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

three months, and he was still a mystery to the national media. Kasten approached the reporters. “How would you guys like an exclusive sit-down with our owner?” he asked. The men jumped at the chance. An interview with Walter, the man crazy enough to plunk down $2 billion for a sports franchise, would make for great copy. Kasten ushered the reporters to a table with Walter, making sure their backs were facing the patio. Then, after they were tucked away, he walked up to Henry. “John,” he said. “Can we talk?” Henry extinguished his cigar and followed Kasten out of the lobby.
    When Kasten pulled Henry off that patio on that August night in Denver, the Dodgers and Red Sox could not have been in more disparate positions. Kasten was looking for bold-faced names. Henry had them, and his team was flailing. In 2011, Boston had played well for five months before imploding down the stretch, becoming the first team in baseball history to blow a nine-game wild card lead in September. The Red Sox dropped eighteen of their final twenty-four games and were eliminated from the playoffs on the last day of the season after a furious ninth-inning comeback by the lowly Orioles. The club’s manager,Terry Francona, and general manager, Theo Epstein, were both run out of town.
    In an effort to reboot, before the 2012 season the Red Sox brass hired Bobby Valentine, a known authoritarian, to manage the team, and installed Cherington as general manager.The players hated Valentine. But the front office had every reason to believe its talented—and very expensive—team would bounce back and perform well that year. Their center fielder, Jacoby Ellsbury, had finished second in the AL MVP voting the year before, Gonzalez had finished seventh, and second baseman Dustin Pedroia had placed ninth. The Red Sox tookthe field on opening day in 2012 with a $161 million payroll, third highest in MLB behind the Yankees and the Phillies. That kind of money brought huge expectations, which is why Boston didn’t want to give up Gonzalez on July 31 when they were just three and a half games out of earning a wild card berth to the playoffs.
    But when the calendar flipped to August, the Sox lost eight of their first twelve games. And on the evening that Henry stubbed out his cigar and accompanied Kasten out of that hotel lobby, Boston had fallen to eleven games back of the Yankees in the AL East, and five and a half games out of the wild card race with just six weeks left to play.
    Though Gonzalez was only a season and a half into his seven-year deal, it was becoming clear he might benefit from a change of scenery.His coaches and teammates compared him to a clubhouse lawyer who liked to argue for the sake of arguing. Some even began referring to him as the Professor behind his back, a dig at their perception that he thought he was smarter than everyone else.
    It was true that Gonzalez didn’t display his emotions on the field very often, which made it difficult for fans to tell how much he cared. The only time he seemed to react was when he disagreed with an umpire’s call. Thanks to his exceptional plate discipline, Gonzalez led the major leagues in walks in 2009, with 119. But his walk total decreased in the years after that, and he walked only 42 times in 2012. The explanation was simple enough. He told teammates and coaches that he was tired of taking pitches in 3-2 counts, because it gave the umpire a chance to mistake a ball for a strike. If taking the power out of an ump’s hands to call him out on strikes meant that he was going to walk only a third as often as before, well then so be it. It was also true that Adrian Gonzalez was more verbose than the average baseball player. And though he may have exhausted some teammates with his argumentative streak, his benign transgressions fell far short of the stage-four clubhouse cancer some in the Boston media made him out to be. Even those he annoyed couldn’t help but respect his work ethic.
    Gonzalez