The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse by Molly Knight
Authors: Molly Knight
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didn’t ask how much money he would be given to spend on player payroll during his job interview. After McCourt hired Colletti, Colletti returned the favor to Kent. Four months after he took over as the general manager of the Dodgers he offered the thirty-eight-year-old second baseman an eight-figure contract extension.
As the dysfunctional McCourt regime spiraled downward, the Dodgers became notorious for their revolving door of high-ranking executives. In addition to their general manager carousel, during their eight years owning the club the McCourts burned through four managers and three team presidents. Colletti somehow survived. Most baseball executives expected Walter to relieve Colletti of his duties when he came in, not because of his shortcomings but because each new ownership group tended to install its own brain trust to enact its vision—even when it didn’t just spend two billion on a franchise.But the damage McCourt’s tightfistedness inflicted on the big-league club and its farm system was so cataclysmic it was difficult for the new owners to evaluate Colletti. A general manager’s number-one task is to stockpile as much talent as possible. But McCourt’s thriftiness had limited Colletti’s options. So the new owners decided they would keep him for a trial run, then decide if he was good enough to stay.“I didn’t think the problems the franchise had were related to the front office,” Stan Kasten said. Colletti remained the club’s GM, but appeared about as comfortable on the job as a Bush White House staffer when Barack Obama’s team came in.
For the first time in club history, the Dodgers were putting together a roster with no financial limitations. And the responsibility ofloading the organization with expensive talent fell on two men: one who grew up in poverty, and another who had built his career on rarely splurging for stars.
In his thirty-plus years in baseball, Colletti had proven he had the moxy to hang within the upper echelon of the game. Major League Baseball can be a nepotistic crony fest, filled with sons of famous ballplayers. Butby his own estimation, Colletti grew up dirt-poor, and lived in a converted garage on the industrial outskirts of Chicago for the first six years of his life. His Italian-American father worked as a mechanic who was paid by the hour. When the family bought a home, paying the mortgage on time was a herculean task. It was seventy dollars a month.
Given his background, the fact that Colletti rose to become the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers is astonishing. It’s easier to get elected to the U.S. Senate than it is to be named a GM: there are one hundred senators, and only thirty MLB general managers. And the game’s analytics renaissance meant that Colletti didn’t just have to compete with well-connected scions to hold on to his position. In the early 2000s, the Oakland Athletics’ GM, Billy Beane, and his Moneyball philosophy inspired legions of MBA grads and computer science savants to seek out jobs in front offices so they could use their skills to do something more exciting than writing code for Silicon Valley start-ups. The new owner of the Houston Astros, for instance, had hired a former management consultant, Jeff Luhnow, to be the club’s GM. Luhnow then brought in a crack team of Wall Street wizards, lawyers, and a NASA behavioral scientist to overhaul the organization. When Walter’s group bought the Dodgers the club had an analytics department that consisted of one person. Colletti preferred cowboy boots to calculators.
The directive to overpay Ethier to keep him in Los Angeles must have been a shock to Colletti’s system. Gone were the days of being allowed to add impact bats or arms in the middle of the season only if he could somehow do it for free. Colletti was finally able to pursuethe roster he wanted, which better suited his confrontational style. Perhaps because of his humble beginnings, Colletti approached the game
As the dysfunctional McCourt regime spiraled downward, the Dodgers became notorious for their revolving door of high-ranking executives. In addition to their general manager carousel, during their eight years owning the club the McCourts burned through four managers and three team presidents. Colletti somehow survived. Most baseball executives expected Walter to relieve Colletti of his duties when he came in, not because of his shortcomings but because each new ownership group tended to install its own brain trust to enact its vision—even when it didn’t just spend two billion on a franchise.But the damage McCourt’s tightfistedness inflicted on the big-league club and its farm system was so cataclysmic it was difficult for the new owners to evaluate Colletti. A general manager’s number-one task is to stockpile as much talent as possible. But McCourt’s thriftiness had limited Colletti’s options. So the new owners decided they would keep him for a trial run, then decide if he was good enough to stay.“I didn’t think the problems the franchise had were related to the front office,” Stan Kasten said. Colletti remained the club’s GM, but appeared about as comfortable on the job as a Bush White House staffer when Barack Obama’s team came in.
For the first time in club history, the Dodgers were putting together a roster with no financial limitations. And the responsibility ofloading the organization with expensive talent fell on two men: one who grew up in poverty, and another who had built his career on rarely splurging for stars.
In his thirty-plus years in baseball, Colletti had proven he had the moxy to hang within the upper echelon of the game. Major League Baseball can be a nepotistic crony fest, filled with sons of famous ballplayers. Butby his own estimation, Colletti grew up dirt-poor, and lived in a converted garage on the industrial outskirts of Chicago for the first six years of his life. His Italian-American father worked as a mechanic who was paid by the hour. When the family bought a home, paying the mortgage on time was a herculean task. It was seventy dollars a month.
Given his background, the fact that Colletti rose to become the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers is astonishing. It’s easier to get elected to the U.S. Senate than it is to be named a GM: there are one hundred senators, and only thirty MLB general managers. And the game’s analytics renaissance meant that Colletti didn’t just have to compete with well-connected scions to hold on to his position. In the early 2000s, the Oakland Athletics’ GM, Billy Beane, and his Moneyball philosophy inspired legions of MBA grads and computer science savants to seek out jobs in front offices so they could use their skills to do something more exciting than writing code for Silicon Valley start-ups. The new owner of the Houston Astros, for instance, had hired a former management consultant, Jeff Luhnow, to be the club’s GM. Luhnow then brought in a crack team of Wall Street wizards, lawyers, and a NASA behavioral scientist to overhaul the organization. When Walter’s group bought the Dodgers the club had an analytics department that consisted of one person. Colletti preferred cowboy boots to calculators.
The directive to overpay Ethier to keep him in Los Angeles must have been a shock to Colletti’s system. Gone were the days of being allowed to add impact bats or arms in the middle of the season only if he could somehow do it for free. Colletti was finally able to pursuethe roster he wanted, which better suited his confrontational style. Perhaps because of his humble beginnings, Colletti approached the game
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