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

second-richest contract ever for an outfielder—it was a bit of a surprise. Boston’s lineup was already full of expensive talent, and the club had traded for Gonzalez just two days earlier.
    The Red Sox didn’t part with that money freely. In an interview with a local radio affiliate during Crawford’s first spring training with the team, Epstein divulged that the club had conducted a thoroughbackground check on the left fielder before backing up the Brinks truck to his door. “We covered him as if we were privately investigating him,” Epstein told listeners. “We had a scout on him literally the last three, four months of the season at the ballpark, away from the ballpark.”
    That revelation unnerved Crawford.“I’m from an area where if somebody’s doing that to you they’re not doing anything good,” Crawford told Boston reporters. “I definitely look over my shoulder now a lot more than what I did before. The idea of him following me everywhere I go, was kind of—I wasn’t comfortable with that at all.”
    Being watched by anyone was something Crawford wasn’t used to in Tampa. In his first six seasons with the Rays, the club finished last in the American League in attendance. Those Tampa squads were terrible, but it’s not as if the city embraced baseball as soon as the team started winning. In 2008 the Rays rode an incredible season all the way to the World Series. Their stellar play was rewarded with a third-to-last-place finish in attendance in the AL. For almost a decade, Carl Crawford was the human embodiment of a tree falling in the woods and making no sound: he was the best baseball player that no one saw.
    Crawford liked to tell a story about an experience that summed up the anonymity afforded to a player who stars for the Tampa Bay Rays. One day he was hanging out with teammates in the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field when members of the Tampa police department turned up looking for him.
    “Carl Crawford?” one asked.
    “Yeah,” Crawford said.
    “We need to talk to you about the Navigator,” said the officer.
    “What Navigator?” asked Crawford.
    “Well, earlier today a man walked into a dealership in town and said his name was Carl Crawford and asked to test-drive a Navigator and never came back,” said the officer.
    Crawford was confused. He told the cops he’d never driven a Navigator in his life. As it turned out, a crafty car burglar wearing Crawford’sjersey had taken a gamble on a Tampa Lincoln dealer having no clue what the best player on the city’s baseball team looked like. It worked.
    That sort of caper would never fly in Boston. Even the thickest thief in the state of Massachusetts wouldn’t be dumb enough to pose as a member of the vaunted Red Sox. When he signed with Boston, Crawford knew he was going to go from playing in an empty stadium to suiting up in front of a packed house of die-hard fans every night. Realizing how uneasy the revelations about Crawford’s private life had made his new star player, Epstein backtracked and insisted he misspoke; that the team acquired information in the same way it did on every free agent in its sights. But the damage was done. Crawford’s tenure in Boston began on a sour note, and in the season and a half he spent with the Sox he never grew comfortable.
    In some ways, however, Crawford might have gotten too comfortable.He later told a teammate that he felt like the Rays strung him along for years toward a big payday that never came. His desire to earn the huge money that many of his peers enjoyed drove him to play hard every day. But as soon as he signed his fat contract with Boston he confided in friends that he found it difficult to keep his edge. Crawford still wanted to be great but his motivation was buried somewhere, deep under his millions. He didn’t like that about himself, but it was the truth.“That guy used to terrorize us with his bat and his speed when he was in Tampa,” said one player who faced Crawford