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

Clayton Kershaw was asleep in bed next to his wife when the alarm on his cell phone jolted him awake. He checked the time. Seven a.m. He stood up, walked to the bathroom, considered vomiting, thought better of it, trudged to the kitchen, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and flipped on the television. He didn’t like to set an alarm on the days he pitched, preferring instead to sleep until 10:30, 11, or whenever his lanky body floated into consciousness on its own. But it was opening day, and he was scheduled to throw the first pitch at 1 p.m., which meant rolling out of bed at an hour unholy to him.
    Kershaw was not a morning person, which made him like every other Major League Baseball player since the invention of stadium lights. Being a ballplayer was like working a second shift.Go to work around one, out by eleven. Lather, rinse, and repeat more than one hundred times per year. Any hope of surviving in the big leagues meant one must attune his body to achieve peak physical strength,mental acuity, and emotional equilibrium between the hours of 7 and 10:30 every night. Because the adrenaline rush of triumph or the uneasiness of personal failure stayed in the bloodstream for hours after the last out was recorded, the average player knocked out around two. The guys who were wired the tightest—or partied the hardest—often greeted dawn.
    On days he did not pitch, which was 80 percent of the time, his wife, Ellen, would wake him by eleven so they could spend as many hours as possible together before he left for the ballpark. They were twenty-five years old. Married for three years, but together since they were freshman classmates at Highland Park High School in Dallas.Kershaw had taken another girl to the homecoming dance in ninth grade, but that was the only date he’d ever been on in his life with a girl who wasn’t Ellen. They’d been sweethearts for ten years but somehow hadn’t yet run out of things to do together. On the mornings of days he wasn’t pitching, they’d hit up museums, television tapings, maybe drive a half hour to try a new breakfast joint before she sent him off. Ellen always had something planned. Four days out of five he was like any other young husband very much in love with his wife, finding bliss in otherwise mundane domesticity. But every fifth day he turned into something else.
    At just twenty-five years old, Clayton Kershaw woke up on opening day 2013 with the weight of the Dodgers’ franchise on his broad shoulders. Having already established himself as one of the best pitchers in the game at such a young age, it was not outside the realm of possibility that he could one day be crowned the greatest ever. He had won his first Cy Young Award at age twenty-three and finished as the runner-up at twenty-four. Of the 6,797 starting pitchers who had taken the mound since the live-ball era began in 1920, Kershaw had posted the lowest earned run average of any starter through his first thousand innings. By giving up just 2.70 runs per nine, he bested Hall of Famers Whitey Ford (second at 2.75) and Dodger legend Sandy Koufax (third, 2.76)—among everyone else.
    Kershaw had been MLB’s ERA champ at age twenty-three andthen turned around and did it again at twenty-four. In that same time frame he’d also struck out more batters than anyone else in the National League. Those statistics were nice, but they didn’t impress him much. It was Kershaw’s belief that while strikeouts and earned run average got the glory, the best way to measure a starting pitcher’s greatness was in how many innings he gave his team. (He’d led the NL in that category over the past two seasons, too.) The Dodgers hadn’t won a world championship since the year he was born. In the year they owned the team, the Guggenheim group had added hundreds of millions in player salary to the payroll to make that happen. But they weren’t going anywhere without Kershaw.
    When he was called up to the big leagues in 2008 at age