As great as he has been in his career, baseball has never been what you would describe as kind to Clayton Kershaw.
The Los Angeles Dodgers southpaw established himself as an ace 15 or so years ago, but it wasn’t long after that the hits started coming in the postseason. The pattern went: Excel in the regular season. Get asked to do too much in the postseason. Fail. Hear the “playoff Kershaw” jeers, in person or on social media.
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There eventually became no better way to describe his career than Sisyphean.
But sometimes, baseball shows mercy. Sometimes, you finally string together enough good starts to win your first ring. Sometimes, you get a ring for making seven starts in the regular season and none in the postseason. And sometimes, you get a ring on your way out the door.
That will be the story for Clayton Kershaw when viewing his career from the vantage point of October. Failure eventually giving way to success, sometimes through his own merit and sometimes because he was on the right team at the right time.
After a Game 7 for the ages, Kershaw will call it a career as a back-to-back MLB champion, despite having thrown 2 1/3 innings total in those postseasons, with a 15.43 ERA. On Saturday, he didn’t seem to mind his teammates being the ones who got it done as he embraced his family at the end of his playing career.
Kershaw announced in September that 2025 would be the final season of his career after 18 MLB seasons all spent with the Dodgers, the rare single-team player. To that point, he had been one of L.A.’s most solid pitchers of the regular season, ranking second on the team in innings with 112 2/3 with a 3.36 ERA.
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However, it was very clear that the Dodgers were planning to run through the postseason with a rotation of Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow. Kershaw and his diminished velocity were relegated to deep within the bullpen.
Clayton Kershaw has three rings and a completed career. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
His first playoff appearance was a disaster, turning a close game into a blowout loss against the Philadelphia Phillies in the NLDS. Kershaw didn’t take the mound again until the Dodgers were forced to use him with the bases loaded in the 18-inning marathon that was Game 3 of the World Series.
He was tasked with only one batter, Blue Jays left-hander Nathan Lukes, and got the job done to end the 12th.
You could see the anxiety and relief that come from a career like Kershaw’s on the face of his wife, Ellen, who has been up close for everything.
Game 7 nearly saw another Kershaw cameo, but that will remain a simple what-if. What if Yamamoto doesn’t get that game-ending double play, or the team manages to get the out at home with Daulton Varsho coming up?
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Varsho bats left-handed. Kershaw was warming in the bullpen, likely to be deployed against a lefty. There’s a world in which he enters the game and ends his career on the mound as a champion. There’s also a world in which he surrenders a walk-off Blue Jays victory in the cruelest moment of them all.
He sounded happy to simply be in this world.
Kershaw was bound for Cooperstown around the time of his third Cy Young Award, but it remained to be seen if he would shake his October ghosts. He got catharsis in 2020, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in five starts for his first ring.
Everything after that was a bonus and a case of baseball finally showing a little kindness after a decade of disappointment. At the expense of the Blue Jays, of course.