As Dodgers players packed in for Clayton Kershaw’s retirement news conference last Thursday, Freddie Freeman waved the Kershaw family to a row of seats at the front of the room.
He wanted Kershaw’s wife, Ellen, and their four kids in front of the pitcher right when he sat down at the dais at Dodger Stadium.
How else, Freeman joked, could they get the future Hall of Famer to cry?
Turned out, in a 14-minute address announcing his retirement from baseball at the end of this season, Kershaw did get choked up from behind the mic. But, it happened first when he addressed his teammates. They, he told him, were who he was going to miss most.
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“The hardest one is the teammates, so I’m not even going to look at you guys in the eye,” Kershaw said, his eyes quickly turning red. “Just you guys sitting in this room, you mean so much to me. We have so much fun. I’m going to miss it.”
“The game in and of itself, I’m going to miss a lot, but I’ll be OK without that,” he later added. “I think the hard part is the feeling after a win, celebrating with you guys. That’s pretty special.”
Days later, that message continues to reverberate.
For the Dodgers, it served as a reminder and a reset.
Ever since early July, the team had lived in a world blanketed by frustration and wracked with repeated misery. Many players were hurt or uncharacteristically slumping. The team as a whole endured an extended sub-.500 skid. Behind inconsistent offense and unreliable bullpen pitching, a big division lead dwindled. Visions of 120-win grandeur were meekly dashed.
Amid that slump, the club’s focus drifted. From team production to individual mechanics. From collective urgency to internal dissatisfaction.
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“Everyone on this team has been so busy this year trying to perfect their craft,” third baseman Max Muncy said, “that sometimes we forget about that moment of just hanging out and enjoying what we’re going through. “
Or, as Kershaw put it after his final regular-season Dodger Stadium start on Friday, “the collective effort to do something hard together.”
“All that stuff is just so impactful, so meaningful,” Kershaw explained.
And if it had gone missing during the depths of mostly difficult summer months, Kershaw’s retirement has thrust it back to the forefront.
“I do think it helps reset,” Muncy said. “Over the course of seven, eight months, you see each other every day and sometimes you take that a little bit for granted … It’s not something that anyone forgot. But sometimes you need a refresher. I think that was a good moment for it.”
Don’t mistake this as a “Win one for Kersh!” attitude. The Dodgers insisted they needed no extra motivation to defend their title, even after what’s been a turbulent repeat campaign.
But, both players and coaches have noted recently, their efforts this year have sometimes felt misplaced. The togetherness they lauded during last year’s championship march hadn’t always been replicated. A pall was cast over much of the second half.
“When you’re not winning games, it’s not fun,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said earlier this month. “But at the end of the day, we gotta put all that aside. … We have to come here and enjoy ourselves around the clubhouse, regardless of the situation.”
The Dodgers did that and more this past weekend, when a celebration of Kershaw — which included nearly team-wide attendance at his Thursday news conference, several on-field ovations Friday, and Kershaw’s address to Dodger Stadium on Sunday — was accompanied by three wins out of four against the San Francisco Giants.
“Watching him get choked up when he started talking about the teammates — it was just a crazy feeling in that room,” pitcher Tyler Glasnow recounted from Thursday’s announcement.
Added Muncy: “You hear when he talks about the stuff he’s gonna miss the most, the stuff that he enjoys the most: It’s being a part of the team. It’s being with the guys. It’s being in the clubhouse.
“To hear a guy like him just reinforce that, I think it’s a good message for a lot of people to hear.”
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In Muncy’s estimation, the Dodgers have “seen a reflection of that out on the field” of late, having moved to the verge of a division title (their magic number entering play Monday was three with a 10-4 record over the last two weeks.
“There’s been more of an effort to try and enjoy the moments,” Muncy said. “Make sure we’re still getting our work in, but try to enjoy the moments.”
The Dodgers made a similar transformation last October, when they used their first-round bye week to build the kind of cohesion they had lacked in previous postseason failures — one the team credited constantly in its eventual run to the World Series.
Kershaw’s retirement might’ve provided a similar spark, highlighting the significance of such intangible dynamics while lifting the gloom that had clouded the team’s last two months.
“There’s obviously been a lot of things to point [to this season], as far as adversities, which all teams go through,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But I think that as we’ve gotten to the other side of it … guys have stuck together and they’ve come out of it stronger, which a lot of the times, that’s what adversity does.”
More adversity, of course, figures to lie ahead.
The Dodgers ended the weekend on a sour note, with Blake Treinen suffering the latest bullpen implosion in a 3-1 loss on Sunday. They’ll still enter the playoffs in a somewhat unsettled place, needing to navigate around a struggling relief corps and overcome a hand injury to catcher Will Smith.
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It means, like last year, their path through October is unlikely to be smooth.
That, after a second half full of frustrations, they’ll have to lean on a culture Kershaw emphasized, and praised, repeatedly over the weekend.
“To have a group of guys in it together, and kind of understanding that and being together, being able to have a ton of fun all the time, is really important,” Kershaw said. “The older I’ve gotten, the more important [I’ve realized] it is. Like, you can’t just go through your day every day and go through the emotions. You just can’t. It’s too hard, too long to do that.”
“You gotta have Miggy doing the mic on the bus. You gotta have Kiké. You gotta have all these guys that are able to keep us having fun and energized every single day. That’s what this group is, and it’s been a blast.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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