There is a picture of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw sitting in the dugout during the final game of the 2019 National League Division Series, against the Washington Nationals, that I still think about sometimes. Kershaw had come into the game in relief, with the Dodgers leading by two runs, and he had given up two home runs. His shoulders are hunched, his head is down, his long hair hangs across his face. His great beard is unable to hide him. His elbows rest on his large knees, and his palms are pressed together. He is alone, as if surrounded by a repelling force field of failure. It is one of the saddest pictures of an athlete that I have ever seen—or it would be, if I had not seen so many similar images of Kershaw during the past decade.
I know it’s not fair to begin a story this way—not when you’re talking about the best pitcher of his generation, and one of the best pitchers in the game’s history. It’s especially not fair after Kershaw’s performance in Game One of the World Series, against the Tampa Bay Rays, this past Tuesday. Kershaw was magnificent, striking out eight and allowing just one run over six innings. He put away seventeen of the final eighteen batters he faced, and he did it with dominating stuff. At six feet four, with legs like trunks, Kershaw, at thirty-two years old, has recovered some of the speed that had left his fastball in recent years. Still, these days he uses it as a precision instrument, putting batters behind in the count and setting up his nasty slider. Half of the time that the Rays swung their bats against Kershaw on Tuesday, they missed. The Dodgers’ offense, supercharged by the star outfielder Mookie Betts, set off a series of small explosions in the fifth inning, and went on to win, 8–3, prompting a burst of optimism that perhaps the Dodgers would win the title for the first time in more than thirty years. (The Rays have never won the Series, but, to be fair, the franchise hasn’t even existed for thirty years yet.)
In Game Two, the Rays—whose entire payroll this season is less than what Kershaw made alone—rode their own offensive outburst to a 6–4 win. Then, in Game Three, on Friday, the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler turned in his own pitching masterpiece, allowing one run on three hits in six innings, leading the team to a 6–2 win. This was followed, on Saturday, by a Rays win in a wild Game Four, a result determined by a costly Dodgers error and a walk-off bloop single in the bottom of the ninth. On Sunday night, Kershaw takes the mound for a second time, with the chance to get the Dodgers to the brink of the championship. What is at stake, it is widely understood, is not only a World Series ring but Kershaw’s legacy.
Kershaw is 3–1 in four starts this post-season, with a 2.88 earned-run average, thirty-one strikeouts, and only three walks. He had one bad outing against the Braves (and there he was in the dugout again, on the desolate bench, head drooping), but, otherwise, the story that people have gotten used to telling about Kershaw in the playoffs—of a singular talent who falls apart—has seemed silly. Maybe such rigid narratives always are. In past post-seasons, he has been unlucky; he has been mismanaged; and he has, sometimes, been great. The Dodgers have been excellent during the past decade—thanks, in part, to Kershaw—and he has started a season’s worth of games in the playoffs alone. The brilliant performances outnumber the bad ones: he has thirteen playoff starts in which he’s allowed two or fewer runs. But the bad ones stick to him. There are reasons. His minuscule career earned-run average balloons from 2.43 in the regular season to 4.22 in the post-season. Coming into Game One, it was 5.40 in the World Series. He allows home runs at twice the rate during fall baseball as in the regular season. “Everything people say is true right now about the post-season,” he said, after that loss to the Nationals, in 2019. “I understand that. Nothing I can do about it right now. It’s a terrible feeling. It really is.”
Even in Game One, as Kershaw was humming along with a two-run lead, having retired thirteen batters in a row, there was a moment in the top of the fifth inning when Dodgers fans across the country caught their breaths. He left a slider in the heart of the plate, and the Rays’ Kevin Kiermaier daggered it: home run. I saw Kershaw’s eyes flick up on the replay, as he followed it out of the park, and I closed my own. Would he unravel? No: he calmly ended the inning, and when the Dodgers got their turn to bat they broke the game open. Kershaw retired all three batters in the sixth, with a little help from his defense, and ended his night having thrown a paltry seventy-eight pitches. I felt myself relax.
It’s a truism that baseball is a game of failure. The best hitters only succeed around a third of the time. Even in eras with juiced balls or juiced players, home runs aren’t hit very often—which is why they produce such spontaneous euphoria. But, for pitchers, the cliché is a little off. Pitchers can chase perfection. And few have flirted with perfection as intimately as Kershaw does. For years, his stingy E.R.A. inched progressively down, and it seemed, as absurd as it sounds, that he could nudge it toward nothing. In each of the last few seasons, it began to creep up, but this year it dropped down again, to a tiny 2.16. Kershaw is past his physical prime, and he has a bad back, but his command of the strike zone, and his ability to make balls move midair, still suggests magic. That’s why the moments when he seems ordinary are so arresting.
Three years ago, Kershaw followed a fabulous World Series Game One outing against the Houston Astros with a total disaster. (The Astros’ sign-stealing may have had something to do with that.) That could certainly happen again. Or maybe the Dodgers will win it all, and maybe that will change Kershaw’s narrative completely. Either way, I won’t forget the photographs of him on the bench, head down. It’s not an image that should define him, but it’s part of the picture, and worth remembering. That’s the same man I’ve watched driving off the mound, long legs stretched and arms spread like wings ready to take flight.
