Kershaw shoulders oversized load on 2023 Dodgers

A scout texted ahead of the National League Division Series to talk about Clayton Kershaw.

“Have you heard Kershaw’s shoulder is still an issue?” he wrote.

This is how most conversations with scouts are. It’s like high school gossip, but instead of rumors about blossoming love, it’s usually about busted shoulders and elbows.

Anyway, yes, of course, I knew — we all knew — Kershaw’s shoulder is not exactly straight-off-the-assembly-line stable these days.

The surefire Hall of Famer spent more than a month on the injured list this summer with shoulder soreness. He returned Aug. 10 and had a 2.23 ERA across 36 1/3 innings in his last eight regular-season starts. But we have all this Statcast data smacking us in the face, and it was impossible not to notice that his “fastball” averaged between 88.2 and 88.8 mph in each of his September starts.

“I saw that start against the Giants [on Sept. 23],” the scout wrote. “Tough to see where the stuff is. So much respect for him. He actually had some success, as I felt their hitters struggled to adjust to the diminished stuff. I will be surprised if it looks like that against a better club.”

Welp. The D-backs aren’t what you’d consider an elite offensive club, but, boy, were they ready for Clayton Kershaw in Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. Kershaw has a checkered postseason history, but this outing in the Dodgers’ eventual 11-2 loss was nothing short of one of the worst starts in anybody’s postseason history.

It went like this: Double, single, single, double, homer, groundout (woo!), walk, double, shower.

Only three other starters had ever allowed six or more runs while recording one or zero outs in the postseason – the A’s Gil Heredia (Game 5, 2000 ALDS), the Cardinals’ Dakota Hudson (Game 4, 2019 NLCS) and the Braves’ Mike Foltynewicz (Game 5, 2019 NLDS).

So here come the haters with their postseason pitchforks to tell us that Clayton Kershaw just can’t get it done in October. And, honestly, there have been a lot of times when Clayton Kershaw just didn’t get it done in October. There are also a lot of times when Clayton Kershaw did get it done in October.

That’s the thing about 194 1/3 innings in the postseason. Lots of stuff happens.

Kershaw authored something resembling a redemption story in 2020, but, of course, that was a peculiar pandemic postseason, which means some people will never take it seriously.

What I would ask the naysayers to consider is that maybe, possibly, the Dodgers, for all their resources and successes, have a long history of relying way too much on Kershaw’s left arm. And this particular start — Kershaw’s 12th career Game 1 start — was a cry for help from a Dodgers team that lost three-fifths of its already iffy Opening Day rotation.

Kershaw led this team with 131 2/3 innings this year — by far the lowest total ever for the innings leader on a division winner and not at all what was envisioned for this 35-year-old whose workload has been carefully managed the last few years. The Dodgers were the first division winner ever to not have a pitcher start 25 games. (Congrats?)

The Dodgers are trying to get through this postseason essentially without a rotation. Their bullpen accounted for 44.6% of their regular-season innings pitched — the highest of any postseason entrant this year. If the plans presented publicly by manager Dave Roberts are to be believed, then a deep run this October (and on a night like Saturday, a deep run did not look likely) would require an even higher percentage, because they plan on quick hooks and piggybacks and other phrases that make old timers break out in hives.

Kershaw just showed us how precarious this plan is. Because to use a very technical term, he ain’t right. The six hits against him all had exit velocities from 98.8 mph to 115.7 mph. As the scout surmised, Kershaw’s diminished stuff is not going to fool anybody in October. The planning and preparation is too precise.

Because Kershaw is 35, has flirted with retirement in the recent past and just put his club in a 1-0 hole in a best-of-five series, we can’t rule out the possibility that we just witnessed not only the worst start of his postseason career but also the last. If that’s the case, at least we won’t have to spend any more October nights arguing about whether a guy with LITERALLY THE BEST CAREER ERA+ EVER (minimum 2,000 innings) is good at his job or not.

But those arguments really ought to be limited to previous iterations of postseason Kershaw, anyway. The Kershaw you just watched has nearly 3,000 career innings under his belt and a shoulder quite likely with the same physical components as string cheese. He was the Game 1 starter not because he’s vintage Clayton Kershaw but because the Dodgers were some combination of unlucky and unprepared for what this 2023 season wrought.

On a night like this, the question was not whether Clayton Kershaw is built for October. It’s whether the Dodgers are built for October.