Fourteen Pictures About One Thing

A history of a great athlete looking sad.

This is an article about a great athlete looking sad. I’m not totally sure how I feel about that fact. But the image of Clayton Kershaw sitting alone in the dugout after being pulled mid-inning from a tough postseason start has so often defined October baseball, going all the way back to my first postseason as a baseball writer and continuing through his career-worst start last Saturday. This image feels worth exploring—where does it come from, what does it mean, why do we do it, how does it correspond to the reality of Kershaw’s postseason struggles—even at the risk of bumming everybody out or claiming part of Kershaw’s soul that isn’t mine to claim. We’ll see.

1. October 8, 2009

The first time Clayton Kershaw started a postseason game was in 2009. Through six innings, he had allowed one run and the game was tied. He went out for the seventh and allowed three hits and the go-ahead run and his manager came out to get him. The broadcast went to break and returned with a shot of Kershaw, short hair and smooth face and 21 years old sitting next to a pile of spent Gatorade towels, staring first to his left, then out to the field with a grimace, then to his right. It was an ambiguous image. A strong pitching line stretched out beneath him as the broadcasters praised his performance—“You can see why the Dodgers are so excited about the future of Clayton Kershaw,” Bob Brenly said—but he had also just allowed a go-ahead run. Kershaw didn’t seem exuberant or downcast, kind of just like he was waiting for bus and not sure from which direction it would arrive. Then he turned his head down. Now he looked downcast. I don’t think he was, particularly. People look at the ground for all sorts of reasons. But “directed downward” is the literal definition of downcast, along with “low in spirit.” You can almost imagine the broadcast was relieved to have an unambiguous emotion to focus on. The camera didn’t cut away for 10 more seconds.

2. October 15, 2009

One week later, Kershaw took a 1-0 lead into the fifth inning. It all fell apart. He walked three and threw three wild pitches, and he left the inning with two outs and down 5-1.

Kershaw the pitcher wasn’t that good yet. He’d gone 8-8 in the regular season, his first full season. He’d had the worst walk rate in the majors. Expectations for him couldn’t have been so high that anybody expected him to rend his garments over one bad inning. But his posture in that dugout—hunched again, head down but face exposed, the one tragic figure in an otherwise workaday scene—was too compelling for the broadcast to pass up. Coming back from the commercial, it zoomed in on him for 27 seconds as teammates walked in and out of the shot, a zoom so long and slow and penetrative that at a certain point you almost want to laugh at the excess.

3. October 18, 2013

The Dodgers missed the playoffs in 2010, 2011, 2012. In that time, Kershaw became the best in the world, winning three ERA titles and two Cy Youngs and bulking up and growing out his hair and accomplishing a beard. In his first three postseason starts in 2013, he went 19 innings and allowed one earned run, striking out 23 and permitting only eight hits. Ah, but. In NLCS Game 6 the Cardinals got to him, and Kershaw left the fifth inning down 5-0.

FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens later wrote that this start was “the first time Playoff Kershaw became a thing.” This feels way too early—it was only his second bad posteason start out of six!—but “Playoff Kershaw,” as an emotion, is the energy created by two contradictory stories rubbing against each other to create friction. One story is his postseason failure, which was still fairly underdeveloped at this point. The other story is his regular season success. By 2013, Kershaw was approaching Koufax/Pedro levels. His regular season achievements stretched to the sky. He felt inevitable. Hence the friction.

The camera found him, as usual, and as usual: His elbows on his thighs, his face down, surrounded by dugout trash. His hands clasped, his mouth hard. You fill in your own totally made up storyline, like “he looks like he’s trying to pray but the spirit won’t catch him.” To be clear, you’re making that up.