The Washington Nationals have finally broken their playoff curse, advancing out of the division series for the first time since the team moved from Montreal in 2005, courtesy of a 7-3 win at Dodger Stadium. The heroes of this game are numerous: Stephen Strasburg, who recovered from two early home runs to keep the Nats in the fight; Patrick Corbin, who recovered from losses in Games 1 and 3 to throw 1 1/3 scoreless innings; and the three Nats who homered in Washington’s seven unanswered runs: Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto, and the embattled Howie Kendrick, whose 10th-inning grand slam put Los Angeles to the sword.
But when a 106-win team coming off back-to-back pennants blows a 2-1 series lead and coughs up a three-run lead at home in the decisive game, there will be a search for goats: Corey Seager and A.J. Pollock combined to go 3-for-33 in the NLDS, Joe Kelly surrendered the decisive grand slam to Kendrick, and manager Dave Roberts spent the back end of Game 5 making one inexplicable pitching change after another, to his club’s ultimate doom.
And because Clayton Kershaw blew a lead in the decisive game of the series, the Kershaw Playoff Narrative gets another spin.
With two outs in the seventh inning, the Dodgers held a 3-1 lead, but starter Walker Buehler, who’d battled through iffy command and groped along the edge of the strike zone all night, had walked Trea Turner with his 117th pitch. With the go-ahead run coming to the plate and the three most dangerous Nationals hitters—Adam Eaton, Anthony Rendon, and Juan Soto—due up, Roberts went to his bullpen.
Instead of calling on a reliever, he sent for Kershaw, who’s not only past his peak but has struggled early in games this year. In the 2019 regular season, he posted a 5.79 ERA in the first inning and nothing higher than 3.65 in any inning that followed. Just this past Friday, Kershaw allowed all three of his runs in his first two innings of work. Roberts called on Kershaw despite a fully rested bullpen, including an indomitable Kenta Maeda and lefty Adam Kolarek, the latter of whom had faced Soto three times this series and retired him each time.
Kershaw retired Eaton quickly to end the seventh, but in the eighth, he dropped an 89 mph fastball down and out of the zone. Rendon reached down, plucked it off his shoestrings, and flicked it over the left field fence. The next pitch—which Kershaw threw almost before TBS had stopped showing replays of Rendon’s dinger—was a cement-mixer slider, letters-high and middle-in to Soto, who dropped it halfway up the bleachers in right center.
The three-time Cy Young winner took no further part in the game, or indeed in the postseason, as the Dodgers and Kelly capitulated two innings later. Even before Kershaw surrendered the back-to-back home runs, and even though the Dodgers had—according to FanGraphs—a 50 percent chance of winning in spite of them, it seemed inevitable that Kershaw would not only blow the lead somehow, but that the Dodgers would never recover.
I wrote about the Clayton Kershaw Playoff Narrative for the first time in 2014, which was essentially a different era of baseball. There was no juiced ball, no resurgent post-tank Cubs or Astros, no Statcast, no swing-plane revolution, no stark divide between the few teams willing to invest heavily in a competitive on-field product and the many who are not.
Since then, Kershaw has delivered numerous exceptional and important playoff performances: stunning but ultimately futile wins in Game 4 of the 2015 NLDS, Game 2 of the 2016 NLCS, and Game 1 of the 2017 World Series. A phenomenal four-inning relief stint in Game 7 of the 2017 World Series, which came after the Astros had already taken the lead for good off Yu Darvish. A pair of tone-setting master classes in the first two rounds of last year’s playoffs, and two series-clinching short relief appearances, one in Game 5 of the 2016 NLDS and another in Game 7 of last year’s NLCS.
But the bad times continue to dog Kershaw, and no amount of one-run, seven-inning gems can outweigh the memory of the eight runs he gave up in Game 1 of the 2014 NLDS, the blown lead in Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, or the home run to Brandon Woodruff in Game 1 of the 2018 NLCS. He suffers by comparison to the postseason heroics of the young Madison Bumgarner or the latter-day Justin Verlander, as well as the imagined and unattainable ideal of the pitcher whose greatness is such that it transcends human fallibility.
Anyone who’s as good as Kershaw was at his peak—which is to say, Kershaw alone among 21st-century pitchers—is expected to face the toughest opponents at the biggest moments and never falter. It’s an impossible standard to live up to, and because the Dodgers have made the playoffs every year since 2013, Kershaw has had the opportunity to meet that standard and failed to do so. And every year, we write about that failure, talk about it, cover it like some grim marker of the passing of the seasons. The leaves turn, the sweaters come out of the closet, Kershaw gets torched in the NLCS, and all the radio stations start playing Christmas music. Same as it ever was.
I hate writing about Kershaw’s playoff failures. The concept of the postseason choke artist is born out of a particularly unforgiving view of competition; that failure is a symptom of weakness, rather than the natural byproduct of a zero-sum contest in which the sun rises and the rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike. The greater the player’s stature, the greater the height from which he can be torn down, and the gap between regular-season achievement and postseason failure is proof of the greatest weakness of all.
It’s an irresistible logical tautology that the loudest and most reductive thinkers wield like the scimitar of truth, and no baseball player in the game right now has suffered more cuts than the 2014 NL MVP. Kershaw seems to have internalized this logic, which is all the more upsetting, particularly as he processes these events on national television.
Even at the relatively tender age of 31, Kershaw’s best years are clearly in the past, which means there are probably no more Cy Youngs, no sub-2.00 ERA seasons, no 300-strikeout campaigns down the pike to leaven the disappointment of these postseason failures. Nevertheless, he will be judged by the standards of his youth, and the further he drops from those heights, the louder the hectoring from the gallery will be when he fails.
And he will fail again, and be hectored for it, until and unless the Dodgers win the World Series. In the meantime, Kershaw’s Dodgers will most likely continue to be among the 29 teams that come home each fall without grasping the Commissioner’s Trophy, and context will continue not to matter that much. It didn’t in Game 2, when Kershaw didn’t exactly pitch poorly, but ran into a buzzsaw in the form of a red-hot Strasburg. Nor did it matter in Game 5, when he was thrust into a critical moment despite not being anywhere close to the best man for the job. Roberts set Kershaw up to fail, and Kershaw obliged him.
Kershaw still has several years of high-quality pitching in him, and the Dodgers remain the best team in the National League for the near future. This is almost certainly not the last brutal postseason loss Kershaw will suffer before his career is done. It’d be comforting to glean a measure of justice from that fact, because when the greatest players don’t come through in the clutch, the only way for it to make sense is to view losing as a punishment for some intangible frailty.
The truth is far more frightening: Everyone loses, in life, in sports, and in baseball most of all. Sometimes for a reason, sometimes not, because there simply aren’t enough unique sins and failings of humanity to account for every strikeout, every blown lead, every lost playoff series. Failure is the most common outcome in baseball. And if it can happen to one of the greatest pitchers in the game, over and over, year after year, for no reason in particular, then nobody is safe.