How an unbelievably awful 2/3 of an inning shaped Clayton Kershaw’s brilliant season
The inning unfolded like a mirage, one unbelievable image after another, all adding up to the greatest delusion of all: Clayton Kershaw plodding off the pitcher’s mound, defeated. He is the best pitcher alive, on his way to becoming one of the best ever, though for 24 minutes on a hot afternoon on May 17, Kershaw was the guy getting pummeled by the worst team in baseball.
Inside the Arizona Diamondbacks’ dugout, they giggled. Not just laughed. There were actual giggles, giddiness come to life, grown men tickled at the history they were making at Chase Field. Kershaw, as Diamondbacks infielder Cliff Pennington said, “is barely human,” a 26-year-old maybe-cyborg who spits mid-90s fastballs and high-80s sliders and low-70s curveballs with little regard for those standing 60 feet, 6 inches from him. Since that day, he owns a 1.45 ERA over 22 starts, 200 strikeouts and 28 walks, and an opponent OPS of under .500. It’s a run unparalleled since Bob Gibson finished a full season with a 1.12 ERA, prompting the lowering of the mound to its current 10-inch height.
For everything to fall apart so spectacularly over the course of one inning, then, left everyone in shock. Bad Kershaw outings are a baseball Halley’s Comet. Disastrous Kershaw innings are the chupacabra. “It was strange,” said A.J. Ellis, Kershaw’s catcher that day for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “The first inning was so dominant.”
Kershaw breezed through it on only 10 pitches, striking out a pair and fostering the sort of discomfort among hitters unique to him. While he missed the first month of the season with a strained muscle in his back, Kershaw returned looking like his normal-enough self, his stuff present, his command on its way. When it failed Kershaw come the second inning, the Diamondbacks saw their opportunity. And what happened was unlike anything Kershaw ever experienced, nor like anything he’s likely to again.
“He executes 99.9 percent of the time,” Pennington said. “We got the .1 percent.”
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It started with a walk, and not just any ordinary walk. Now, it should be noted, Clayton Kershaw doesn’t walk hitters. His walk rate is among the five lowest in baseball. He abhors walks. The sort of walk he issued to Cody Ross to begin the second inning was the worst kind. Four pitches. Too high, too low, outside, too high. An unintentional four-pitch walk. Just the 69th over nearly 5,000 batters faced in his major league career.
“Sometimes you go up to the plate and say you’re going to take the first pitch and just see it,” Ross said. “It so happened to be a ball. Next pitch, I wanted to see another. Ball. And see another. Ball. And then, after that, I’m taking 3-0 against Clayton Kershaw.”
Ross isn’t exactly the likeliest candidate to take a walk, let alone a four-pitch freebie. Of his 277 career walks in more than 3,500 plate appearances, just 48 came unintentionally on four pitches. There was but one explanation.
“Obviously,” Ross said, “he was scared.”
Ross laughed, not just at the absurdity of his comment but at the rest of the inning. Next up was Martin Prado, who worked the count to 2-2 before Kershaw threw a fastball. Of the other 27 hitters this season whose at-bats ended on a 2-2 fastball, 15 struck out. Prado reached far out of the strike zone and poked a shot that bounced like a Super Ball over the head of first baseman Adrian Gonzalez to put runners on first and third.
After Alfredo Marte struck out, Pennington stepped in. He squared to bunt on the first pitch and watched a fastball go by for a strike. Kershaw doubled up on the fastball looking for another strike. When hitters get to 0-2 against Kershaw this season, they are batting .115/.128/.172. The only thing that turns out worse than an 0-2 count against Kershaw is a Roger Goodell press conference.
The first sign of Kershaw’s troubles arrived with the 0-2 pitch. It was a curveball, high in the strike zone, the sort of gift he gives only a few times a year. Pennington pummeled it into the left-center field gap, sped to third base and popped up with a slide. Only 40 of the 799 triples this season have come on 0-2 counts. Never before had Kershaw yielded one in such a situation. He slumped over on the mound, frustrated with himself, with the 2-0 deficit he carved himself.
“It was almost like, ‘All right. We got him a couple,’ ” Pennington said. “And the next guy got him.”
Tuffy Gosewisch is a 31-year-old backup catcher, the sort of guy who, when he retires, will be best known for his goofy name. Kershaw started him off with an inside fastball, which Gosewisch knew was coming. Kershaw throws first-pitch fastballs about 85 percent of the time. And he had to figure it was coming inside, too. Of the 456 first-pitch fastballs Kershaw has thrown to right-handed hitters this season, just 11 have been outside, according to data at Brooks Baseball.
Gosewisch swung. Only 35 percent of hitters who have seen first pitches in the same area – high, inside corner – have done the same this season. The 95.1-mph fastball chipped a sliver off Gosewisch’s bat. The ball nonetheless scooted through the drawn-in infield, scoring Pennington, staking the Diamondbacks to a 3-0 lead, continuing the improbable that would end soon enough, because when Kershaw bleeds, it’s a pin prick, not a gusher.
His opponent for the night, Chase Anderson, sacrificed Gosewisch to second base with a bunt for the second out. He needed only to retire A.J. Pollock, the Diamondbacks’ leadoff hitter, and Kershaw jumped ahead 1-2. Pollock took a fastball, spoiled another, and figured Kershaw might come back with a slider, a pitch he throws 41 percent of the time to right-handers with two strikes. He guessed right, and as an added bonus, Kershaw left it high in the zone, a huge no-no with a pitch he tries to bury on the back foot of right-handed hitters.
Pollock lifted it to left-center field. A better left fielder than Carl Crawford might have gotten to it. A better center fielder than Matt Kemp might have gotten to it. Crawford was in left. Kemp was in center.
“If things happened to go the other way,” Pollock said, “it probably ends right there.”
Gosewisch scored easily, Pollock was on third, and in stepped Chris Owings, the rookie shortstop who struck out in the first. Kershaw mixed his pitches up then: a fastball, two sliders and a curve. With the confidence in his breaking-ball command fading, he fed Owings fastball after fastball, six in a row. He’d done that only 85 other times in his career, according to data from Daren Willman at Baseball Savant, and 20 percent of those came against opposing pitchers. Owings never blinked, taking three and fouling off two to draw a full count.
Kershaw deposited the sixth over the heart of the plate, and Owings sizzled it over the shortstop’s head and into the left-center gap. It was another triple. The third of the inning. Kershaw had allowed three triples in all of 2012 and three more in 2013. Never before had he yielded more than one in a single game. In less than 20 minutes, the Diamondbacks – the woeful Diamondbacks – dinged him in triplicate.
“He was just trying to pound strikes in there,” Owings said, “and we just happened to get barrels.”
That sounds so easy, and maybe that day it was. Ellis and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt came to the mound following Owings’ triple, more in hopes of giving him a minute to breathe than imbuing him with something to stanch the flow.
“What are you going to tell Clayton?” Ellis said. “He’s got so much self-awareness, so much self-honesty.”
The time helped none. Kershaw left another curveball up, this one to Paul Goldschmidt, who yanked it down the third-base line for a double. Only once in his career had Kershaw allowed five extra-base hits in a game, and here he was with four in a single inning.
In stepped Cody Ross, who started the inning with a walk. Kershaw balked, his only one of the season, pushing Goldschmidt to third. Ross watched a fastball inside. Then he took a changeup – a pitch Kershaw long ago ditched in favor of his superior offerings and has thrown just 25 times since that day – for a ball low. Two fastballs beneath the bottom of umpire Quinn Wolcott’s strike zone followed.
In his previous 185 starts, never had Clayton Kershaw issued two unintentional four-pitch walks in one game, let alone one inning, let alone to the same hitter. Nor had Cody Ross, a hitter who in his own words heads to the plate “coming out of my shoes,” taken a pair of unintentional four-pitch walks in the same game. This was apex weird, as if Ralph Kershaw, Clayton’s evil twin brother, had assumed his identity and replaced him for an afternoon.
“He’d been scuffling,” Ross said. “I was thinking, ‘All right, I’m gonna come up and be ready to hit right here, look for something to drive.’ It wasn’t a good pitch. I was still in hitter’s mode until I got to 3-0. And then I was taking.”
After Kershaw’s 40th pitch of the inning, Dodgers manager Don Mattingly walked to the mound. Runners were on first and third. The score was 6-0. Fans already were assured of three free Taco Bell tacos for the Diamondbacks putting up a six-pack of runs. Kershaw was done for the day, replaced by Jamey Wright, off whom Prado singled for the final run of Kershaw’s day. It was the second-shortest outing of his career, one out better than the 1 1/3-inning, seven-run mess of four years earlier, when the Milwaukee Brewers lit up Kershaw.
If not for the second inning on May 17, 2014, Kershaw’s ERA this season would be 1.47, lower than Dwight Gooden’s transcendent 1985 season, lower than Greg Maddux’s remarkable 1994 season, lower than any non-Deadball Era season in history aside from Gibson’s 1.12.
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Later that day, as the Diamondbacks considered the improbability of their 18-7 win, the unlikelihood that an underachieving bunch would put up its highest run output of the season on Clayton Kershaw, of all pitchers, they considered trying to burrow even deeper into his head by intimating that maybe, just maybe, they knew what was coming.
“We thought about saying he was tipping just to get in his head and make him think he was,” Pennington said, “so hopefully he would change something and start tipping.”
No, Kershaw wasn’t giving away his pitches. He’s too keen to let himself lapse into such patterns, and even if he did, his pitches are so sharp hitters still would struggle to hit them. Not shockingly, Kershaw used that game as a flashpoint for change, vowing to Ellis that he would not hang another breaking ball all year.
And for the most part, he hasn’t. Kershaw’s public demeanor and baby face belie a frightening intensity, one he wasn’t willing to let go immediately after the game. Ellis texted him, asking if he wanted to hang out, maybe grab a beer. Kershaw demurred. He wanted to be alone.
They shared a taxi to the game the next day, and it was back to work, May 17 a distant memory, the rest of the season an unwritten book in which he’d go all David Foster Wallace, writing chapter after brilliant chapter. Kershaw threw a 15-strikeout no-hitter against Colorado on June 18. It was the second outing in a 17-start stretch during which he threw at least seven innings, one that was snapped Friday when Kershaw gave up three runs in the first, left in the fifth and still secured his 20th win against just three losses.
“He went on that run right after,” Pollock said. “It’s like we lit the fire for him. Maybe we should’ve put up a couple runs less.”
Twice during that streak Kershaw met the Diamondbacks. On June 13, he allowed one run in seven innings. On Aug. 27, they scored an unearned run over eight innings. This was the Kershaw they’re used to seeing.
“He mowed right through everybody,” Pennington said.
It made him think of the day Kershaw didn’t, the day he was human. While Pennington wishes there were more of those, he’s OK living with just one. Yes, Clayton Kershaw really did allow three triples in one inning. Yes, Clayton Kershaw really did walk the same batter twice on four pitches. The delusion, the mirage, was true as can be.
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