The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse by Molly Knight

when he was with the Rays and later became his teammate. “But after he went to Boston it was like, how is this the same player?”
    A career .300 hitter, Crawford hit just .255 while he battled a wrist injury during his first year with the Red Sox. His on-base percentage plummeted from .356 in 2010 to an awful .289 the following season, and his slugging percentage also fell ninety points. While the number of times he struck out (104) remained identical to the season before, the number of walks he took halved from 46 to 23. More troubling: his stolen base total nosedived from 47 to 18. Every ballplayer’s speed declines as he ages, but this drop-off was staggering. Crawford was justtwenty-nine years old when he signed with the Red Sox. His legs were his livelihood.
    The 2012 season brought even more injury trouble. And after appearing in only thirty-one games, Crawford was shut down for the rest of the year with a torn ligament in his throwing elbow. Of this time in Boston, Crawford said:“For two years I was afraid to smile. Everyone was so uptight.”
    “I started growing grey hairs on my face from the stress,” he told USA Today . “Deep down, it’s like I know I can still play baseball but after being told how much you suck for two years straight, it kind of messes with your mind.”
    But for as much as he wanted out of Boston, Crawford knew the odds of that happening were slim. Not only was his body battered, but he was also still owed $109 million on his current contract. Even if he were healthy and back to torturing other teams with his power and speed, there were only a few clubs in baseball that could afford to take on such a salary commitment, and everyone knew he was no longer worth the money he was due. The severity of his injury meant that in order to be liberated from Boston, Crawford would have to find a team that was both rich enough to pay his fee and crazy enough to want to. Had the Dodgers not been so hell-bent on getting Gonzalez, Crawford might not have gotten out.“I was completely shocked,” Crawford said, of when he was told he was traded. “I thought I was gonna be stuck in Boston for seven years.”
    Forty-eight hours before the trade was announced, Crawford had Tommy John surgery to repair his elbow. The estimated recovery time was six to nine months.
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    After the Boston deal was finalized, a giddy Walter was so excited to bring the players he just bought to Los Angeles that he sent a private jet to Boston to retrieve them. The trade with the Red Sox had added a quarter of a billion dollars in salary to the team’s payroll through the 2018 season. Walter didn’t look at it that way.“I broke it down intoyears and just saw it as thirty-five million over seven years,” he said. “Which really isn’t that bad.” Still, if he was going to pay that much to get Gonzalez, then by God his bat was going to be in the starting lineup that night.
    Walter, Kasten, and Colletti were just as surprised as the players that the trade went through. Crawford and Beckett posed no real threat to wrecking the deal because their contracts were too enormous for teams to want to take on. But for the Dodgers to be able to successfully claim Gonzalez, every single American League team had to pass on the chance to pluck him off the waiver wire, and then so did all the NL clubs with a worse record than Los Angeles’s. Though Kasten knew that only a handful of teams would be able to afford the money left on Gonzalez’s deal, if one of those clubs did claim the first baseman then the entire trade would be blown. He told Walter he thought the Dodgers had a 50 percent chance. When Colletti sent an email to Walter with the final word on whether their waiver claim of Gonzalez had been successful,Walter was so nervous that he let it sit unread in his inbox for half an hour. The news was good.
    Shortly after word of the trade broke, Gonzalez, Beckett, and Punto were already making their way west. In a