The Dodgers great has more important things to think about than his open market value. Family, baseball and otherwise, seem prime among them.By Yours Truly
Clayton Kershaw let the kiddos steal the show after he beat the Braves in the NLDS.In 1926, a former college hopeful whose school plans died with his family’s crops in Kansas in 1922 began building makeshift telescopes to reach for the stars. One of those helped him discover Pluto in 1930. Eighty-eight years later, the Texas boy born to Clyde Tombaugh’s niece elected to continue reaching for the stars and beyond in a very wealthy Dodger uniform.
Clayton Kershaw has reached most extraterrestrial planets in his career except the ones where World Series champions reside. And he elected this week not to opt out of his incumbent contract, joining Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman in announcing he’d signed a new three-year extension.
So much for the experts who thought for dead last certain that Kershaw would opt out and reach for the stars that play with Uncle Sam’s currency.
After an agonising week to follow an agonising World Series defeat, when he acknowledged publicly that he simply didn’t know quite what to do, Kershaw decided to stay home. He’d soul-searched it with his wife before making it all systems go. And when he joined to announce the new extension, Kershaw displayed something above and beyond an athlete’s call to compete. On the field and in the marketplace that surely would have paid him ducally as a free agent.
“Honestly,†the 30-year-old lefthander told a press conference, “I wanted to stay here. Financial, everything aside, it was more valable to me to stay here. I’m glad we got that done. I talked a lot with [his wife] Ellen. My kiddos love it here, Ellen loves it here, I love it here. I love the team here. There’s not many opportunities that meet all the criteria that Ellen and I would be looking for.â€
Kershaw could have allowed the contract to continue under its original terms for its final two years at a slightly higher annual salary than what he’ll earn for the first two years of the new extension. The third year plus $6 million in incentives actually allow him to earn more, without binding the Dodgers too far past his 33rd birthday.
It wouldn’t be entirely fair to suggest the free agency era has exposed one and all players as lacking loyalty once they see their potential value on an open market. More players than you may remember either stayed with one organisation from the outsets of their careers or, when traded before their free agency might have begun, elected to stay with their new organisations for the rest of their playing lives.
Of course, it helped that they had the talent that made those organisations want to keep them in the family. Don’t pretend otherwise. The banes of the long-gone reserve era included teams dealing players at will, often for the most arbitrary reasons, and those post-reserve who decried the death of “loyalty†rarely if ever asked where the loyalty was among those players’ bosses.
There come various reasons why players otherwise elect to test their markets when free agency becomes available to them even the first time, and various reasons—not always savoury—why teams don’t do more to keep them aboard before lamenting loyalty’s loss.
Too often Joe and Jane Fan presume it’s the player’s fault; often enough, a player presumes he’s lost his club, sees the too-green pastures elsewhere, and learns the hard way how green wasn’t his new valley.
The Dodgers’s president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, called the talks between the team and its best pitcher since the peak of Sandy Koufax “unfailingly pleasant.†That part shouldn’t shock anyone who has known and observed Kershaw since his advent. Even in defeat Kershaw has been as close to unfailingly pleasant after a game as he has been after a signature victory or even during a game when he agrees to be interviewed by game broadcasters.
And Kershaw has never acted in any way that suggested any unhappiness with the Dodgers or the Los Angeles area. Just about his only lack of happiness is his and the Dodgers’ lack of overall postseason success, real or perceived. Kershaw has had his moments of postseason brilliance and his moments of postseason deflation alike.
Perhaps the former is best represented by his masterwork in Game Two of this year’s division series against the Braves; the latter, by the four shutout innings he laboured to pitch in Game Five of the World Series—in between Steve Pearce’s top-of-the-first two run homer and Mookie Betts’s sixth-inning, one-out solo bomb. If not the day in October 2014 when A.J. Ellis behind the plate called for something over the middle when something to the outer edge might have deked St. Louis’s Matt Adams into a double play ball and not a three-run homer that ruined an otherwise solid outing.
Kershaw could hardly help referencing his half-and-half postseason record as well as his transition from pure power pitching to working anew as more of a breaking ball specialist during his extension presser. “It gives me a chance to prove a lot of people wrong,†he said. “I think this year especially—maybe rightfully so—there’s been a lot of people saying that I’m in decline or I’m not going to be as good as I once was. I’m looking forward to proving a lot of people wrong with that.â€
Despite his disabled list stints this season, the third year in a row he’s missed time on the list, Kershaw still delivered a 1.04 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, a 2.73 ERA, a 3.18 fielding-independent pitching rate (that’s your ERA without your defense, folks), and a 5.34 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 161.1 innings pitched.
It’s entirely possible that the years in which he was compared favourably to Koufax—whom he considers a friend and teacher—are gone for keeps, but it’s also entirely possible that he can remain a great pitcher regardless. He doesn’t have to hit the Koufaxian heights again to prove it.
When Kershaw signed the mega-lucrative extension (ten years, $214 million) that just expired in favour of the new extension, one of the first things he and his wife did was ramp up their support for Hope’s Home (named for an HIV-positive girl the Kershaws met on a Christian mission to Zambia) and Kershaw’s Challenge (supporting disadvantaged and disabled children in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Africa), not to mention CURE International which finances children’s surgeries around the world.
Friedman made a point of discussing Kershaw’s clubhouse value. “He’s made as much of an impact as you can on an organisation in terms of the success we’ve had—not just on the field, but from a culture standpoint in terms of bringing up young pitchers and kind of emulating the work ethic, the drive.â€
No Dodger pitcher works harder than Kershaw does to perform; few have had such galactical highs in the regular season and such subterranean lows as Kershaw has known in the postseason despite his overall 1.09 WHIP in the postseason.
“Myself, personally, a chance to win every single year, it doesn’t come around like this in L.A. very often,†he said calmly. “We just decided that it was a much better option to try to work it out here than to do anything else.â€
Something of that attitude helped David Price go from nothing special in the postseason to never better than in this year’s. (Price, too, elected not to exercise his own opt-out clause and to stay with the world champion Red Sox.) Kershaw could hit the heights in a postseason and be knocked off his perch in the same postseason, too many times over for his taste, but not let it destroy the essence of the still-young man. If nothing else, you have only to see him playing with his young children before a game for proof.
The Dodgers remain his baseball family, but real family life keeps him grounded firmly. So much so that Kershaw didn’t once mind the kiddos stealing the show after he beat the Braves in early October, when he went out for the ninth as a kind of decoy before yielding to closer Kenley Jansen before throwing a pitch.
Cali and Charley Kershaw crashed the postgame presser (“I thought you guys were supposed to be in bed,†he grinned) and climbed into their father’s lap at the mike, right before the old man was asked whether he thought he could go past the eighth, really. Kershaw purred to Cali, “Did you want Daddy to finish?†The little girl whose smile resembles her father’s so strikingly shook her head while she flashed it. “She knows, she knows,†said Daddy with a grin. Charley just nodded his pacifiered phiz and poked at the microphone.
If Uncle Clyde didn’t let ruined crops stop him from traveling a galaxy, even if only with his eyes and mind, Kershaw sure wasn’t going to let more swollen pelf from elsewhere or another ruined postseason stop him from traveling likewise with the only team he’s known, in the city he’s made home, where he’s as comfortable as his wife and children with what they have and what they do.
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