Tag Archives: Clayton Kershaw

“I’m really at peace with this”

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Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw gets to retire as few of the greats truly do—on his own terms.

Often as not, you learn more about those whose careers you admire by the way they face the end than by the ways they did what earned your admiration. In Clayton Kershaw’s case, it might not be learning but re-learning.

When Kershaw froze the Giants’ Rafael Devers like ice cream with a strike-three fastball that could have been accused of clogging up the passing lane to open the top of the fifth Friday night, his mates in the infield surrounded and hugged him, then he handed the ball to Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. Roberts’s final season as a player was Kershaw’s first.

Now, Roberts put an arm around Kershaw and congratulated him on the career that’s written his likely first-ballot Hall of Fame ticket. Kershaw had only one reply: “I’m sorry I pitched so poorly tonight.”

Then, the 37-year-old lefthander looked toward his wife and four and a half children (Mrs. Kershaw is expecting their fifth) in the stands and motioned to the Dodger Stadium crowd before walking down from the mound and toward the dugout. He gave the crowd the curtain call they all but demanded, knowing they’d seen him pitch at home for the final time, then disappeared.

“I’m kind of mentally exhausted today, honestly,” he said after the Dodgers finished the game with a 6-3 win, “but it’s the best feeling in the world now. We got a win, we clinched a playoff berth, I got to stand on that mound one last time. I just can’t be more grateful.” Note the order in which he listed all of it. We first, I second.

That attitude enabled Kershaw not just to rule the earth from the mound in his prime but to pick up, dust off, start all over again after more mound heartbreak than the all-time greats should be allowed. When he triumphed, it was splendor on the mound; when he didn’t, it was down at the end of Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel. Never once did Kershaw take the triumphs for granted or the heartbreaks for finalities.

Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw beginning to deliver the strike three freezer to the Giants’ Rafael Devers, his final regular season batter and strikeout in Dodger Stadium.

No worse hour befell him, perhaps, than the night the Nationals yanked the Dodgers out of the 2019 postseason. The division series night Roberts sent Kershaw in relief of Walker Buehler and Kershaw yanked the Dodgers out of a seventh-inning Game Five jam by striking Adam Eaton out on three pitches. The night Roberts should have met Kershaw en route the dugout, given him the proverbial pat on the posterior, then taken the ball and brought Kenta Maeda in for the eighth to do what the manager later admitted thinking should have been done originally: face Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto.

Oops. Kershaw went out for the eighth. He threw Rendon a 1-0 fastball that looked as though it might catch the corner. Looks were so deceiving that Rendon sent it over the left field fence. The next pitch Kershaw threw, to Soto, was a slider that hung just enough for Soto to hang it into the right field bleachers. Then Roberts brought Maeda in. And Maeda struck the next three Nats out in order.

Those blows tied the game at three each, but Kershaw wasn’t anywhere near the mound when Howie Kendrick wrecked Joe Kelly and the Dodgers with the grand slam that punched the Nats’ tickets to the National League Championship Series. (And, to their eventual World Series conquest.) Some small packs of Dodger fans relieved themselves by running their cars over Kershaw jerseys in the postgame parking lot anyway.

Kershaw couldn’t bring himself to say what had to be said, that his manager inexplicably set him up to fail. Instead, he took the responsibility for himself.

“That’s the hardest part every year,” Kershaw said postgame. “When you don’t win the last game of the season and you’re to blame, it’s not fun . . . Everything people say is true right now about the postseason. I understand that. Nothing I can do about it right now. It’s a terrible feeling, it really is.”

He’d go forth to claim two World Series rings, in 2020 and 2024, even though his fractured toe kept him from pitching in last October other than cheerleading. His career 154 ERA+ leads all still-active pitchers. His 2.85 lifetime fielding-independent pitching rate is second among the active only to the often ill-fated Jacob deGrom. His resumé includes three Cy Young Awards, a Most Valuable Player award, and a no-hitter. Baseball-Reference considers Kershaw the number 20 starting pitcher who ever hit the mound; he was the best starting pitcher of his own time before his body finally started telling him, “That’s what you think.”

The fastball isn’t Little Johnny Jet anymore. The curve ball Vin Scully himself labeled Public Enemy Number One might be headed for Leavenworth. The slider that really turned Kershaw from good to great to extraterrestrial has lost just enough of its slide. But he is still Clayton Kershaw, and he will still have a role in the Dodgers postseason. Even if it’s coming out of the bullpen. He’ll be valued, even if he’ll let other arms hog the headlines for better or worse.

He didn’t pitch as poorly as he thought he did Friday night. Sure, he surrended a pair of earned runs and walked four while scattering four hits otherwise, but he struck six out in his 4.1 innings’ work. Even if that freezer to Devers looked borderline enough that you could wonder whether plate umpire Lance Barksdale might have let the moment and the legacy inform his judgment.

Kershaw Family

L to R—Cooper, Charley, Chance, Ellen, and Cali Kershaw contribute to the ovation for their future Hall of Famer as he’s about to begin his final regular-season Dodger Stadium start.

The night before, Kershaw made his pending retirement official, after an annual flirtation with the idea. True to form, he was humble and appreciative, right down to letting his wife share the moment by way of reading a letter she wrote him for the occasion:

From my perch, I have been uncomfortably pregnant, nursed newborns, rocked them to sleep to the roar of the seventh-inning stretch to get their last nap in. Fed them baby food, pouches, teething with crackers, changing blowout diapers, been frazzled with toddlers, tantrums and meltdowns, chased them through the concourses. A Mary Poppins bag filled with tricks and games to keep them occupied, and ironically teaching them the ins and outs of baseball. Explaining all the numbers on the scoreboard and the concession line, the ballpark food.

(I’ve) cried over some really hard losses and some really incredible milestones. (I’ve) watched our kids fall in love with the game, with the players and watching you pitch. Singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” chasing beach balls, ducking from fly balls, spilling food and popcorn all over the fans below them. (I’ve) done it thousands of times, thousands of bathroom runs, all in the stadium. The workers and ushers are (our) best friends now.

A tear crept down Kershaw’s cheek as he read it.

“I’m really not sad. I’m really not,” he said later in the conference. “I’m really at peace with this. It’s just emotional.”

Few of the greats get to choose their own retirement terms. But they show more of what they’re made of when they do so than they ever showed on the field. Kershaw facing the end, whenever it may prove to be, showed more than any triumph and transcended any tribulation. No wonder grown adults wept for and with him.

NLDS Games One: The Atlanta Chop Slop, the Los Angeles funeral parlour

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Truist Park

Trash talk? Have at it. Trash the field over a call going against you? What was this, Braves fan?

Neither the Dodgers nor the Phillies expected simple National League division series this time around. Not with both teams coming in with what some call patchwork pitching. But one came out looking better in their Game One while the other came out looking like the remnant of a nuclear attack.

The Phillies and their pitching managed to keep the Atlanta threshing machine from threshing Saturday afternoon, winning 3-0. Starting with a first-inning nuking of future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, the Diamondbacks laid waste to the Dodgers Saturday night, 11-2. On the arms of big enough bats and a starting pitcher who was usually close enough to Dodger batting practise.

Letting starter Ranger Suárez go no more than three and two thirds, knowing they’d have a day off between Games One and Two, the Phillies went to a bullpen game, essentially. And that bullpen finished what Suárez started, shutting the Braves out over the remaining five and a third. The Braves who hit a record 307 home runs on the regular season looked as though they had paper towel tubes for bats.

None more glaring than the founding father of the 40/70 club. Ronald Acuña, Jr. went 0-for-3 with a walk, and his evening’s futility included an embarrassing called strikeout in the fifth, when—with first and third and one out—the second Phillies reliever of the evening, Seranthony Domínguez, planted a fastball right on the low inside corner.

Small wonder that Braves manager Brian Snitker could and did say, postgame, “I think it was more their pitching than our hitting.” Indeed.

Braves starter Spencer Strider pitched boldly enough, striking eight out and scattering five hits in seven innings’ work. But the Phillies still pried two runs out of him, both with Bryce Harper the big factor. First, Strider threw wild enough trying to pick Harper off first in the top of the fourth, enabling Bryson Stott to single him home with the first run. Then, Strider threw Harper enough of a meatball to disappear into the Chop House seats behind right field with one out in the top of the sixth.

“Strider, man, he’s one of the best in the game. You know he’s going to come at you and throw his best at you,” Harper said postgame. “So just trying to get a pitch over and was able to get the slider up and do some damage.”

Except for Acuña’s surprising silence, and the eighth-inning catcher’s interference call with J.T. Realmuto at the plate and the Phillies with the bases loaded, enabling the third Phillie run home, the Braves at least looked stronger in Game One defeat than the Dodgers did. Even Strider, who became the first postseason pitcher ever to lose twice against a team against whom he’s well undefeated in the regular season.

The Diamondbacks didn’t let Clayton Kershaw—all 35 years old of him, with possible lingering shoulder issues plus eight days of rest leaving him with little enough to offer—get out of the first alive. Their 35-year-old journeyman starter Merrill Kelly, who didn’t turn up in the Show until age 30 in the first place, manhandled them for six and a third after the Snakes bit Kershaw deep in the first.

For the regular season’s final two months, with a 2.23 ERA over eight starts, Kershaw seemed to tell age and his shoulder alike where to stuff it. Then Kershaw took the ball Saturday night. What’s the saying about too much rest being as hazardous to a pitcher as too little rest can be?

Ketel Marte opened with a double to the back of left center field, and Corbin Carroll began showing why he’s in the Rookie of the Year conversation with a prompte RBI single. Tommy Pham—the same Tommy Pham who called out the lack of work ethic among second-tier Mets teammates with whom he played before the trade deadline—rapped a short single to left for first and second.

Then Christian Walker, a veteran first baseman who hadn’t been anything much special before 2022, hit one so far to the back of the left field bleachers some wondered how the ball didn’t leave the ballpark structure. Just like that, Dodger Stadium resembled a funeral parlour. And, just like that, Kershaw resembled the corpse for whom the audience came to mourn.

A ground out by Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. and a walk to Alek Thomas later, Evan Longoria sent Thomas all the way home with a double to deep center field, hammering the final nails into Kershaw’s coffin.

“Embarrassing,” the lefthander said postgame. “You just feel like you let everybody down. The guys, a whole organization, that looked to you to pitch well in Game One. It’s just embarrassing, really. So I just feel like I let everybody down. It’s a tough way to start the postseason. Obviously, we still have a chance at this thing, but that wasn’t the way it should’ve started for me.”

Kershaw’s postseason history is a direct contrast to the regular-season career that guarantees him a place in Cooperstown. Until Saturday night, enough of that sad history came by way of leaving him in too long or by circumstances above and beyond his control.

Entering Game One with a 5.49 ERA against the Dodgers lifetime but a 7.03 ERA against them when pitching in Dodger Stadium, Kelly pitched six and a third shutout innings before turning it over to a bullpen that kept the Dodgers to one hit. The bad news: the hit was a two-run triple by Will Smith off Miguel Castro. The good news: The Snakes could afford such generosity by then, since it cut an 11-0 lead by a measly two runs.

Kelly’s keys included forgetting how the Dodgers treated him like a piñata in regular season play. “I’m watching our guys beat up on one of the best pitchers that we’ve ever seen in our lives and watching them do it in the first game I’ve ever pitched in the playoffs,” he said postgame. “I felt if I gave those games any attention I was going out there behind the eight-ball before I even stepped on the mound.”

This time, Kelly went out there with a six-run cushion, then saw it padded to nine by a three-run second including Carroll leading off against Dodger reliever Emmet Sheehan with a drive into the right field bleachers. Kelly was now comfortable enough that he could have pitched from a high-backed leather office chair and incurred no damage.

The only thing that should have and apparently did embarrass the Braves was the Truist Park crowd throwing drinks onto the field after catcher Sean Murphy’s mitt grazed Realmuto’s bat by a thin hair. You could hear it on replays that didn’t exactly show it too clearly, but Murphy’s lack of challenging the call affirmed it.

Trea Turner—who started a spectacular double play with Acuña (leadoff walk) on third to end the bottom of the eighth, diving left for Ozzie Albies’s ground smash and backhanding to second baseman Stott—scored on the interference. The rain of drinks into the outfield annoyed both the Braves and their manager.

“There’s no excuse for that,” Snitker snapped postgame. “It’s scary because those water bottles, when they come, they’re like grenades. It could really seriously injure one of our players.”

That’s what the miscreants don’t stop to think about. Against a team whose fan base is usually considered one of the worst in the game. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding: the clergyman pronounces the happy couple husband and wife before telling the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.”) Be better, Braves fans.

Only the silence in Dodger Stadium following the Diamondbacks’ early and often abuse of Kershaw and Sheehan kept the big National League division series headlines elsewhere from reading, “Chop Slop.”

The All-Star Game was Clayton’s place

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Clayton Kershaw, Blake Grice

National League All-Star starter Clayton Kershaw with fan Blake Grice, who touched Kershaw by telling the future Hall of Famer he was meeting him for Grandpa’s sake.

By right, this year’s All-Star Game start for the National League should have belonged to the Marlins’ Sandy Alcantara (he leads the Show’s pitchers with 5.3 wins above replacement level and his 1.76 ERA). And if the game were played someplace other than Dodger Stadium, it might have been Alcantara’s to start.

Braves manager Brian Snitker, managing the NL All-Stars as the previous season’s World Series skipper does, had his own idea. Especially since this was the first All-Star Game in Dodger Stadium since Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, and a Dodger icon was having an All-Star worthy season himself.

So Snitker elected to hand the opening ball to Clayton Kershaw. A Hall of Fame lock, approaching the sunset of an off-the-charts career, starting the All-Star Game in his home ballpark. You could imagine Snitker thinking to himself that you couldn’t pay to pre-arrange more serendipitous circumstances. Even with his own All-Star Max Fried among his pitching options.

It was a class gesture by the defending World Series-winning manager. Only one thing could have seen and raised, and that one thing was Kershaw himself. By most reports, one of the first things the 33-year-old lefthander did when Snitker called him to say the opening ball was his was to call Alcantara himself.

“He was awesome about it. I was really thankful about that,” Kershaw said, after the American League hung in for a 3-2 win through no fault of Kershaw’s own.

He let himself take the entire atmopshere in, even foregoing his usual pre-start intensity that compels teammates, coaches, and even his manager Dave Roberts to say nothing much more than “hello” to him. (He even let Roberts share lunch with him on Tuesday.) About the only thing Kershaw did remotely work-related was study some American League scouting reports.

One he didn’t have to study was Shohei Ohtani (Angels), whom Kershaw retired thrice when pitching last Friday. Wary of opening the All-Star Game with one of his signature breaking balls, Kershaw pumped a fastball that doesn’t have its former speed and Ohtani—interviewed before the game, promising to swing on the first pitch—smacked a broken-bat floater up the pipe into short left center for a leadoff single.

Then, having Aaron Judge (Yankees) 1-2, Kershaw suddenly couldn’t think of what to throw next. Some described him as buying time when he lobbed a throw to first. He bought more than he bargained for. He’d caught Ohtani having a snooze. Ohtani had drifted away from the pad and Kershaw’s lob turned into the first All-Star pickoff in fourteen years.

The two-way Angel could only laugh. Kershaw could only grin after first baseman Paul Goldschmidt (Cardinals) tagged Ohtani out. Dodger Stadium went nuclear. Kershaw finished striking Judge out, walked Rafael Devers (Red Sox), and lured Vladimir Gurrero, Jr. (Blue Jays) into an inning-ending ground out. The man who wanted to take it all in from start to finish then ducked out of sight and to a press podium under the ballpark.

Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw

All they could do was grin and laugh after Kershaw (right) picked Othani off first while working to Yankee bombardier Aaron Judge.

While the National League took an early 2-0 lead with Mookie Betts (Dodgers) singling home Ronald Acuña, Jr. (Braves; leadoff double off AL starter Shane McLanahan [Rays]) and—after a double play grounder by Manny Machado (Padres)—Goldschmidt hammering one into the left center field bleachers, Kershaw finished his press conference with a ten year old boy raising a hand.

“What’s up, dude?” Kershaw asked pleasantly.

The boy introduced himself as Blake Grice and told Kershaw how much his late grandfather loved both him and the Dodgers’ long-enough-retired broadcast deity Vin Scully and had wanted to meet them both. (His family had passes courtesy of MLB itself.) “So this moment is important to me,” the boy continued, “because I’m meeting you for him.”

The father of four children himself, Kershaw couldn’t resist when he heard that and saw the boy’s tears of likely gratitude for getting to do something for his grandpa in the presence of a Dodger icon who’s been the closest the Dodgers have had to longtime eminence Sandy Koufax.

“Come here, dude,” Kershaw beckoned. He hugged the boy, gave him a clap on the back, and said, “Great to meet you. Thanks for telling me. That took a lot of courage to tell me that. Your grandad sounded like an awesome guy.” When Kershaw asked Blake if he had a parent with him, the boy’s father held up his cell phone. Kershaw beckoned him forward and he snapped a photo of the pitcher and the boy speaking for Grandpa.

It was more than enough to atone for the prayers thousands of fans in the ballpark and perhaps the millions watching on television must have had that, despite going down to its ninth straight All-Star loss and 21st such loss in 25 such games, the National League didn’t tie the game in the bottom of the ninth.

That’s because the latest to emerge from baseball’s apparent laboratory of mad science would have had the game decided in favour of the Home Run Derby winner’s league if nine full innings ended in a dead heat. (On Tuesday it would have been the National League, thanks to Juan Soto [Nationals] winning the Derby.) Thank God and His servants Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson that that didn’t come to pass.

The AL overthrew the NL lead with one out in the fourth when Giancarlo Stanton (Yankees) batted with Jose Ramírez [Guardians] aboard (leadoff single) and took Tony Gonsolin (Dodgers) far into the left center field bleachers. Byron Buxton (Twins) following at once found himself ahead in the count 2-1 when he caught hold of a Gonsolin fastball up and drilled it into the left field bleachers. Just like that, Gonsolin had surrendered 882 feet worth of home run travel.

Buxton admired game MVP Stanton’s blast from the on-deck circle and thought to himself, “I ain’t matching that.” Until he damn near did. “I don’t even know if you can put it in words how hard [Stanton] hit the baseball,” Buxton said after the game.

It made all the difference when the game otherwise became a pitching duel of sorts between eleven American League pitchers (including Framber Valdez [Astros] getting credit for the “win” despite striking nobody out in his inning’s work) and nine National League pitchers including the hapless Gonsolin tagged for the loss and, officially, a blown save.

For just the sixth time in four decades an All-Star pitcher got to start the game in his home ballpark. And for a few shining moments on the mound, Kershaw gave his home park’s audience a thrill topped only by the one he gave a ten-year-old boy looking to do his grandpa in the Elysian Fields a favour that couldn’t be done while the older man still lived on earth.

None of the highest highs or the comparatively few lows he’s endured in fifteen major league seasons have let Kershaw forget that baseball at core is about rooting, caring, loving. He had the parallel chance to remind a Dodger Stadium audience about it and to affirm it for a ten-year-old boy. He didn’t flinch at either opportunity.

Mr. Commissioner, meet the real faces of the game

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Rob Manfred, Liam Hendriks

Commissioner Rob Manfred with White Sox relief pitcher Liam Hendriks before last year’s Field of Dreams game. (The Athletic.)

Having a read of ESPN writer Don Van Natta, Jr.’s profile of commissioner Rob Manfred, I was almost convinced that maybe, just maybe, there really was more to Manfred than met the eye. Or, more than what comes forth in his stiff presence and often clumsy remarks.

Just maybe, the man isn’t the baseball-hating or baseball-illiterate Rube Goldberg-like abecedarian the caricatures so often portray. He did, after all, grow up a Yankee fan in upstate New York and can say proudly enough that he’s the only baseball commissioner ever who played Little League baseball. “All glove, no bat,” he remembers of being a Little League infielder.

My parents received a set of classic Revere copper-bottom cookware as a wedding present eight years before Manfred was born. (I still remember the fragrance of that special powder used to clean the copper bottoms, too.) Who knew Manfred (three years my junior) was the son of Revere’s production supervisor at their home plant in Rome, New York? An hour’s drive from Cooperstown, as it happens.

Born in 1958, Manfred took in his first live major league game at Yankee Stadium with his sports-obssessed father, sitting between the plate and first base on an Old Timers’ Day. Come game time, Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle crashed a pair of home runs and the Yankees beat the Twins, 3-2. When he finally became the game’s commissioner, he handed his father the first baseball with his stamp upon it.

“This is really an unbelievable thing,” Manfred, Sr. told his son. “I can’t say I disagree,” Manfred, Jr. told Van Natta.

A couple of hundred fathoms down, though, Van Natta noted that “more than once” Manfred told him what few baseball commissioners have dared to admit, that being the buffer absorbing the heat that should go to his bosses, the owners, is part of his job. Even if it’s about as pleasant as your private parts being caught in the vacuum cleaner’s handle.

And then it came.

“Every time it’s me, it ain’t one of those 30 guys—that’s good,” Van Natta quoted Manfred as saying. “Look, who the hell am I? I don’t have $2 billion invested in a team. I’m just a guy trying to do a job. I mean it. [The owners] deserve that layer. I believe they deserve that layer of protection. I’m the face of the game, for good or for bad.”

Mr. Manfred, unless it’s to boo and hiss your heads off over this or that piece of mischief, you may rest assured that no baseball fan anywhere in this country is paying his or her hard-earned money to head for the ballpark to see you or your bosses.

But I’m going to do you a small favour, as if you know me from the greenest bat boy on any professional baseball team. I’m going to introduce you to the true faces of the game. The ones whom those fans do pay their hard-earned money to see at the ballpark regardless of the machinations and deceptions of your bosses and theirs.

Mr. Manfred, meet Mike Trout. This is the guy you blamed once upon a time for not being baseball’s face, based upon his committing no crime more grave than letting his play and his clubhouse presence and his agreeability with fans before and after games speak for themselves, with no jive about the magnitude of being him.

Meet Shohei Ohtani. This is the two-way star who lights up the joint just by flashing that thousand-watt grin of his, never mind when he strikes thirteen out on the mound one night and belts baseballs onto the Van Allen Belt the very next. Between himself and Mr. Trout, you should be asking what on earth is wrong with the Angels that they still can’t find quality pitching enough to keep them in a race after they start in one but sputter unconscionably.

Meet Aaron Judge. This is the Leaning Tower of River Avenue who sends baseballs into the Delta Quadrant one moment and then, when made aware, goes out of his way to meet a Canadian kid to whom he’s number one among baseball men and who was handed one of his mammoth home run balls by an adult fan who knew the boy wanted nothing more than to catch one Judge hit out.

Meet Joey Votto. This is the future Hall of Fame first baseman who got himself tossed from a game early last year, but—after he learned his ejection broke the heart of a little California girl to whom he’s a hero above heroes—sent her a ball with his handwritten apology and autograph on it, prompting his team to drop game tickets and a little extra swag upon her the very next day.

Meet Bryce Harper. This is the guy who never apologised for being on board with letting the kids play. The guy now on the injured list with a thumb fracture and surgery to repair it after getting hit by a pitch thrown with one of the baseballs you and yours still can’t see fit to manufacture uniformly and with allowance for fairness on both sides of it, fairness for the pitchers and for the hitters alike.

Meet Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. and Bo Bichette. One is the son of a Hall of Famer who did last season what even his old man never did: led his league in on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+, and led the entire Show in total bases. The other is the son of a respected major league slugger, has quite a lethal bat in his own right when his swing is right, and currently leads his league in trips to the plate. Together they’ve put some zip back into the Blue Jays.

Meet Oneil Cruz. The bat has yet to come to full life but the footwork, the glove, the throwing arm, have shown so far that you can be as tall as Frank Howard, J.R. Richard, and Randy Johnson and still play shortstop as though the position was created for you and not the Little Rascals in the first place. They’re falling in love with him in Pittsburgh, which needs all the love it can get, but they ought to fall in love with him all around the Show—except when he’s going so deep into the hole grabbing a grounder or a hopper that an enemy batter loses his lunch when he’s had a base hit stolen from him.

Meet Clayton Kershaw. He’s been around the block a few times. He’s a Hall of Fame lock as maybe the best pitcher of his generation. He’s still a quality pitcher and a class act. They still buy tickets on the road when they know he’s going to take the ball for the Dodgers. He’s faced his baseball aging curve with grace under pressure. And, for good measure, he’s the one active player who was seen fit to be part of the ceremony when the Dodgers unveiled that statue of their Hall of Fame legend Sandy Koufax this month, and you know (well, you damn well should know) what a class act Koufax was on the mound and has been in the decades since off it.

(You’re not still P.O.ed that Koufax waxed your Yankees’ tails twice while his Dodgers swept them in the 1963 World Series when you were seven, are you?)

Meet Justin Verlander. Missed a year plus recovering from Tommy John surgery. He has a 2.23 ERA and a 3.53 fielding-independent pitching rate so far this season. For any pitcher that’d be a remarkable return so far. For a future Hall of Famer who’s still suiting up at Jack Benny’s age (that’s a joke, son), it’s off the chart so far.

Meet Verlander’s 25-year-old Astros teammate, Yordan Álvarez. He’s leading the entire Show with his .667 slugging percentage, his 1.081 OPS, and his 206 OPS+. If there’s one untainted Astro who’s must-see viewing whenever he checks in at the plate, it’s him.

Meet Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers. The left side of the Red Sox infield is a big reason why the Olde Towne Team yanked themselves back up from the netherworld into second place in that rough and tumble American League East. Did I mention that Devers currently leads the entire Show with 177 total bases?

Meet José Ramírez. The Guardians’ third baseman is giving Devers a run for his money in the All-Star balloting that closes today. That thumb injury has put a crimp into his bat for now, and it’s had its role in the Guardians’ sudden deflation at the plate, but this guy just may be the face of his franchise right now. He ought to be one of the faces of this game.

Meet Mark Appel. This is the guy who went from number one in the draft to injuries as well as pressures and even to an exit from the game only to try giving it one more try—and finally coming up with the Phillies, nine years after that draft, and tossing a scoreless inning . . . at age 30. That’s as feel good a story as it gets for the oldest former number one to make his Show debut, no matter what happens with the rest of what remains of Appel’s career. They don’t all go to hell and back.

Those are only some of baseball’s faces, Mr. Commissioner. They’re the ones the fans want to see and pay through the nose to see. Despite your tinkerings. Despite your often erroneous readings of the room. Despite your inability or unwillingness to demand the same accountability of umpires that you do of players, coaches, and managers.

Despite your inability to let your professed deep love of the game come through without tripping over itself because, as an improvisor, well, if you were a musician the consensus would be that Miles Davis you ain’t.

“But . . . history, dammit!!!”

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Clayton Kershaw

Clayton Kershaw pitching in Target Field, against the Twins, Wednesday. He was lifted after seven perfect innings and the world went nuclear.

Finally, Steven Kwan went hitless. It took his sixth major league game before somebody’s pitchers finally found ways to get him out all day long, if you don’t count the bases-loaded walk he took in the second to start the scoring in a 7-3 Guardians win.

Then Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. smashed three home runs against the Yankees in the south Bronx, including a pair off Yankee ace Gerrit Cole, en route a  6-4 Blue Jays win, a performance that had even the Yankees dropping their jaws in amazement.

Those might have been the top stories Wednesday if not for Clayton Kershaw and Dave Roberts.

Kershaw pitched seven perfect against the Twins in Minneapolis. Despite his having thrown “only” seventy pitches while striking thirteen Twins out including striking the side out in the sixth, Kershaw didn’t come back for the eighth inning. Roberts ended Kershaw’s day knowing both men agreed he’d be on a limited leash in his first season’s start at all, never mind pitching in temperatures in the thirties.

The world went nuclear over it.

Sometimes during the uproar it seemed nobody wanted to listen when Kershaw postgame explained, among other things, “I knew going in that my pitch count wasn’t going to be one hundred. It’s a hard thing to do, to come out of a game when you’re doing that. We’re here to win. This was the right choice.”

He’s Clayton Freaking Kershaw and he should have been entitled to finish that perfect game!

“Those are selfish goals. We’re trying to win,” said the lefthander who pitched a no-hitter in 2014 and whose black ink from ages 23-29 has already secured his reservation in the Hall of Fame.

That’s really all we’re here for. As much as I would’ve wanted to do it, I’ve thrown 75 pitches in a [simulated] game, and I hadn’t gone six innings, let alone seven. Sure, I would’ve loved to do it. But maybe I’ll get another chance.. . . I would have loved to have stayed, but bigger things, man, bigger things . . . Earlier in my career, I’d be built up to a hundred pitches. Blame it on the lockout. Blame it on me not picking up a baseball until January. My slider was horrible the last two innings. It didn’t have the bite. It was time.

Whaddabout history?!? Whaddabout entertainment?!? This is the way baseball brings the fans back?!?

What about the injury history of a 34-year-old pitcher, working in that 30-degree temperature range in crisp Minnesota, after an owners’ lockout-imposed badly abbreviated spring training, and coming off a season ended by forearm/elbow inflammation, accompanied by speculation he might even face Tommy John surgery? To say nothing of Kershaw not picking up a ball until January because of continued recovery from that forearm issue?

Goddam analytics!!!!!

Protecting a pitcher’s health—which is exactly what Roberts did, presiding over a starting rotation about whose long-term health Roberts has said on the record is the key to the Dodgers’ long-term seasonal health and success—has absolutely nothing to do with analytics. All the analytical information available to managers and players about their own and their oppositions’ tendencies isn’t going to tell you whether or when a player’s liable to incur injuries. Analytics aren’t that smart.

“It was a short spring training after a lockout,” reminded no less than Aaron Gleeman, who covers the Twins for The Athletic. “He’s not fully built up. Nothing to do with analytics.”

Nolan Ryan wouldn’t have come out after only seventy [fornicating] pitches, and his manager would have had a fight on his hands if he tried to lift Ryan!!!!

Any time any starting pitcher gets the early hook for any reason in any circumstance—never mind that most managers now have their starters on pitch limits in an admirable bid to compensate for the too-short spring training preparation and assure their long-term season’s health as best as possible—there still comes even one ignorant Ryan name-drop. This one delivered truckloads of them all around social media.

I’m going to let Athletic analyst Keith Law say it for me as I also did when reviewing the book in which he said it, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behaviour Teaches Us About Ourselves, two years ago:

The center square on your [Pitch Count Bingo] card is Nolan Ryan, whose name is certain to come up in any attempt to discuss the limits of the human body to throw a projectile at 95 mph repeatedly over a three-hour span . . .

Nolan Ryan was a physical marvel, and an extreme outlier when it came to durability, although most discussions of the latter ignore the part where he missed 1967 and 1968 with persistent arm trouble. Ryan did things we will probably never see again, not now that pitchers throw harder than ever and play more than ever as kids, while teams work to keep their most gifted pitchers healthy until they reach the majors . . .

Nolan Ryan is the ultimate survivor, the survivor ne plus ultra, the übersurvivor when it comes to survivorship bias. Yes, Ryan defied everything we know now about pitch limits, and shouldered (pun intended) workloads that no MLB would ever allow a pitcher to carry [now], whether in individual games or entire seasons . . .

He is . . . an outlier, a great exception—not one that “proves” the rule, but one that causes many people to discard the rule. Most pitchers can’t handle the workloads that Ryan did; they would break down and suffer a major injury to their elbow or shoulder, or they would simply become less effective as a result of the heavy usage, and thus receive fewer opportunities to pitch going forward. Teams did try to give pitchers more work for decades, well into the early 2000s, but you don’t know the names of those pitchers because they didn’t survive: they broke down, or pitched worse, or some combination of the above. (Emphasis added.)

By the way, the Dodgers did finish the victory they began while Kershaw was in the game. They led 3-0 when he came out. With one out in the top of the eighth, Cody Bellinger, Gavin Lux, and Austin Barnes smashed back-to-back-to-back home runs off Dereck Rodriguez working his fourth inning of relief. Then Max Muncy greeted Rodriguez’s relief Griffin Jax by leading off the top of the ninth hitting a full-count fastball over the right field fence.

They also lost the perfecto when Kershaw’s relief Alex Vesia surrendered a one-out line single to former Yankee Gary Sanchez in the bottom of the seventh. Nobody saw Kershaw complain. If anything, he looked about as jovial and hail-fellow in the dugout as a man can look after being “robbed” of a shot at “history.” A man who knows his baseball immortality is already assured is far more sanguine in such circumstances than the world going nutshit about his “robbery.”

There were 233,345 major league baseball games before Wednesday, and only 23 of them were perfect. Thirteen (57 percent) were pitched by men who’d get to the Hall of Fame as visitors only. Only one—Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s jewel of 9 September 1965, after Koufax threw mere no-hitters in each of his three previous seasons—actually proved that practise makes perfect.

Should the Dodgers fail in their quest for one full-season World Series championship while Kershaw remains among them, it won’t be because he was lifted after seven perfect innings in his first season’s start. Should they succeed in that quest, it will be in considerable part because Roberts placed his pitcher’s long-term, season’s health—with his pitcher on board entirely—ahead of “history.”

“But who is a perfect game for, anyway?” asks Sports Illustrated writer Emma Baccelieri, who answers promptly. “It might be just as easy to conceive of it as selfless rather than selfish: a great communal gift as much as a great individual achievement. Everything on Wednesday made sense. But perhaps it is not selfish—not unreasonable—to wish that everything did not have to make so much sense all the time.”

Would I have loved to see Kershaw consummate a perfect game? You might as well ask if I still enjoy being alive. Just don’t ask me to list the roll of Hall of Fame pitchers who never got to pitch perfect games, either. They’d only begin with Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Warren Spahn, Whitey Ford, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, and, yes, St. Ryan himself—who threw seven no-hitters but was never perfect even once.

You’re worried about “entertainment?” The single most entertaining things in baseball other than actual games and even World Series triumphs are arguments liable to last as long as baseball itself will last. Even when those arguments are as witless as the day is long.