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

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 thatmorning. 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.”

1
THE BILLIONAIRE BOYS’ CLUB
    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 onthe 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