PHILADELPHIA — As Clayton Kershaw completed his pregame routine the other day and walked off the field at Citizens Bank Park, I asked him about his postseason debut. That was 17 years and 39 playoff appearances ago, and yet Kershaw remembered it so well that he got his answer out before I got all of my question out.
“I was in the ‘pen,” Kershaw said. “Here.”
The pitching staff of the 2008 Dodgers featured two Hall of Famers: Kershaw, in his first year, and Greg Maddux, in his last year.
When the Dodgers faced the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series, Derek Lowe, Hiroki Kuroda and Chad Billingsley made the cut as starters. Kershaw and Maddux did not.
“He and I were both kind of the long guys down there,” Kershaw said. “It’s crazy, kind of the similarities.
“Where I am now is kind of where he was. It’s pretty cool.”
For just about every player, baseball tells you when your career is over. Maddux, for all his accolades, was no exception.
In each of his last five seasons, his earned-run average was above 4.00, even as he pitched at least 194 innings in each of them. In his last stint with the Dodgers — seven starts at the end of the 2008 season — his ERA was 5.09.
Maddux knew that postseason would be the end for him. He just didn’t tell anyone.
In his last outing — in the game in which the Phillies eliminated the Dodgers — Maddux was one of six Dodgers relievers. He worked the fourth and fifth innings, left the mound with the Dodgers down by five runs, and quietly asked the plate umpire for a baseball on his way out.
“I’ve got the ball in my room somewhere,” Maddux told The Times in 2014. “It kind of stunk that we lost. But I knew it was the last time I was going to put on a uniform. I was privileged to wear it for as long as I did.”
Kershaw is the rare player that has told baseball when his career is over. He announced his retirement last month, effective at the end of the season, even as he is still mighty effective.
His .846 winning percentage would have led the major leagues, had he thrown another 50 innings. He still threw more innings than anyone on the Dodgers except Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and his 3.36 ERA was his third-worst in a full season. In his final start, he shut out the American League West champion Seattle Mariners into the sixth inning.
In a normal year for the Dodgers, Kershaw would be starting in the playoffs, because a normal year for the Dodgers means scooping up a bunch of talented pitchers with histories of injury and questions of durability, then crossing their fingers and hoping a few are healthy and effective come playoff time.
Last October, the Dodgers ran short: Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, Walker Buehler and four bullpen games. This October, almost miraculously, the Dodgers have five available starters with an ERA better than Kershaw: Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow and Emmet Sheehan.
Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, admitted to some trepidation at telling a Hall of Famer that he would be bound for the postseason bullpen.
“But, to Kersh’s credit, he cuts off that timidness in a way by saying, ‘Hey, I’m here to win, whatever it takes,’” Friedman said. “He’s loved watching these guys compete. Obviously he’s done really well this year as well.
“Usually, when a guy’s on his way out, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s time.’ You can kind of see it. The performance really backs up. That’s not the case with Kersh. He was a big part of the success we had this year. But to his credit, he cut it off really early and just said, ‘Hey, I just want to be part of this and help this team win, whatever way I can.’ And so he helped make that conversation way easier.”
If Kershaw works four innings this October, he’ll pass Maddux for sixth place on the all-time list of postseason innings pitched. If he pitches 5⅔ innings, he’ll become the fifth pitcher to throw 200 postseason innings, joining Andy Pettitte, Justin Verlander, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz.
In the future, fans will flip over Kershaw’s baseball card — or, more likely, look up his Baseball Reference page — and learn that the greatest starter of his generation finished his career in relief.
A curiosity, at the least, I suggested. Kershaw shrugged.
“The postseason is just its own separate thing,” he said. “You just do whatever you can. Where our team is at with our starters, it makes sense.
“I guess it’s weird, but it’s part of it.”
In his postseason debut here in 2008, Kershaw retired the first five batters, not bad when four of them were named Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard. In his finale in that 2008 NLCS, Maddux got the last man he faced to ground out: Cole Hamels — in the old days, when pitchers used to bat.
Kershaw might not throw another pitch; the Dodgers have made no commitment to use him in this round, or to keep him on the roster if they advance beyond then.
On Sunday, I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts whether Kershaw was here only in case a starter exited in a hurry or a game went into extra innings.
“I trust him,” Roberts said. “I think there’s other opportunities he might have to pitch. But I also do feel that there’s other guys, whether it’s lanes or spots, that I feel we’re more comfortable with.
“It’s not a slight on Clayton, but I do think that there’s various roles — up, down, early, late — that I could use him.”
The Dodgers are using starters wherever they can: starting, relieving, closing. Given the anxiety-inducing state of the Dodgers bullpen, the notion that they might not be able to find a spot to use Kershaw leaves only one question: Seriously?
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