Another Kershaw Puke-a-thon

Thus ends perhaps the strangest postseason career in modern baseball history.

If you weren't up for some late night viewing last night, you missed something on par with catching the Prohibition episode of the Simpsons or a late run of Get Shorty, both for its semi regular showing and the enjoyment gleaned from it. It was another Clayton Kershaw immolation in the playoffs, as the Phillies turned his increasingly pedestrian offerings into mash, and gave us one more glimpse of Kershaw with his head in his hands in the dugout. For baseball watchers, this is as familiar an image as Carlton Fisk waving that ball fair. Most of us could draw it from memory.

Perhaps one day, on some right-wing, faith-based podcast for true giblets, Clayton Kershaw will tell us what he really thinks of Dave Roberts. Then again, it probably won't be all that juicy. While Roberts has spent a decade tossing out Kershaw in the postseason in a variety of roles he wasn't suited for, and watching it blow up far more than anyone would guess for one of the generation's best pitchers, it's likely that Kershaw was just as antsy to pitch whenever asked to try to help the Dodgers.

There's a new slice of joy, watching Kershaw once again get that face he gets in October where it looks like he's having the debate we all know so well of whether or not you'll get to the toilet on time once you exit the bus, given that he's spent the past couple years revealing himself to be a homophobic turd. He's certainly hardly unique in MLB, to be sure, but he's put himself out there more than most. Which means he becomes a bigger figure of fun for the rest of us.

Not that that, or his playoff failures, will matter much in the long run. Kershaw will be a first ballot Hall of Famer, and rightly so due to his regular season excellence. He'll have two rings, maybe a third to come, though one was fake from 2020 and the other one or two will be without him contributing anything to them. He'll be generationally rich, and soon everything we read about him in the media, leading up to that Cooperstown speech, will be a fawning retrospective.

Yet it's hard to think of a player, an inarguable all-time great, who has a greater schism between his regular season reputation and his postseason one. Kershaw also is somewhat a victim of MLB's greater insistence on the playoffs recently, and that's accentuated by the view of the Dodgers from the wider world, which has become more and more October exclusive the past 10 years.

It's funny to think what fans today might have thought of a career like Nolan Ryan's, had it occurred more recently. It spanned 25 years but only included seven postseason starts. Obviously, in an expanded playoff universe, Ryan would have had more. But it's never mentioned when his career is talked about, because back then the playoffs were almost ancillary.

Looking at a more contemporary comparisons, Randy Johnson's playoff numbers aren't actually that great. He was clubbed for the Mariners in 1997, and for Arizona in 2002. But those two years were preceded by signature performances in 1995 and 2001, which clinched series wins or even World Series ones, and they erase whatever else took place. It also didn't hurt that those two signature playoff outings took place against the Yankees, for teams that were considered underdogs slaying the dragon, the Ms and Diamondbacks. Kershaw has never really pitched for an underdog.

He has dominant playoff outings. He was brilliant in Game 2 against the Cubs in 2016. He then got clobbered in Game 6. He struck out 11 in Game 1 of the 2017 World Series. Then in Game 5, when the Astros had the trash cans in uniform, he got utterly neutered. He was battered around by a superior Red Sox team in the 2018 World Series, and that kind of ends his relevant postseason experience, counting 2020 for whatever you want.

Meanwhile, his biggest contemporary, Justin Verlander, has pretty much excelled in the playoffs, and had a direct hand in two World Series wins for Houston, as well as catapulting the Tigers to a couple appearances. Yet we don't talk about Verlander throwing the ball all over the field like a rogue yard hose in his first World Series start in St. Louis. Or that he got pummeled by the Giants in his next trip in 2012. Or that the Yankees and Nationals lit him up pretty good in 2019. Or that the Phillies did too in Game 1 in 2022. Strange.

Some of that has to do with the deemphasis that has been put on the Dodgers' regular season for years now, in a way that Verlander's Tigers or Astros didn't really face. The Astros won two World Series, appeared in two others, and were pretty much doing it from the beginning of their emergence, so they get a pass on it, even if they cheated. They weren't ever seen as chokers or incomplete.

The Dodgers, on the other hand, piled up playoff appearance and division titles with no World Series, and hence the focus only got bigger on what happened in the year's 10th month. As their resources grew and their dominance only expanded, their regular seasons were just taken more and more as a given. Kershaw may have had an ERA that never sniffed 3.00 or higher, but more and more people didn't care, because that just felt like the ante for him and Los Angeles during the season.

Still, Kershaw's ERA balloons over two runs when going from the regular season to the playoffs. Perhaps he benefitted from the given that Dodgers' regular seasons were, too? Certainly more was riding on October for L.A. than most teams, and Kershaw, mostly, hasn't handled it. Was he asked to do too much? Of course. But he should have done better with it. Perhaps those April-September starts were even easier for Kershaw, knowing deep down that the team's fortunes wouldn't really change, whatever he did. We'll never know.

Again, it won't cost Kershaw anything. Certainly not amongst Dodgers fans. It's just hard to think of another player, anywhere, of that stature, and the enduring image of him with every other fanbase, not just a direct rival, will be of head in hands in the dugout, alone, wondering how the hell it went so wrong again.