I just finished Andy McCullough’s biography of Clayton Kershaw, which is called The Last Of His Kind, and which is further called Clayton Kershaw & The Burden Of Greatness. It answered all my questions about Kershaw, except for the one that it raised:
“…including a defeat to the Texas Rangers that Kershaw called ‘the most frustrating game I ever pitched.’”
The game referred to was played on June 17, 2015. All the game write-ups at the time included Kershaw’s “most frustrating” quote—it’s too good a quote not to include in your game story—but without a lot of emphasis, because Kershaw’s performance was not really a notable part of the Dodgers’ loss that night. (Their poor hitting with runners in scoring position was.) Kershaw pitched six innings. He struck out 10 batters and walked only one. He allowed only six baserunners, two of whom were either caught stealing or picked off. There were maybe two balls hit convincingly well. He did this:
Yes, he did allow four runs, three of them earned, which isn’t great, but isn’t exactly eternity spent pushing a boulder up a hill. So how, why, could a regular-season interleague game in which Kershaw pitched pretty well and the Dodgers were in first place be the most frustrating of his life? Since the game is on YouTube in full, I watched it, eager to see a) what the heck and b) how my recent literary immersion in Kershaw’s psyche might illuminate it.
So, first, let’s do a tour of his frustrations—things that either might have been frustrating, seem like they would be frustrating, or produced confirmable frustration.
First Inning
1. His 14th pitch of the game is a slider to Joey Gallo that he bounces way in front of the plate.
Kershaw walks to the catcher to take the new ball by hand, then takes a long walk around the mound. Twenty-one seconds is a long time just to rub up a new baseball. He’s maybe already frustrated.
2. He comes back to even the count to Gallo, then throws this 2-2 curveball to freeze him—but, as Kershaw walks off the mound, the umpire doesn’t give him the call.
(The pitch was high, according to PITCHf/x.) He does strike out Gallo swinging on a fastball the next pitch.
Second Inning
3. Kershaw gives up two hits to put runners on the corners with none out. One of the hits is on a weak groundball that is just out of his reach.
4. He gets Rougned Odor to hit a pop up into center field. The center fielder seems to pulls up a bit passively and plays it on a hop. He manages to get the force out at second base—the runner at first had to hold, because it seemed like such a catchable ball—but that allows the first run of the game to score from third.
5. Kershaw throws a 1-0 slider to Carlos Corporán. It’s in the strike zone but catcher A.J. Ellis boxes it, and the pitch is called a ball. Kershaw snaps at the ball coming back to him.
It’s not clear whether Kershaw is mad that Ellis cost him the strike, or that the umpire missed the call, or that he threw one of his worst sliders of the night. Of all the sliders he throws in this game, this one has the least horizontal movement and the second-least downward movement. Bad slider.
“So he’s a little annoyed at himself,” Vin Scully says. “You can tell by his body language.” He comes back to get Corporán on a curveball.
Third Inning
6. He allows a leadoff single to the pitcher Wandy Rodríguez, on a weak pop up that the center fielder can’t quite reach. It wasn’t a bad pitch and it wasn’t loud contact and it was nearly caught, just a confluence of narrow margins going against Kershaw.
7. He throws a bad slider to start the next batter, Shin-Soo Choo. He shelves the slider for the next nine pitches, which is a long time for him. Eight of the next nine pitches are fastballs.
8. He finally throws another slider, on 1-0 to Joey Gallo, with two outs and the opposing pitcher still on the basepaths. It’s in the dirt, but Gallo swings at it, evening the count at 1-1. Then Kershaw tries the slider again. This one has below-average horizontal movement for a Kershaw slider, and despite being at the low edge of the strike zone it is dead center over the plate. Gallo makes it get small fast, a thunderous two-run homer.
(The video of Kershaw slamming things in the dugout comes after this inning.)
Fourth Inning
9. He gets a swinging third strike to Adam Rosales to start the inning. But A.J. Ellis can’t find the pitch in the dirt, and as Kershaw points and screams and eventually smacks his glove in anger, Rosales reaches.
Ellis looks maybe annoyed at Kershaw being definitely annoyed.
10. Kershaw picks off Rosales. But, as the Dodgers’ defense completes the out at second base, Kershaw sees that the first-base umpire has called him for a balk.
Rosales gets to stay at second. Vin Scully: “And now Kershaw, distressed enough tonight, is now really ticked off.” Kershaw doesn’t argue, just smirks. Rosales will end up scoring as an unearned run.
11. The Dodgers have left seven runners on base and haven’t scored. They’re 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position. The one was a hit by Kershaw, with the runner holding at third.
Fifth Inning
12. Throws an 0-2 curveball to the opposing pitcher, and it squirts out of his hand way high. A few pitches later, he leaves another curveball too high, to Shin-Soo Choo. Kershaw turns his head and yells something, possibly starting with an F.
He strikes out Choo a moment later for the second out, and Scully says: “For Kershaw, this has to be the most dissatisfying nine-strikeout game he’s ever pitched.”
13. Throws his one changeup of the day, to start off Elvis Andrus. It’s terrible.
14. Bounces on a 2-1 slider to Adam Rosales. Flexes his entire body to unleash a righteous profanity, very audible on the broadcast.
He ends up walking Rosales, his only walk of the night. Then he picks him off.
15. Loses at home to the Texas Rangers. A few months later, Jeff Sullivan will find this game is—by FanGraphs’ single-game odds—the biggest upset of the 2015 baseball season, demonstrating “the enduring reality that baseball is helplessly random.”
**
One good standard for any Great Achiever biography is this: Does it convincingly reveal the fragile child who existed before all the achievements? That child never really goes away in any of us—our life’s work is mostly just building various armors to protect that child—and if the author does a good job the child won’t ever be far off in the book, either. So I’m reading McCullough’s account of Kershaw in the 2014 playoffs, and what I’m really seeing is: 12-year-old Clayton, anxious and unsmiling, trapped in his scarcity mindset, uncomfortably dependent on others, filled with feelings but temperamentally incapable of talking about them, pitching in the 2014 playoffs. When I turned on this 2015 game, I was actually momentarily jolted to see how big Kershaw was; the fragile boy had so taken over my mental picture while I was reading the book that I almost forgot Kershaw is an adult.
Why was this game so frustrating? The book is detailed enough to give us some specific clues. Two weak flares landed in front of center fielder Chris Heisey. Those are frustrating for anybody but especially for Kershaw, who, it turns out, was in a long-smoldering argument with the new front office over just this thing:
The team wanted to play the outfielders deeper to protect against extra-base hits. Kershaw objected because “he was like, ‘I just can’t take when I give up a little flare and it drops for a hit,’” Zaidi recalls. The arguments lasted years.
So since one of those flares led to the first run, and the second—to the pitcher!—led to the second (and arguably third) run, you could imagine the frustration.
But some of the frustration was clearly Kershaw’s, too. We saw visible reactions—the long walk, the snap-catch, the subtle F and the unsubtle F—on four pitches that he threw for balls, and three were on bad sliders. His slider was simply bad on this night, and almost always too low. For another pitcher, this might have led to a mechanical discussion, either internally or with his pitching coach. But Kershaw:
“… never liked talking mechanics,” Rick Honeycutt recalled. “He didn’t want to hear me say ‘mechanics.’” He preferred feel to verbiage. “If I’m missing up, I aim down,” he once told teammate Stephen Fife. He used the most basic cues.
So we can imagine a night when the feel isn’t there, and as the problem persists he’s helpless. There’s no backup plan. There’s only continuing to fire at the target, trying to find the feel, as frustration builds.
There’s more like that—a passage about his wife’s mortification at seeing Clayton swearing on the mound helps us understand how frustrated he must have been in this game to do it twice—but, really, the details aren’t as important as the premise. McCullough’s book could almost be summed up as: Clayton Kershaw is the type of dude whose most frustrating game of his entire career is a mid-June game in which he basically shoves. That’s how much he hates losing control. That’s how much he longs for self-sufficiency. That’s how little patience he has for others and how anxious he is about letting himself down. And that’s why, despite his inability to really analyze himself in words, he’s so interesting—to me and to the 214 (!!!!) other people that Andy interviewed for this book. Which I loved, by the way.
There’s one more thing about this start. Kershaw was clearly the best pitcher in the world at this point. But the season had begun pretty poorly for him—poorly for him, at least, with a 3.29 ERA in mid-June. A theme of this book is that Kershaw never wanted to depend on anybody for anything. (“He can’t even ask a teammate for a ride to the field without feeling like he owes something in return.”) If he was going to get out of this funk, his personality, his armor, required him to figure it out on his own. That is, itself, a very frustrating feeling.
But he did it. His ERA the rest of the season was 1.35.
Not sure why, this might have been one of my favorite posts so far.
Kershaw was such a special player; this was such a cool moment-by-moment breakdown.
Insightful and entertaining. Great read!