It must be hard to be the best pitcher in the world except in the most important games. Clayton Kershaw has won three Cy Young awards and an MVP before the age of 27. He has stormed through seasons almost as if he was toying with opponents, striking hitters out almost at will. From April through September he may wind up the best there ever was.
But Octobers have been cruel for the best pitcher in the world. His playoff starts have been filled with calamities amounting to a reputation – mostly undeserved – that he is the worst kind of superstar: the one who can’t win the big game.
And so it was unfair that his seven dominant innings in a 3-1 Dodgers victory over the Mets in Game 4 of the National League Division Series was not the story. Nor was it the Game 5 that will be played in Loa Angeles on Thursday night. But rather the big story of Clayton Kershaw’s night was a ground ball that rolled all of about 25 feet.
When asked about it later, he stared stunned and slightly rolled his eyes.
“That’s really the first question I’m answering?” he said.
And yet the ground ball in question came on the first batter in the seventh inning. This has been the inning that has generally been is undoing for the best pitcher in the world during many of his nine previous postseason starts of which he had won but one before Tuesday night. The ball trickled off the bat of Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes and rolled lazily on the grass between the pitcher’s mound and the third baseline. It was impossible to field; the most fortunate of base hits.
“Here we go,” Dodgers manager Don Mattingly admitted thinking.
Catcher AJ Ellis worried about “the flood of emotions.” He went to the mound to talk to the best pitcher in the world “to keep the positive thoughts in there (because) negativity is going to creep in.”
Only something remarkable happened. The Mets didn’t pester Kershaw with more tiny ground balls. He didn’t walk anybody. He didn’t appear rattled. Instead he got the next batter Travis d’Arnaud to pop up and Lucas Duda to fly to center and shortstop Wilmer Flores to hit a hard grounder to third that Justin Turner grabbed and threw to first, ending the inning.
And the Dodgers exhaled.
“Tonight he got the out,” Mattingly said.
Kershaw’s night was done after that inning. He looked at Turner and pumped his fist. Though he wouldn’t say it, the best pitcher in the world had vanquished something, pushing through a belief that his seventh innings could not be survived.
“I mean there’s no curse or anything,” he later said.
But the way his seventh innings have gone wrong in recent postseasons not everything felt right either. It was weird to talk about the best pitcher in the world as if he was to fragile to survive an inning he usually sails through during the regular season. He seemed annoyed about the attention of his seventh inning playoff failings.
“Good question,” he hissed after the first query about Cespedes’s grounder.
He saved the Dodgers season the way Chase Utley saved it last Saturday by plowing into Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada on a double play attempt. And while Kershaw’s surviving the seventh on Tuesday was not as dramatic as Utley fracturing Tejada’s leg, each incident represented a change on this Dodger team – the reversing of a mindset that has held this team back in postseasons. Utley gave them a toughness, instilling an aggressiveness that hasn’t always been there. Kershaw gave his team the belief that he can actually win an important postseason game.
The Dodgers have two great starting pitchers, Kershaw and Zack Greinke. They are not a hitting team. They have a shaky bullpen. This team will go as for as their dual aces will take them. On Tuesday Kershaw showed he could survive the dreaded seventh.
In doing so, he became the best pitcher in baseball again. A Dodgers team that realistically had little hope of advancing in the postseason, a reason to believe.
On Tuesday, during the moment that would have once broken him – a ball dribbled 25 feet off the bat of Yoenis Cespedes – was but that. A ball dribbled 25 feet.
Kershaw might have been right. Maybe there is no curse.
And yet he seemed relieved that whatever it was had gone away.
