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Why trading a backup hitting .194 saddened the Dodgers clubhouse

A.J. Ellis and Clayton Kershaw
The Dodgers traded A.J. Ellis to the Phillies on Thursday. (AP)

LOS ANGELES – The best of A.J. Ellis, and I’m guessing but reasonably certain, is at home, with his children, doing silly stuff and laughing at jokes that stopped being funny when the first one was 2 but everyone deserves an equally attentive audience forever.

Then the baseball.

This is a man who caught his first big-league game at 27 ½, who became a regular big-league catcher at 31, who out-ran every projection for him, about whom on Thursday afternoon his buddy Scott Van Slyke said, “When it really comes down to it, he can pull stuff out. You don’t think he has it, but it’s there,” and anyone who knows Ellis also knows that as a compliment. The best of compliments.

Often, Ellis also was 62 or 63 feet from Clayton Kershaw when Kershaw was great, and Kershaw never forgot about that, about the guy who called and framed the pitches, who came to the mound with something more than, “Um, everything all right?”, who blocked overthrown sliders with his forehead, who bought him a beer when the crappy nights ended.

The best of Ellis here, at his job, was that he did the right thing, or tried, and sometimes that was good enough and sometimes it was not, but the right thing never involved chasing a batting average or gettin’ mine or where the TV cameras were or if it looked cool or not. He was a good teammate in a bad clubhouse and then a good teammate in a better clubhouse, and so this is why you’ll look at the box score and see Ellis is a .194 hitter and wonder why Justin Turner would say, “Yeah, this is a tough day.”

Typically, a guy hits .194 for long enough and teammates are volunteering to drive him to the airport, one of those, “Great trade, who’d we get?” kinds of things.

So on Thursday afternoon he sat on the bench at Dodger Stadium in street clothes, seemingly all cried out, and the drive-time radio would moan about how much of Kershaw’s ERA he was responsible for, when the real emotion was feeling bad for a guy who felt bad and then understanding the Dodgers likely just got better. There’s still room for that, right? If the Dodgers collapse, it will not be because Carlos Ruiz and not Ellis was catching Clayton Kershaw. It probably won’t be because Ruiz, who the Dodgers traded to the Phillies for Ellis Thursday, didn’t move a runner or get a bunt down or work a count. Ruiz, at 37, is a better baseball player than Ellis, and OPSes 200-and-some points higher against left-handed pitchers, and is loved in his own clubhouse, and will work just fine as the guy who spells Yasmani Grandal. Fact is, if Dodgers personalities were so fragile that one among them could swamp or save the boat, then, you know, that October thing probably wasn’t going to work out anyway.

It is true the Dodgers clubhouse is a better place to work these days, and it is true Ellis had plenty of influence there, and that might have something to do with them being in first place. It’s also true Kershaw is the one man they’d be wise to keep happy, and he always seemed very happy to have Ellis those 62 or 63 feet away, and maybe that’ll be worth something next month. We’ll see. The image of Kershaw and Ellis side by side on that Dodger Stadium bench Thursday afternoon, both in tears, probably wasn’t what the rest of the guys had in mind when they came to work, but that’s how some days go at work.

A.J. Ellis
A.J. Ellis was seen as one of the clubhouse leaders for the Dodgers. (AP)

Appropriately, the San Francisco Giants were in town, as all team chemistry hypotheses – the final frontier of analytics – seem to lead back to them. The Giants always seem to do a little more with a little less, and usually that rolls back to the kind of clubhouse Bruce Bochy runs and the kinds of people lolling in that clubhouse. There is no real answer to whether chemistry pushes winning or vice versa, except Bochy almost certainly came close Thursday afternoon when he said, “It starts with talent, let’s be honest.”

So that’s what the Dodgers did – they got a little more talented in a race that isn’t close to being settled.

“Um, obviously it was a tough decision on a personal level,” president Andrew Friedman said. “We felt like from a baseball standpoint, Carlos fit our team really well.”

As for being an upstanding guy in the locker room, Friedman added, “If Carlos didn’t possess similar things we wouldn’t have made the move.”

What stinks about that is Ellis had to leave when he didn’t want to, and it’s nice – and wholly syrupy – to believe some guys would rather stay because that’s who they believe they are. He is not a great player in the realm of the big leagues. He is a player who made himself valuable to a good team, however, and sometimes that’s worth something and other times there are better alternatives.

Then the baseball, you see.

“There’s no anger,” he said. “There’s no anger at all. This is a business. This happens to people all the time. So, I’m not angry. I’m sad.”