted to turn on the news. He shrugged, got up from the table, and walked toward the small television that sat on the marble counter tucked in the far corner of the kitchen. “Isn’t it amazing how fast it gets out?” he said. “Do you want to listen to this or no?” I did. When he flipped on the TV, it was already set to MLB Network. A red “
BREAKING
” banner crawled across the bottom of the screen with news of his contract details. He stood in front of the television alone and watched. His phone continued to buzz. “It’s funny who texts you,” he said. He didn’t want to reply to anyone yet. “As soon as I get started I’ll want to get through all of them.” His iPhone kept lighting up. I asked how many texts he’d received.
“Twenty-nine,” he said. Many of those came from the text chain used by his fantasy football league, which included a dozen of his Dodger teammates.
Another text came in from his childhood friend and current Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford. The two boys had played freshman football together in high school, with Kershaw hiking the ball to Stafford from the center position. Since Stafford had bought a home in Detroit and lived there in the off-season, Kershaw saw him around their old neighborhood only once or twice a year when he came back to visit family. “Congrats,” Stafford wrote. “And you’re buying dinner next time I see you. Well deserved.” Kershaw also heard from his manager Don Mattingly’s son Preston. A high school shortstop out of Evansville, Indiana, the younger Mattingly had been the Dodgers’ supplemental first-round pick in 2006—the club’s compensation for losing free agent pitcher Jeff Weaver to the Angels. Los Angeles took him thirty-first overall, twenty-four picks after they selected Kershaw. The two had played together in the organization’s minor-league system, and remained close friends even though Mattingly never made it to the big leagues. I watched Kershaw watch with rapt attention as the analysts on television discussed his worth. When they began to show highlights, he made a face. “It looks gross to see yourself throwing so much,” he said, as he turned the television off.
It had been three months since the worst game of his life. When Kershaw took the mound in St. Louis for Game 6 of the NLCS, he was supposed to dominate; he had given up just five earned runs total in his last seven starts combined. Kershaw said he had not watched tape of the game, and that he never would. “That was a tough one for me,” he said. “It’s still not easy to digest. We didn’t score but I think if I had pitched better . . .” His voice trailed off. “If I had pitched better and we felt like we were in the game, we might have won. It’s never one person’s fault but it kind of feels that way for me. Who knows if we would have won Game Seven or not, but it definitely stings.”
I asked him if the distance from that night had given him any more
clarity as to what went wrong. But to him there was no mystery. “My stuff just wasn’t very good that day,” he said.
Was there a moment before the game where he felt something was off? “No,” he said. “I usually feel the same. It’s never like, ‘Oh my gosh I’m gonna suck,’ or ‘Oh my gosh I’m gonna dominate.’ Some days you’ll go out there and watch my bullpen and you’ll ask if I even made the high school team. I don’t throw one strike,” he said, shaking his head.
“But then once you get on the mound it’s completely different. Sometimes it’s just really bad for whatever reason. So you own up to it. It was my fault we lost. I pitched bad, bad time to do it.”
We did our interview and then he showed me around his house. We walked back past the Ping-Pong table and into his office. It was littered with baseball memorabilia. One wall had a framed lineup card from his first major-league start: another game against the Cardinals. It turned out that the first big-league batter he ever faced was his future Dodger teammate and good friend Skip Schumaker. He struck him out. Kershaw liked to remind Schumaker every day that he was his first-ever strikeout victim. Schumaker always shot back that Kershaw owed him his career. Those days were over, though: Schumaker was no longer a Dodger. He’d signed with the Reds in the off-season. Kershaw’s friend Nick Punto had moved on, too. Oakland had given him a two-year deal.
Next to the framed lineup card of Kershaw’s first game was the lineup card for his first win. Another wall hoisted his framed all-star jerseys. The ball he hit for a home run on opening day in 2013 sat among other treasures behind a glass case. One of those mementos was a Don Mattingly autograph he acquired as a child, one of the first signatures he ever collected. He opened a closet with binders full of childhood memories his mom had put together for him, and pointed out a fancy desk he had never once used. On that desk sat a poster board Ellen was using to run a pool with her friends to pick the winner of
The Bachelor
television show. Life for Kershaw went on.
Though they didn’t yet have children of their own, the Kershaws loved living across the street from that school. It was two blocks from Ellen’s parents’ home, and half a mile from his mother’s. When the lot next door went up for sale they scooped it up, too, thinking it would make for a perfect yard for their future family. Kershaw pointed out a spot where they might add a pool. “All of my friends from home are single but in baseball everyone has kids,” he said. Because he’d been in the league for six seasons it was often difficult to remember he was still just twenty-five years old. Sometimes Kershaw ventured across the street to shoot hoops on the school’s playground. He didn’t think any of the children knew who he was, or if they did, they weren’t impressed. It was Dallas, after all. He had been a little boy here once, too, and had cheered his heart out for the Rangers. As an adult, he wore number 22 as an homage to his favorite player, former Texas first baseman Will Clark.
As he stood in his backyard and watched the kids play, the enormity of the contract he just signed seemed to hit him. In a few hours, Ellen would return and some high school buddies would come over and barbecue to help him celebrate. Twelve months later he and Ellen would welcome a child of their own, a daughter they named Cali Ann.
“I hope to never take for granted the amount of money I was given and hope I can help a lot of people with that,” he said as he walked me out. “That’s ultimately what you’ll be judged for at the end of your career—how much of an impact you made off the field.”
He continued.
“As far as on the field, nobody cares about how much money you’re making if you perform,” he said. “Mike Trout made five hundred thousand dollars last year and he’s the best player in the game. Nobody really cares how much money you’re making if you win a World Series. That’s what the fans want, that’s what we want, that’s what ownership wants, and I think that’s why I signed on. We have a good chance to do that.”
I asked him how his life had changed since he woke up that
morning. He smiled. The money wouldn’t change anything, he said. It wouldn’t make him soft.
“Obviously it’s a huge, huge gift and responsibility and I’m really excited about it,” he said. “But at the end of the day it doesn’t change the fact that I have to go out and dominate.”
W
hen Clayton Kershaw hung
up the phone $215 million richer on that January day, it was nothing short of a fiscal miracle. The Dodgers hadn’t been to the World Series in twenty-five years, and, even worse, the club had spent most of the past decade owned by Frank McCourt, a man who forced the storied organization into bankruptcy. Though the Guggenheim Partners had paid $2.15 billion for the Dodgers twenty-two months earlier, what they got was a glorified fixer-upper.
Dodger Stadium may have been one of baseball’s crown jewels, but it was in desperate need of repair. The fifty-year-old ballpark was the third oldest in the major leagues after Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field and it showed. Cracks in its thirteen-story façade seemed to deepen with each passing season, and when the warm summer breeze blew through the concourses, its concrete bones rattled and sighed. During playoff games when fifty-five thousand fans screamed and stomped, it often felt like the old press box, wedged right into the stadium’s heart, would collapse on itself. Flickering bulbs on
the video board made replays difficult to see. Overwhelmed concession stands not equipped with twenty-first-century technology meant that during sellouts hungry customers had to wait in line up to forty-five minutes for a Dodger dog. Even the players suffered along with the masses. The tiny home clubhouse smelled of dirty feet and rotten tobacco, and the air-conditioning often kicked during the dog days of July and August. Manager Don Mattingly’s office was the size of a broom closet. Even worse, the visiting team had no batting cage or weight room of its own, which meant rival players had to walk through the home clubhouse to share facilities with Dodger players before and after games. This led to awkward moments of subterfuge when anyone was working on anything he didn’t want the opposition to know.
“It was just really, really weird,” Mattingly said.
After taking over, the new owners vowed to pour a hundred million dollars into stadium improvements right away as a show of good faith to fans. With that kind of cash in the hole, they thought they’d be able to dazzle patrons and players alike with state-of-the-art upgrades and fancy new fan attractions. (Or at the bare minimum, fix the cell phone towers behind center field so that it was possible to send a text message during a well-attended game.) But then they got reports back from the engineers who inspected the place. Their holy cathedral on the hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles had biblical sewage and electrical problems. “Dodger Stadium is historic—which is great—but when you use that word to refer to plumbing and wiring,
historic
is not a good word,” said team president Stan Kasten.
“I wanted to do all these things and they told me, ‘Stan, if you plug in one more toaster the whole stadium will blow up.’ ” The Guggenheim group realized that despite its fancy high-tech ambitions the first round of renovations would have to go toward replacing lightbulbs and toilets.
But the new owners were in it to have fun. So after replacing the scoreboard and constructing bigger batting cages, weight rooms, and a centrally air-conditioned home clubhouse that was twice the size of the old one, they built themselves their own private bunker under the
stadium and fortified it with liquor and flat-screen televisions. They planned to celebrate many championships there.
The town’s beloved Lakers had won five titles in the past twelve seasons under the twinkling eye of the benevolent Dr. Jerry Buss, a man whose penchant for trotting out championship team after championship team led many to argue he was the best professional sports team owner ever.
Just winning, however, wasn’t enough for Guggenheim. The Lakers had captured the attention of a city where actual movie stars roamed free in their natural habitat by showcasing the game’s biggest superstars year in and year out. The “Showtime” era of the eighties and early nineties featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson gave way to the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal “Lake Show.” Supermodels, pop stars, and Oscar winners became courtside fixtures because nothing validates famous people more than being around other famous people.
Since the Lakers were already a global brand synonymous with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the new Dodger owners had the blueprint already laid out for them. To win over the citizens of the entertainment capital of the universe and surpass the Yankees as Major League Baseball’s premier franchise they would first have to field a team with enough star power to impress folks in Hollywood. In doing so, they hoped to captivate a nation obsessed with celebrity and attract millions of new fans with their winning ways. And if becoming the loathsome Big Bad Wolf to millions more was the tax they paid on the path to glory, then so be it. They wanted to become the Lakers on grass. Only three miles separated Dodger Stadium from Staples Center, the Lakers’ home court. Under McCourt, that gap would have taken light-years to cross. The Guggenheim group set out to bridge it immediately. But before the Dodgers had any prayer of competing with the Lakers, they had to dig themselves out of an even bigger hole.
• • •
When Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles before the 1958 season, he was called a traitor in New York and a crazy person everywhere else. At the time O’Malley won the approval to relocate his team to L.A., the Dodgers’ closest opponent would have been the St. Louis Cardinals, some sixteen hundred miles away. O’Malley convinced the Dodgers’ archrival, the New York Giants, to move from upper Manhattan to California, too, and the two clubs launched Major League Baseball on the West Coast. Relocating the Dodgers three thousand miles away was a huge gamble, but O’Malley had long seen opportunity where others were tripped up by uncertainty. After all, he had been part of the group in 1945 that risked the franchise by signing Jackie Robinson. In addition to breaking the color barrier for generations of black baseball players to come, the iconic Robinson also went on to become a six-time all-star and National League MVP, and helped lead the Dodgers to their first-ever World Series title in 1955.