The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse by Molly Knight Read Free Book Online Page B

might want to be general manager of a team someday. So Walter bought the Los Angeles WNBA team, the Sparks, with the idea that she might run it when she was old enough.
    Walter knew that Dodger fans had hated McCourt. He understood their wariness about another rich out-of-towner buying the Dodgers as a business opportunity, and not because he had deep roots in the community. So he went to work to win them back.
    After his group took over, the first significant player contract to come up for renewal was Andre Ethier’s. A right fielder who had beenin the Dodgers organization since he was twenty-three years old, Ethier was a fan favorite, particularly among the women who whistled when his rakish mug was shown on the scoreboard. He had led the team with thirty-one home runs in 2009, the last year the Dodgers made the playoffs. But in the past two seasons his power had almost evaporated. In 2011, at age twenty-nine, he hit just eleven dingers—a lackluster number for a corner outfielder. On the plus side: Ethier was a career .300 hitter against right-handed pitching. Unfortunately, pitchers also threw left-handed. He hit only .230 against southpaws, leading commentators to point out he was best used as a platoon player. The Dodgers’ front office was well aware of his limitations but decided that buying the goodwill of their fan base made more financial sense than paying Ethier what he would have been worth on the open market. Even though he was on the decline, and arguably the club’s tenth-best player at that point, the Dodgers re-signed him to a five-year, $85 million extension that raised eyebrows around the league for its generosity. But the new owners weren’t overpaying an aging outfielder as much as they were purchasing a citywide public service announcement letting fans know the bad times were over.
    A few weeks later, the club made headlines again for another head-scratching investment by offering an unknown, out-of-shape, hotheaded Cuban kid a seven-year, $42 million contract after watching him take a few rounds of batting practice. Though other bids for Yasiel Puig’s services were never made public, gossip around the league was that the dumb new Dodger owners had overpaid once again, offering the twenty-one-year-old outfielder more than double what the next-highest bid was. To outsiders, it seemed like the Dodgers had gone from bankrupt to bloated in a matter of months, and had found more expensive ways to lose.

2
BURN THE SHIPS
    W hen Guggenheim bought the Dodgers out of bankruptcy, they inherited Ned Colletti as the team’s general manager and Don Mattingly as its skipper. Colletti was entering his seventh season in the position, Mattingly his second. When Frank McCourt hired Colletti in November 2005 he became the eleventh GM in Dodgers history—but the seventh in the past eight years. In his first twenty months as owner McCourt had clashed with, and fired, the Dodgers’ two previous general managers, Dan Evans and Paul DePodesta. So when McCourt set out to find his third GM in two years,the Dodgers’ then second baseman, Jeff Kent, made a suggestion. Kent had ownership’s ear because he had grown close to Jamie McCourt through charity work they’d done together to help Los Angeles police officers. He told Jamie that she and her husband should consider interviewing Colletti, a baseball lifer he had gotten to know well while playing for the San Francisco Giants.
    Before joining the Dodgers, Colletti had worked as an assistantgeneral manager under Brian Sabean in San Francisco for nine seasons. Prior to his stint with the rival Giants, Colletti had been with his hometown Cubs for twelve years, maneuvering his way up from press flack to negotiating player salaries for the club’s front office. Intrigued by his pedigree and his familiarity with National League baseball, McCourt asked Colletti to meet with him about the Dodgers’ GM vacancy.McCourt was said to be particularly impressed when Colletti