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

Molly Knight gets incredible access to the Dodgers, a team with one of the biggest payrolls in all sports. If you like Kershaw you'll love this, a lot on the Dodgers' ace and the group that took over the team. I flew through this book, real easy read.

This is a fantastic book for baseball lovers and baseball rookies alike. It's a book all about the McCourt era and the aftermath, how the Dodgers rebuild in their pursuit of a World Series title. Learning in depth about Kershaw, Greinke and Puig really made this book for me.I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Best baseball book I've read since 'The last night of the Yankees dynasty'.

I was shocked at how absorbing this book was to read. Often I couldn't put it down.I didn't expect a book about the most recent iterations of the LA Dodgers to be quite this interesting, but what a beautiful mess that team is. Such an eclectic and discordant mix of talent, wealth, entitlement, immaturity, and insecurity.Year after year, statistical projections predict the Dodgers to be at the very top of the league and then each season unfolds into a melodramatic roller coaster ride for them. Molly Knight's book provides all the most intimate details of these adventures.Starting off with the story of the transition of the LA Dodgers franchise from bankrupt pathetic embarrassment under crook owner Frank McCourt to the financially flourishing Guggenheim ownership regime with lots of behind-the-scenes details, the book (paperback version) covers the period of 2012 to 2015 focusing on the human side of the game without ever drifting into the territory of hero worship or platitudes or cliches. Just lots and lots of fascinating, entertaining stories about very proud and powerful personalities trying to coexist.Knight certainly knows baseball and when she does discuss the play on the field or statistical performance, she handles it adeptly. But the heart of this book is its human stories---the peculiarity of pitcher Zack Greinke, the pouty star outfielder Matt Kemp, paranoid middle man manager Don Mattingly, the loose cannon polarizing rule-breaker Yasiel Puig, the focused and determined superstar Clayton Kershaw, and so much more.The style sometimes reminded me of Dan Okrent's classic book "Nine Innings" in which the description of a single ballgame sets off lengthy tangents detailing the history of this or that player, all the events of their career that led them to that point.My only complaint (a minor one) is that things seem to fade toward the end, as though she wasn't sure how to conclude this great book. I was really hoping for super in-depth detail and discussion of the organization assembling what Knight calls "The Best Front Office Money Can Buy" but felt that section was a little too truncated. That powerhouse front office, an All Star team of former GMs and sought-after execs, is (I think) the most fascinating thing about the current Dodgers and I hoped for more stories about how that all came about and how they managed to function. Was shocked to see Knight mention a few times that the team had missed out on a trade or a signing because the front office was too focused on some other matter. Sounds like exactly what this braintrust was built to avoid and completely contradicting the stories that were coming out during the 2014-15 winter meetings when all the ex-GMs in the front office were wheeling and dealing separately, divide-and-conquer style.But I guess all of that is a story for another book.

Excelent book! Molly Knight just hit it over the wall. Us who have followed the team all the way through the McCourt dark years and now these new Guggenheim can connect the dots behind the team we saw in the field every day. Awesome book

Insightful as it details how money does not always win championships. Chemistry and cohesion and a willingness to win mentality at all costs

This book had so much more insight than I'd hoped. Molly Knight was given some great access and used it to make an interesting, enjoyable and very easy to read sports book about one of the most unique franchises in Major League Baseball.

The pages came still stuck together. Had to cut them apart myself meaning the pages are all frayed and some have rips now. It arrived on time and all but the copy was basically half a tree at this point. Not overly impressed.