Last of the 3K Titans?

Clayton Kershaw and baseball's assault on the body

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My god, it was a grind. By the time Clayton Kershaw made history late Wednesday evening in the ancient, confined spaces down in Chavez Ravine, he had crawled over several beds of nails going back at least a decade.

Shoulder surgery. Knee surgery. Toe surgery. Bone spurs. Herniated disc. Biceps tendinitis. Sacroiliac inflammation. Joint inflammation. He’s 37 years old going on a hundred.

Kershaw has made 40 starts over the last three years combined. It has taken a witches’ brew of procedures and rehab regimens to allow him to haul his creaking frame out to the mound and continue chucking the baseball for the only franchise he has ever known. Wednesday was his ninth start of the season, an absolute miracle, and he ended it with six innings pitched against the White Sox, with nine hits and four runs allowed…and three strikeouts.

It was the last strikeout — of Chicago third baseman Vinny Capra, on Kershaw’s 100th pitch, a classic backdoor slider for a called strike three — that put the left-hander where he’s been trying to go for quite a while now. Kershaw sits on exactly 3,000 strikeouts. He’s the 20th pitcher in MLB history to hit 3K, and although he was already an obvious Hall of Famer, this sort of anoints him, as well as his life’s work.

It damn near killed him. But we’ll get back to that.

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Let’s take a quick minute to put Kershaw’s achievement into some context:

—Only four left-handers in the history of the league have recorded 3,000 strikeouts in their careers. The other three are Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson and CC Sabathia.

—Only three active pitchers are at 3K: Kershaw, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. Lefty Chris Sale sits at 2,528 strikeouts, but he’s 36, currently on the 60-day IL with a rib fracture, and has battled other injuries in recent years. (Wait: I just described Kershaw.)

—Besides Kershaw, there are four pitchers who compiled this many strikeouts while playing for a single franchise: Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson, Carlton and John Smoltz. Only two of those, Johnson and Gibson, wound up spending their entire careers with the one team. Kershaw will become the third.

—Kershaw reached 3,000 strikeouts in 2,787⅓ innings of work. That’s the fourth-fastest such climb in history. The only pitchers who got there in fewer innings were Johnson (2,470⅔), Scherzer (2,516) and Pedro Martinez (2,647⅔).

—In the live ball era, basically since 1920, no MLB pitcher who logged at least 1,500 innings has ever achieved a lower career ERA than Kershaw’s 2.52 — period, strikeouts or no strikeouts. Nolan Ryan is baseball’s all-time whiff leader with 5,714 K’s; his career ERA, a very respectable 3.19, is more than half a run higher than Kershaw’s. Astounding.

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I don’t know what Kershaw has left in the tank. It was easy to see that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was desperately trying to let the pitcher get his 3,000th strikeout last night; Roberts sent Kershaw out there for a sixth inning, sitting on 2,999, in a situation in which he’d normally have pulled the pitcher after the fifth.

"I was going to give him every opportunity to do it at home," said Roberts, knowing that Kershaw’s next start is in Milwaukee.

Kershaw’s numbers this season are fine; he’s 4-0 with a 3.43 ERA, and he’s averaging about five innings per start. For a guy who has found his way to the injured list at least once a season every year for the past decade, the fact that he’s able to roll out there at all is impressive. It could also be over pretty quick.

When a foot injury reduced Kershaw to a spectator during the Dodgers’ World Series victory last fall, it felt like it might have been the end, had the pitcher not been so close to 3,000 strikeouts. There’s no doubt he’s been hunting that prize. Maybe it’s what kept him pushing through the recent years of injury, pain, self-doubt, grueling recoveries, and an odd collection of poor post-season performances that seems to dog him.

None of that mattered last night, as Dodgers fans showered Kershaw with love and his teammates cracked champagne.

"We've been through it," Kershaw said. "I've been through it a lot — ups and downs here. More downs than I care to admit.” It wouldn’t be baseball otherwise, even for a stone-cold winner. That was the pure ache of history talking.

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