The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse Read Free

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 moreclarity 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