What made Clayton Kershaw so award-worthy

Jon SooHoo/Los Angeles Dodgers

By Cary Osborne

Clayton Kershaw clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about himself. His body language shows it when he steers questions about himself into answers about the team.

Even after his magnum opus on June 18 at Dodger Stadium — his first career no-hitter that was an error away from being a perfect game against the Colorado Rockies — his eyes drifted in the interview room. The 26-year-old slumped in a chair, looking like he was sitting on jagged rocks.

Others won’t hesitate to recognize it — even when asked to be his mouthpiece throughout a long, sometimes repetitive season. They find ways to redefine the best pitcher in baseball, whose 2014 masterpiece of a season has a spot reserved in a baseball Louvre.

No one gets asked more than his lockermate, his batterymate and friend, Dodger catcher A.J. Ellis. So Ellis would kindly offer something new every time he’s asked.

“He’s in a zone,” Ellis said in September. “But I don’t think you can say ‘it’s a zone’ anymore, where it’s like you’re in a zone and hot for two weeks. I think this is who he is.”

Despite the Dodgers early exit in the 2014 National League Division Series, we witnessed baseball history in Clayton Kershaw. Never has a Major League pitcher led the Majors in ERA four years in a row — until Kershaw’s run from 2011 to 2014. The leading candidate for the National League’s Cy Young Award and arguably its Most Valuable Player award is at a peak matched only by a few — Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Sandy Koufax, Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez (pitchers who won their third MLB ERA title at or before the age of 30).

“This is a guy who I believe wants to be truly great — all-time great, not just be good or win a Cy Young or two, but to be really one of the all-time best,” said Sports Illustrated senior baseball writer and MLB Network analyst Tom Verducci. “To see how good he can really be, and we’re starting to find that out now, he’s on a run right now that to me is starting to be comparable to the one Sandy Koufax went on in the ’60s.

“It’s a different age. It’s a five-man rotation, not a four-man rotation. You’re not going to see 300-plus innings out of Kershaw. But just to measure him against his peers, how difficult he is to hit and especially every time he goes out he throws a good game … to me that’s reminiscent of Koufax.”

Between 1962 and his final season in 1966, Koufax led the National League in ERA every season (including marks of 1.88 in ’63, 1.74 in ’64 and 1.73 in ’66). Kershaw’s 1.83 ERA in 2013 was outrageous enough, but he went lower in 2014. And his other numbers got even more outrageous.

Kershaw led the National League in wins above replacement, ERA, ERA+, fielding independent pitching, wins, winning percentage, quality start percentage, complete games, WHIP, hits per nine innings, strikeout percentage, strikeout to walk ratio, batting average against, on-base percentage against, slugging percentage against, and OPS against.

And this is the summation you’ll get from Kershaw:

“You always want to be consistent,” he said. “It’s cliche, but you always want to give your team a chance, and you only contribute once every five days. So it’s important for each starting pitcher to take that momentum in there. Wins are a team thing.”

[mlbvideo id=”36575981″ width=”550″ height=”308″ /]
Doing the work
Kershaw said at the 2014 All-Star Game in Minneapolis that his motivation comes from knowing that others are working hard to try and beat him.

“So you do the same,” he told MLB Network.

He is meticulous in his preparation — both physical and mental. But at the end of the day, a pitcher has to execute. No one executes better than Kershaw.

Kershaw is unique in that he is the only left-handed pitcher in the game who has his mechanics. There is a little hesitation at the top and his front leg steps up, down and over. He hides the ball well and throws at such an angle to right-handed hitters, Ellis explained, that it’s hard for them to square up his pitches.

Ellis added that the key for Kershaw, as simple as it sounds, is getting ahead of a hitter with his fastball. Kershaw threw a first-pitch fastball 79.6 percent of the time in 2014, according to pitching data service Brooks Baseball.

Here’s Ellis’ breakdown from September:

“With Clayton, it is getting to the point where there are no more secrets. He’s so aggressive with his stuff that hitters have a pretty good idea what’s coming as far as early in the count. He wants to get ahead of every hitter 0-1.

“The best pitch for Clayton is an executed fastball, so he throws his fastball on 0-0 counts. When he does that you have two choices as a hitter. You can take it, and hopefully you’re 1-0, but with Clayton you haven’t been 1-0 a whole lot this season. You’re 0-1, and now you’ve opened up the entire plate.

“Or you swing at it. You could swing at it, and you could foul it off. You’re 0-1 or you put in play. Now if you put it in play and you get a hit, it’s good for you, but it’s only one pitch on Clayton’s pitch count, so he’s not really concerned about that. He’s ready to go to the next batter. But if you don’t get a hit, you make an out. It’s one pitch on his pitch count, and it’s an out for him.

“He’s executing so well right now where he’s able to get ahead of hitters. If you get to two strikes, he can execute either breaking ball at any time. You keep guys off balance. You can’t sit on either breaking ball because both are so devastating and precisely located.

“You can watch a bunch of film, scout him as much as you want. From what I’ve heard, you can’t be prepared for how quickly the ball gets up on you.”

[mlbvideo id=”32662043″ width=”550″ height=”308″ /]
The season
Kershaw never spent a day on the disabled list in his Major League career — until this season.

We’d have to check with the various search engine companies, but one could imagine just how popular the search term “teres major“ became in Los Angeles on March 30.

It was announced that day, after Kershaw won Major League Baseball’s historic season opener in Australia on March 22 against the Arizona Diamondbacks, that the defending NL Cy Young Award winner strained his teres major, a muscle that starts at the lower part of the scapula and reaches out to the humerus bone near the armpit.

“He’s not a fun guy to be around when he’s injured. That’s just his nature,” said Dodger pitching coach Rick Honeycutt. “It was extremely frustrating to him when it got to the reality that a certain amount of time would have to pass before his particular type of injury was going to get better.

“I think then he accepted it a little bit. More early on he had a focus on X amount of time to get back, and when that didn’t happen, it was the most frustrating when he didn’t make that time. It became the uncertainty of how long it was going to be. But he knew he was going to give it time.”

Kershaw, stubbornly, made two rehabilitation starts (one in High-A Rancho Cucamonga and one in Double-A Chattanooga). He thought he was ready to jump back onto a Major League mound. He finally returned to pitch for the Dodgers on May 6 in Washington, throwing seven shutout innings, allowing nine hits, no walks and no runs, while striking out nine.

Eleven days later, the anomaly arrived. At Arizona’s Chase Field on May 17, Kershaw was knocked out of the game in the second inning. He retired only five batters in the game, having surrendered six hits (including three triples), two walks and seven earned runs. He also had a balk in the inning. Kershaw left the game with a 4.43 ERA.

As fans wrung their hands, what followed was extraordinary.

In his next 20 starts, he went 16-2 (the Dodgers won 18 of the 20) with a 1.28 ERA and 0.75 WHIP, 182 strikeouts to 24 walks in 155 innings and a .169 batting average from opposing batters.

[mlbvideo id=”33858345″ width=”550″ height=”308″ /]
The June 18 no-hitter was one of the most dominating games in baseball history, according to a measure called “game score,” developed by the Godfather of sabermetrics Bill James. Game score weighs innings pitched, strikeouts, hits allowed, walks allowed and runs allowed.

In the top of the seventh inning of the no-hitter, Dodger shortstop Hanley Ramirez charged Colorado Rockie Corey Dickerson’s ground ball, snagged it and threw wide of Adrian Gonzalez at first base. That error ended the perfect-game bid. It ended up being a career high 15-strikeout, 107-pitch no-hitter for Kershaw, garnering the second best all-time nine-inning game score of 102, behind Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout, one-hitter and game score of 105 on May 6, 1998.

“I guess I haven’t really thought about the ramifications of throwing one of these things. It’s definitely special company,” Kershaw said after the performance. “I don’t take for granted the history of this or what that means. I definitely understand all that. As far as individually, though, it’s right up there with winning playoff games and World Series games and all that stuff, so it’s pretty cool.”

Kershaw turned hitters cold again and again. The no-hitter was near the beginning of his 41-inning scoreless streak — which equaled Luis Tiant (1968) for the fifth-longest single-season string in the Majors since 1961. Kershaw surrendered 17 hits and six walks during the streak, and only three runners reached third base (two on errors).

The streak ended with a Chase Headley home run in the sixth inning of a 2-1 Dodger victory over the San Diego Padres.

“I was disappointed I gave up a run. I don’t really care about the streak. It tied the game,” Kershaw told reporters after that game. “I’m not supposed to give up a run. One mistake can kill you, but fortunately it didn’t tonight.”

Kershaw was passed over to start the All-Star Game in Minneapolis in favor of NL manager Mike Matheny’s own guy, St. Louis Cardinals ace Adam Wainwright, who at the time had a 1.83 ERA to Kershaw’s 1.78 in 42 more innings. After the All-Star Break, Kershaw moved beyond in-season comparisons to some of his peers and entered comparisons to pitchers of the past.

His strikeout rate was up. His walk rate was down. At 26 and coming off a spectacular 2013, Kershaw was getting better. His career ERA reached a historic sub-2.50.

“No, not that type of dominance,” Honeycutt said as to whether he had ever seen anything like it.

At the end of the day, though, all that matters to Kershaw is winning. And nothing would be better for him than winning the World Series. Bring on next season.