Clayton Kershaw is ending a career that has spanned 18 MLB seasons, 11 All-Star nods, three Cy Young Awards, two World Series titles, a Gold Glove, a Roberto Clemente Award and, notably, just one team.
The Los Angeles Dodgers announced their southpaw will retire at the end of the 2025 season Thursday, and there is no doubt that Kershaw will be entering the Hall of Fame on his first ballot five years from now. He will have a Dodgers cap on his plaque. No Dodgers player will ever wear No. 22 again.
Kershaw’s status as one of the greatest players of his generation is unassailable, but one question that remains is where he ranks among the all-time greats of the Dodgers, one of MLB’s most historic franchises.
The answer to that question depends on how you define greatness.
Clayton Kershaw’s career coincided with the transformation of the Dodgers. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
(Kevin C. Cox via Getty Images)
By some numbers, Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher ever
Zooming all the way out on Kershaw’s professional career, there are some ways you can argue he’s not just the the best Dodger ever, but the best pitcher ever.
ERA? His career 2.54 mark is the best since the deadball era that ended in 1920 (min. 2,000 innings). By using ERA+ to adjust for era, he’s the all-time best, just ahead of Pedro Martinez.
WHIP? His career 1.02 mark is the best since the deadball era (min. 2,000 innings).
It has been years since Kershaw pitched a full season injury-free, which is why some might not remember just how good he was in the first half of his career. With a precise fastball, deceptive slider and looping curveball, he kept hitters off-balance as well as any pitcher in baseball history.
That has continued even as Kershaw’s velocity has faded and injuries have somewhat regularly kept him off the mound. Taken through an inning-for-inning, regular-season lens, it really doesn’t get better than him.
Kershaw is also the Dodgers’ all-time leader in wins above replacement (as calculated by Baseball Reference) and strikeouts. He helped oversee a club transformation during his career, from literal bankruptcy to making countless other fans demand a salary cap.
We can appreciate all of that.
However, we can also appreciate Sandy Koufax, the player who, along with Jackie Robinson, many regarded as the greatest Dodger before Kershaw got started.
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Let’s talk about the playoffs, and Sandy Koufax
One of the wilder things about Kershaw is that he’s only the second left-handed pitcher who spent his entire career with the Dodgers and was on pace to rewrite the record books, only for injuries to put a damper on things.
Except in Koufax’s case, “damper” is putting it lightly.
Kershaw’s prime might have been incredible, but Koufax arguably reached the peak of all peaks among pitchers in the 1960s. And unfortunately for Kershaw’s case, this is the point where we are going to bring up postseason performance.
Throughout his career, Kershaw was a divisive player for many because he was posting some of the best numbers in MLB history, while stepping on rake after rake in the postseason. For some, Kershaw’s playoff issues invalidated his argument as the game’s top pitcher. Others pointed to how often Kershaw was pushed into short-rest starts and to go just one more inning than he should have. He ultimately found some redemption in the Dodgers’ 2020 World Series run, but the end result is a 4.49 ERA in the games that mattered more.
Maybe some of those arguments are unfair. But here’s the thing: No one has to make any of those qualifications for Koufax.
In an era when the only postseason was the World Series, Koufax posted a 0.95 ERA across four different series. He got the win in two complete games in a sweep of the New York Yankees in 1963, then etched his name in baseball history in 1965 when he refused to play in Game 1 on Yom Kippur, then came back and pitched in three games. He took the loss in Game 2 with, gasp, one earned run in six innings, then threw shutouts in Games 5 and 7, the latter on two days’ rest. All while his arm was falling apart from traumatic arthritis.
Maybe Koufax would have seen more struggles in an expanded postseason, which has been cruel to so many, but any player from his era would likely have just expected more of the same from him.
Kershaw’s postseason problem shouldn’t keep him out of the Hall of Fame. It shouldn’t stop anyone from speaking about him in hushed tones. But when it comes to just deciding on “greatness,” it seems warranted to mention.
Koufax might have lost half of a career to an arm condition, but what remains feels almost tailor-made to counter-argue against Kershaw. He won as many Cy Young Awards and MVPs, with two more Triple Crowns, three more no-hitters (including a perfect game), two more ERA titles and, of course, a postseason track record that made fans proud rather than defensive. He isn’t even that far behind in the counting stats, as Kershaw will finish with only 500 or so more innings — fewer than two seasons for Koufax — than a guy who had to retire after his age-30 season.
Clayton Kershaw will be remembered
We are talking about two different eras with Kershaw and Koufax, but that’s kind of the point with greatness debates. It’s not just about who had the better stats, and Koufax might have had the better stats anyway, especially when you consider his first few years were mediocre because he entered the big leagues two years after he seriously started pitching.
Koufax played at a time when baseball was a different sport in the eyes of the larger world. He was one of the biggest celebrities in America and made a lasting cultural impact with his Yom Kippur refusal, especially in the Jewish community. It’s hard to see any baseball player achieving a similar status in America today (though Shohei Ohtani is doing it in Japan).
And if greatness is about impact over stats, there’s Robinson, who broke the color barrier, helped win the Dodgers’ first World Series in 1955 and was one of MLB’s best-ever second basemen even in a vacuum. If you want to say he’s the greatest Dodger ever, no one should disagree with you.
Talking about all of this feels unfair to Kershaw, who most certainly made an impact in today’s game. He just happens to be on one of the worst teams possible for making a GOAT argument.
Ultimately, Kershaw might be remembered from the standpoint of his era rather than his team. His decline exemplified a change in baseball this century, from starting pitchers who could be expected to throw 200 innings every year to trips to the injured list being an eventuality. It is a testament to Kershaw that he remained effective even after that transition, with a fastball averaging 98 mph this season.
Neither Kershaw nor Koufax is going to sweat whether they helped the Dodgers more than the other. They clearly both did just fine.
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