LOS ANGELES -- After the final game of the 2013 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers held a pep rally to get their fans excited about the upcoming playoffs. Matt Kemp, who was seemingly healthy when that day’s game began and didn’t play, hobbled onto the field on crutches.
A few minutes later, he would inform reporters that he was out for the postseason and was soon to undergo major ankle surgery. The team doctor, Neal ElAttrache, would later brief reporters on the severity of the injury to the talus bone in Kemp’s left leg. He said it was in danger of fracturing if Kemp kept playing on it and said, “We have to protect Matt.”
A downer of a season for Kemp took a severe radical turn south.
“I woke up one day and couldn’t walk,” Kemp recalled.
After the final game of the 2014 season on Sunday, the Dodgers held another pep rally and Kemp was among the speakers. Standing on two sound legs, wearing dark sunglasses, eye black and a gray NL West champions T-shirt, he said the Dodgers have a good enough team to play deep into October. Comedian George Lopez took back the microphone and said, “What Matt Kemp is trying to say is, ‘We’re going to continue the foam party until the end of the World Series.”
Kemp cracked, “Foam party at my house!”
You don’t have to go back an entire year to find Kemp in a less-than-festive mood, though. You can just go back four months. On May 28, Kemp was batting .255 and had an OPS of .755, nearly 100 points off his career norm. According to advanced metrics, he was among the worst outfielders in baseball. After a rough road trip, the Dodgers had seen enough of Kemp’s sloppy play in center field. Manager Don Mattingly finally acted. He benched Kemp for five games, only re-inserting him in the lineup -- in left field -- after Carl Crawford badly sprained his ankle and had to hobble off the field.
Kemp brooded all the way to the trade deadline. He brushed off reporters’ questions, but his agent, Dave Stewart, was willing to talk, complaining that the Dodgers had mistreated Kemp after he’d put his body on the line for the team and, at one point, hinting that a trade would be the best solution for all parties. Stewart, now the Arizona Diamondbacks’ general manager, told CBSSports.com’s Jon Heyman five days before the deadline, “Eight years is a long time to be in one place. Sometimes change is good. This might be the time to change.”
It wasn’t and yet, somehow, it was. The Dodgers held onto Kemp at the deadline, but moved him to right field and shifted Yasiel Puig to center. It made Andre Ethier essentially extraneous, but seemed to reinvigorate Kemp. His offensive low point came on the same day the Dodgers reached their low point as a team, a 2-1 loss at home to the Chicago White Sox, after which Mattingly called the team, “basically s-----.” Mattingly had spent most of his pregame remarks complaining about how individual agendas were clouding out the team’s unity. Few people doubted Kemp’s unhappiness was part of all that.
At the conclusion of that game, Kemp had a .689 OPS. From that day until the end of the season, he batted .311, mashed 20 of his 25 home runs and had an OPS of .933. He led the major leagues with 16 home runs after the All-Star break. Going into the playoffs, he is the primary reason the Dodgers think they have a far more balanced, dangerous lineup than they did entering the 2013 playoffs.
As usual with the high-priced, high-pressure Dodgers, success has bred contentment, not the other way around.
On the occasion of his 30th birthday last week, Kemp said, “Hopefully, I can be here until I’m 40,” a far cry from the message his camp was sending months earlier.
“Nothing’s ever perfect. Nothing ever happens the way you want it to happen, but if things had been different, I would have had a better first half and a good second half,” Kemp said. “That’s just not the way it is. I’m just trying to finish up strong and help my team in any way I can to lead us into the postseason and further into the postseason than we went last season. I’ll do whatever it takes to help them out and see how far this takes us.”
While Kemp’s production has been the most important part of his metamorphosis, his behavior off the field has been equally improved, teammates say. Mattingly recently called Kemp one of the team’s emotional leaders.
“Matt’s been on point, honestly,” Mattingly said.
Colorado TV cameras captured images of Kemp stalking Puig in the Dodgers’ dugout two weeks ago at Coors Field, Kemp upset that Puig hadn’t run from first base to third on an Adrian Gonzalez single to right field before Kemp’s at-bat. Some people took that as another example of turmoil on the Dodgers, who have had their share. Within the team, it was welcomed as a veteran player holding a younger teammate accountable.
“People make a big deal about it in baseball when fights happen in the dugout, but you watch any football game and the quarterback’s yelling at a lineman or he’s yelling at his receiver for running the wrong route,” Dodgers outfielder Scott Van Slyke said. “The guys that need to be the guys should say stuff. I would like to see more of it personally. “
You can kind of sum up Kemp’s character arc this season fairly succinctly in those terms. He went from being a malcontent on a team of malcontents to being the quarterback. All it took was a few short months, a healing body and a radical uptick in his hitting.