LOS ANGELES — They will be missed.
The elevation of Dalton Rushing to the majors and carving out of a role for Hyeseong Kim last week have improved the Dodgers’ roster. But the subtraction of established, well-liked veterans Austin Barnes and Chris Taylor, both long-time members of the Dodgers, has left a hole in the day-to-day life of their former teammates and inevitably alters team chemistry.
“It’s like – there’s a card group of guys on the plane. Austin was one of them. Now Kirby Yates is on the IL. That’s another one that’s not going to travel,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said, trying to give an example of the many ways last week’s moves will change the daily dynamics of the team. “A lot of people don’t understand, there’s a lot of things that go on. Losing people over the course of a year, it stinks.”
Freeman experienced it a year ago when the Dodgers released Jason Heyward in August. Freeman and Heyward have been close friends since their teen years, started their pro careers together with the Atlanta Braves and were reunited again with the Dodgers years later.
“It does suck. There’s no way around it,” Freeman said. “If you say you’re not sad when you lose friends, you’re not a human. You just get going. You’re going to be a little sad but that can’t be the reason you go 0 for 4 now.”
It’s important to remember “you’re going to be friends longer than you’re going to be teammates,” Freeman said. But the sudden nature of moves like the releases of Barnes and Taylor last week make the loss sting more.
“That’s the part that sucks the most, not being able to say your goodbyes,” utility man Kiké Hernandez said. “It’s not like they’re dying. But not being able to say your proper goodbyes because you don’t know when you’re going to see them again. To see those two guys leave and not be able to have a moment to say goodbye and to have to do it through a text message or a phone call makes things a little weird.”
Third baseman Max Muncy was teammates with Barnes and Taylor for eight years. Now he is the longest-tenured position player in the Dodgers’ clubhouse. (Hernandez goes back farther but spent parts of three seasons in Boston).
“For me personally, it was a tough one. It was two guys that I arrived here with, basically. Two good friends that I’ve known for a very long time,” said Muncy, who called Barnes a “pillar” of the Dodgers’ clubhouse culture. “They were both really loved in the clubhouse, really loved everywhere. Any time someone gets DFA’d, it’s a tough one because it happens after a game. You show up (the next day) and the locker’s gone. You don’t get to say goodbye. It is the same when anyone is DFA’d. It’s like their locker never existed.
“But when you have two guys that have been in the same spot – I know it’s a new clubhouse (after offseason renovations) but they’re still in the same spot and now it’s like they were never there – yeah, it’s a tough one.”
Tough as it might be personally, “that’s kind of where the business side comes in,” shortstop Mookie Betts said.
“This is not cold, by any means. But … you have to separate your emotions from the business,” Betts said. “With guys like that, I don’t think you really can. So it’s not necessarily trying to fill a void or anything of that nature because the way Barnesy and CT were in this clubhouse you can’t really just fill what they were doing. That’s stuff that you can’t replace. You just have to understand the new dynamic.
“(Barnes) was always the jokester, cracking jokes, getting guys going, stirring the pot. You need a guy in there that everybody kind of looks to. When everybody’s sitting around, Barnesy was the guy who got everybody engaged, got everybody talking. CT was much quieter, more to himself. That might be a little different. But CT was a guy who was always an example of working hard. He was the guy in the cage showing the young guys how to get prepared, get ready for the game. I don’t know who’s going to do it now but CT did a great job of being that example. We just have to figure out where we are now.”
That process could go one of two ways, Hernandez said.
“It could go as nothing changes and it could also go as it goes bad,” he said. “I think for us, we have enough veteran people to realize that (stuff) like this is a possibility. It’s very much a part of the game. The fact that those two guys have been here for so long is the one thing that stands out so much from that situation.
“For most of us who were here last year, it was a similar shock when they let J-Hey go as far as the impact that he brought to the clubhouse. … It’s been an emotional homestand. But I think with the people we have in here, the amount of veteran guys who’ve basically seen it all, it’s one of those things where we can have our two or three sad days. But it gets to a point where the game is not going to stop because we just released two beloved guys.”
The game certainly won’t wait for the Dodgers to absorb the moves. They find themselves in a tight, competitive NL West. They just finished a series against one of their division rivals and now 10 of their next 13 games will be against the two teams they faced in last year’s National League Championship Series (the New York Mets) and World Series (the New York Yankees).
“It’s hard. It really is,” Freeman said. “But you do understand that it’s a business and you have to keep going.
“When you do lose two respected veterans in the clubhouse, you’ve got to be a grown boy and understand the reasoning. You can be sad that you lost a friend – you can still be in contact with that friend. But we’ve got to keep going. I think we’ve got a good group of guys that will keep this machine going.”
There are other pillars in place, to use Muncy’s description. Teoscar Hernandez has become one in his two seasons with the Dodgers. Betts and Freeman are in their own ways, as is Miguel Rojas. Kiké Hernandez has been praised profusely for his leadership during last year’s postseason run.
“The one thing that we can do is control what we can which is in between the lines and for those of us in the clubhouse that have the power to shift chemistry and (stuff) like that, it’s up to us to make sure that guys don’t get down or stay down or whatever it is,” Kiké Hernandez said.
“It sucks saying this because they’re two good friends of mine but I think we’re going to be alright.”
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