On one of the best nights of his life, on the night he won his first pennant, Clayton Kershaw crammed inside an indoor batting cage at Wrigley Field with the rest of the 2017 Dodgers. He drenched teammates with Korbel Brut and drank from the Warren C. Giles trophy like it was an ice luge. His eyes stung from Beau Joie and Budweiser. He shook hands with Tommy Lasorda and hugged Rick Honeycutt. He snuck away from the throng, scooped up his son, Charley, and chased his daughter, Cali Ann, around the mound. Outside of the day he was married and the days he welcomed his children into the world, he could not recall when he was happier.
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“Who knows how many times I’m going to get to go to the World Series?” Kershaw said. “I know more than anybody how hard it is to get there.”
Already he bore the scars of four consecutive Octobers without reaching the Fall Classic. He would soon learn, in the coming days and months and years, just how hard it was to win one. As he celebrated that evening, he could not know the heartache that awaited him 10 days later against the Astros, or 12 months later against the Red Sox, or two years later against the Nationals. All he knew was he was so close to achieving his dream.
“If we win, I might retire,” Kershaw said. “I might just call it a career.”
Clayton Kershaw can now, at last, call himself a world champion, after the Dodgers won Game 6 against Tampa Bay on Tuesday. It took him 10 postseason berths and three World Series bids. The journey was excruciating. The failure he endured along the way appeared suffocating. But it is over. It is all over now. He checked the last box on a Hall of Fame career.
He can exhale. He can gloat. He can do, frankly, whatever the heck he wants. He has earned it.
Almost every major profile of Clayton Kershaw fixates on two concepts: Time and control. If you spend enough time around him, as I did for three seasons covering the Dodgers for the Los Angeles Times, you learn these are not narrative constructs. He was obsessive about maintaining control of the way he pitches, the way he comports himself in the clubhouse and the way he presents himself to the public. He was precise in his movements; he diagrammed each day at the ballpark down to the minute.
Kershaw was not a monk. He drained the occasional postgame Coors Light. He cranked up EDM while lifting weights clad in a rainbow tank top and headband. His tastes trended toward the mainstream. He liked “Homeland” and “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.” His lone acting credit came, of all places, on “The New Girl.” His friends and teammates used the same word to describe his personality: “goofy.”
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When it came to time and control, though, he was unwavering. Elite athletes are not wired like regular people, but even elite athletes are not wired like Kershaw. There was a day in spring training a couple of years ago when someone changed the 9:15 a.m. meeting to 9:40 a.m. “That’s great,” Kershaw said. “I literally plan my whole day around this. Who can I punch in the mouth?” He was kidding — for the most part. When Kershaw learned Kenley Jansen had changed the meeting time, he instructed Jansen not to do that again.
If Kershaw was expected to throw his first pitch at 7:10 p.m., he entered the dugout at 6:20 p.m. He walked into the outfield to begin his warmups at 6:23 p.m. Brandon McDaniel, the team’s strength and conditioning coach, came to stretch him at 6:36 p.m. He fumed one night in 2017 when a Rockies pitcher was walking from the visitors’ bullpen to the dugout at 7:10.
On days he did not start, Kershaw was not difficult to locate. “If you don’t know where Clayton is and you can’t find him, check the weight room,” former teammate Daniel Hudson said. He entered the clubhouse 10 minutes before the pitchers were expected outside. Back when reporters were still allowed in clubhouses, Kershaw built a window into his schedule to speak with the media. The interviews often ended with Kershaw just walking away, mid-conversation. He would not permit himself to be late.
His zeal for control was palpable whenever he got hurt. When a player went down with an injury, the usual procedure called for the team to release a timetable. Strained oblique? Two to four weeks. Torn hamstring? Three to four months. Tommy John surgery? Twelve to 15 months.
Kershaw was different. After he suffered a herniated disk in 2016, he bristled at the idea of a timetable. All the public needed to know was he would be back when he was ready. That became the party line. Manager Dave Roberts took to saying things like “There is no timeline for us,” even though the notion that the Dodgers’ medical staff did not have an idea when Kershaw might return was absurd.
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Roberts was a rookie manager that summer. He quickly learned a lesson about the consequences of transparency when it came to Kershaw. The kerfuffle started when Kershaw had a setback in a simulated game in Los Angeles while the Dodgers were playing at Nationals Park. Kershaw and the team had been insistent that he would not require season-ending surgery. Even so, I asked Roberts before a game that week, given the setback, did that make surgery more likely? Roberts provided an answer that he figured was only logical: Of course.
“With the way it flared up, it’s more of an indication that surgery is more of a possibility, with the way his back responded,” Roberts said.”But we’re still hopeful that he’s going to be back.”
The quote started a fire. They have the internet in Los Angeles.
Someone — presumably a large left-hander — saw the flurry of tweets and stories. Messages were sent. A member of the media relations department complained to the beat writers that the headlines were misleading. The staffer was reminded that the manager did, in fact, say surgery was more likely. The staffer returned later to say that the team would issue a statement from the medical department. A little while later, the staffer informed the writers that the medical department would not issue a statement. It was not a fun afternoon to be a member of the Dodgers media relations department. Roberts soon stopped offering his own opinion on Kershaw’s progress.
A year later, Kershaw’s back betrayed him once more. He left an outing after two innings. The next day, Ken Rosenthal broke some news: Kershaw was expected to miss four to six weeks, according to the initial diagnosis. As I did often as a beat writer, I spent a little while confirming Ken’s story. I made some calls and learned that, as usual, what he reported was accurate: The Dodgers thought Kershaw would require four to six weeks off.
Once more, this revelation irked its subject. He felt timetables boxed him in. If he returned in three weeks, he reasoned, the media would suggest he came back too soon. If he required seven weeks, everyone would wonder what took him so long. When Kershaw addressed reporters later that week, he insisted the story was untrue.
“There’s no timetable,” Kershaw said. “Whoever said that is very much mistaken.”
On Sept. 1, Kershaw returned to the mound. He missed just shy of six weeks.
In 2018, with Kershaw set to start Game 1 of the NLCS in Milwaukee, I made a wager with my Times colleague Bill Plaschke as we walked into Miller Park: $10 said he would use the word “demons” in his column that night. He laughed and took the bet. A few hours later, sometime in the fourth or fifth inning, after Kershaw had already exited the game with five runs on his ledger, Plaschke crumpled a $10 bill and tossed it at me. “It’s such a good word,” he said.
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Ah, yes. “The narrative.” It resurfaced every autumn. Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in the game, came up short in the playoffs. Over and over again. It was real. I saw it. It could be painful to watch. The nuance of the situation often got lost in the shouting.
“Dare I suggest that Clayton Kershaw might be becoming the Peyton Manning of baseball, the greatest regular-season pitcher ever?” Skip Bayless said in 2014 after Kershaw had made six postseason starts. “Because so far, not so good in the postseason for Clayton Kershaw.”
“If the Los Angeles Dodgers lose this World Series,” Stephen A. Smith said after Game 5 in 2017, “it’s going to be because of Kershaw.”
“The lowest rung of choking hell, the lowest rung, is you might be the best who ever did it in the regular season, and in the playoffs, you’re terrible,” Max Kellerman said after Game 5 of the 2019 National League Division Series.
Despite the garbled syntax, the point usually came through: Kershaw couldn’t hack it in October. I remember talking with a Dodgers official during the 2016 World Series, after Jon Lester threw six innings of two-run baseball to keep the Cubs alive. “How come our guy can never do that?” the official said.
The reality was complicated. Kershaw spun plenty of gems. But he also lost the last game of the Dodgers’ season in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2018. Last year, he blew an eighth-inning lead in the finale. Along the way, there were explanations. He might have been tipping his pitches against the Cardinals. He was too stubborn with his sequences. He went one inning too long. He faced one batter too many. He pitched on short rest too often. The bullpen let him down. The offense let him down. The Astros knew what was coming. He never should have been asked to relieve in the first place.
The numbers are what they are. His ERA in the regular season is 2.43. In October, it rises to 4.19. The game in Houston against the sign-stealing Astros led to some of the damage. But not all of it.
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Baseball executives like to talk about how variance dictates the postseason. Kershaw has pitched long enough in October to live that truism. It would be disingenuous to say his bad numbers stem from bad luck. Yet it would be foolish to ignore the breaks.
When fortune spits on you, it looks something like this:
• Zack Greinke and Corey Seager neglecting to cover third base against Daniel Murphy in Game 5 of the 2015 NLDS — two days after Kershaw’s seven-inning masterwork on short rest in Game 4.
• Andrew Toles dropping a fly ball to aid a two-run first inning for the Cubs against Kershaw in Game 6 of the 2016 National League Championship Series.
• A 100.3 mph rocket off the bat of Will Smith dying at the warning track, rather than cresting over the fence, after Kershaw blew the lead in the fifth game of the 2019 NLDS.
When fortune smiles on you, it looks something like this:
• Cody Bellinger leaping at the wall and robbing Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. of a go-ahead home run in Game 2 of this year’s NLDS.
• Atlanta infielder Austin Riley stutter-stepping on the bases and blundering into an out in Game 7 of the NLCS.
• A 105.6 mph liner sizzling into the glove of reliever Víctor González to start a rally-squashing double play in Game 1 of the World Series.
Maybe that was all it took to end the narrative: Some good luck and some great plays by the others. In these playoffs, Kershaw was a cog in this Dodgers machine, rather than star around which the rest of the team orbited. When Roberts came to get him with two outs in the sixth inning of Game 5, Kershaw did not protest. He was willing to cede his grip on the game and trust his teammates.
“The actual day that you pitch, you feel like you can have some say, some control of the game,” Kershaw said. “But sitting there in the dugout, and watching the last few innings, or watching the whole game, for that matter, it’s so stressful, in the postseason especially, because you care so much.”
In the summer of 2016, the Dodgers traded for Rich Hill. He was a mild-mannered lefty who spat and snarled and swore on the mound. Kershaw loved watching him pitch. They became close over the next four years. Hill teared up when asked about Kershaw after Game 5 last year.
The two men had some similarities. They threw with the same hand. They were devoted family men. Hill was even goofier than Kershaw. But to me, the contrast between the two felt stark.
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Covering Rich Hill made me think about the endless possibilities of life. He reinvented himself in his mid-30s after surgeons had salvaged his limbs and an industry had given up on him. Hill was an elementary school poster come to life: He had dreamed it, he had done it.
Covering Clayton Kershaw made me think about the inevitability of mortality. He was like a sentient hourglass, well aware of the sand pouring into the bottom. He could not stop the passage of time, so he sought to control everything else.
The idea of Kershaw reinventing himself later in his career felt ludicrous. The man spent every spring testing out a changeup, only to pocket the pitch for the season because it did not meet his standard. He did not change easily.
Then a funny thing happened. He started to evolve. “Adapt or die,” Kershaw liked to say, even if he disliked discussing how he was adapting. He stopped carping about infield shifts. He became less wedded to the five-day schedule; he would accept an extra day of rest when the team recommended it. He altered his workouts to protect his back. He varied his sequences and adjusted his pitch mix to throw fewer fastballs. He became more open to suggestions, not just from veterans like Hill or trusted confidantes like Honeycutt, but from younger players like Walker Buehler and Tony Gonsolin.
The most surprising development came this past winter when Kershaw visited the Driveline headquarters outside Seattle. Kershaw was slow to embrace analytics and newfangled methodology. (He once cracked that former general manager Farhan Zaidi’s dominance in the team’s fantasy football league “gives him a little credibility for the whole ‘numbers’ thing.”) As he aged, he wished he had been more open to suggestion in his youth. He underwent a two-day assessment at Driveline and returned to his offseason home outside Dallas with a variety of new information. His fastball velocity improved in 2020 and his 2.16 ERA was his best since 2016.
He had taken the time to give up control.
On Sunday evening, after his final start of this postseason, Kershaw came to the podium for a Zoom call with reporters. Cali Ann and Charley joined him.
“They’re just going to ask me questions,” Kershaw said. “I gotta talk. Just for a little bit.”
“OK,” Cali Ann said.
As Kershaw spoke, the kids kept popping their heads above the table. They mugged for the camera. They flitted back and forth behind him. “Hey, you guys are maniacs,” he said.
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His youngest, Cooper, is less than a year old, too young to remember this. Charley, a month shy of his fourth birthday, might not, either. But Kershaw suspected Cali Ann, the eldest at 5, would remember living inside the 2020 bubble and watching her father fulfill his professional dream.
“I think any dad just wants their kids to be proud of them,” he said. “Cali told me she was tonight. I’ll take that.”
Two days later, he could call himself a champion. Will he retire? Probably not. But Clayton Kershaw has nothing left to prove.
(Photo: AP Photo / Tony Gutierrez)
