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

nod to his new Southern California address, Gonzalez wore a soft blue T-shirt with a beaming Mickey Mouse emblazoned across his chest. The city’s sports fans were ecstatic. Some Dodger fanatics even tracked the plane’s flight path online. While Crawford remained in Florida to recover from his surgery, the three able-bodied players were ushered into Dodger Stadium ninety minutes before the game, after the team had already taken batting practice. Their late arrival caused some harried moments for the Dodgers’s clubhouse attendants, but because the team had been working on the deal for weeks, the rush to prepare uniforms for the new players wasn’t as frantic as when Los Angeles had traded with the Red Sox for Manny Ramirez four years earlier. On that day, the Dodgers’ clubhouse manager, Mitch Poole, ran out of time and wasforced to spray-paint Ramirez’s navy blue glove a royal Dodger bluebefore he took the field. Poole had run the Dodgers’ clubhouse for almost thirty years, and even tossed Kirk Gibson his warm-up pitches in the team’s underground batting cage before Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. That these three Boston players were being shuttled across the country by private jet and chauffeured to the stadium in a fancy SUV made Poole chuckle. When the Dodgers traded Mike Piazza and Todd Zeile to the Florida Marlins for Gary Sheffield, Jim Eisenreich, Charles Johnson, and Bobby Bonilla in 1998, Poole was handed the keys to a beat-up van and told to retrieve the ex-Marlins from the airport.The van’s tire treads were worn so thin he worried it wouldn’t make the twenty-five-minute ride.
    Gonzalez found his locker, said hello to his new teammates and coaches, threw on his uniform, located his equipment bag, which housed his gloves and cleats, snuck in a few quick swings in the team’s underground batting cage, then ran out onto the field and introduced himself to the patch of dirt to the right of first base that would be his home for at least the next six seasons.
    When he dug in to the batter’s box for his first at-bat at Dodger Stadium the crowd roared. The score was knotted at one, and the home team had runners on first and third with no out. Marlins veteran right-hander Josh Johnson stepped off the rubber, turned his back to the plate, and sighed. Miami’s pitching coach, Randy St. Claire, trotted from the dugout to the mound to try to settle Johnson down. Gonzalez wandered out of the box, snapping his bubble gum and tugging a handful of his crisp white jersey out from his belt. With nobody out, the runner on third was a lost cause. Johnson’s best bet was to forget about him and focus on getting Gonzalez to ground into a double play. The Marlins’ shortstop and second baseman moved back toward the cut of the grass to set up for the 6-4-3, or the 4-6-3, or any other type of twin killing.
    Johnson guessed that Gonzalez, revved up by the crowd noise, was looking fastball. He was right. Johnson threw a first-pitch curveball andGonzalez swung way out in front of it and spun around on his heels, fouling it into the stands off first. Strike one. After greeting him with a hook, Johnson thought he could sneak the next pitch by him. Gonzalez was ready. With the count 0-1, Johnson reared back and fired a fastball down the center of the plate. Gonzalez crushed it through the shadows. It landed in sunlight, thirty feet behind the right-field fence, a million miles from Boston. Dodger fans, so demoralized by the depressing McCourt years, saw the promise of better days ahead in one sweet swing. Of course, Gonzalez wouldn’t do that in every at-bat. Still, that home run may have meant more to the organization than any since Gibson’s. The 2012 Dodgers squad wouldn’t make the postseason. But Gonzalez’s homer did something just as important: it closed the book on the McCourts forever.

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THE ACE
    O n the morning of April 1, 2013,