On the morning of April 1, 2013, Clayton Kershaw was asleep in bed next to his wife when the alarm on his cell phone jolted him awake. He checked the time. Seven a.m. He stood up, walked to the bathroom, considered vomiting, thought better of it, trudged to the kitchen, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and flipped on the television. He didn’t like to set an alarm on the days he pitched, preferring instead to sleep until 10:30, 11, or whenever his lanky body floated into consciousness on its own. But it was opening day, and he was scheduled to throw the first pitch at 1 p.m., which meant rolling out of bed at an hour unholy to him.
Kershaw was not a morning person, which made him like every other Major League Baseball player since the invention of stadium lights. Being a ballplayer was like working a second shift. Go to work around one, out by eleven. Lather, rinse, and repeat more than one hundred times per year. Any hope of surviving in the big leagues meant one must attune his body to achieve peak physical strength, mental acuity, and emotional equilibrium between the hours of 7 and 10:30 every night. Because the adrenaline rush of triumph or the uneasiness of personal failure stayed in the bloodstream for hours after the last out was recorded, the average player knocked out around two. The guys who were wired the tightest—or partied the hardest—often greeted dawn.
On days he did not pitch, which was 80 percent of the time, his wife, Ellen, would wake him by eleven so they could spend as many hours as possible together before he left for the ballpark. They were twenty-five years old. Married for three years, but together since they were freshman classmates at Highland Park High School in Dallas. Kershaw had taken another girl to the homecoming dance in ninth grade, but that was the only date he’d ever been on in his life with a girl who wasn’t Ellen. They’d been sweethearts for ten years but somehow hadn’t yet run out of things to do together. On the mornings of days he wasn’t pitching, they’d hit up museums, television tapings, maybe drive a half hour to try a new breakfast joint before she sent him off. Ellen always had something planned. Four days out of five he was like any other young husband very much in love with his wife, finding bliss in otherwise mundane domesticity. But every fifth day he turned into something else.
At just twenty-five years old, Clayton Kershaw woke up on opening day 2013 with the weight of the Dodgers’ franchise on his broad shoulders. Having already established himself as one of the best pitchers in the game at such a young age, it was not outside the realm of possibility that he could one day be crowned the greatest ever. He had won his first Cy Young Award at age twenty-three and finished as the runner-up at twenty-four. Of the 6,797 starting pitchers who had taken the mound since the live-ball era began in 1920, Kershaw had posted the lowest earned run average of any starter through his first thousand innings. By giving up just 2.70 runs per nine, he bested Hall of Famers Whitey Ford (second at 2.75) and Dodger legend Sandy Koufax (third, 2.76)—among everyone else.
Kershaw had been MLB’s ERA champ at age twenty-three and then turned around and did it again at twenty-four. In that same time frame he’d also struck out more batters than anyone else in the National League. Those statistics were nice, but they didn’t impress him much. It was Kershaw’s belief that while strikeouts and earned run average got the glory, the best way to measure a starting pitcher’s greatness was in how many innings he gave his team. (He’d led the NL in that category over the past two seasons, too.) The Dodgers hadn’t won a world championship since the year he was born. In the year they owned the team, the Guggenheim group had added hundreds of millions in player salary to the payroll to make that happen. But they weren’t going anywhere without Kershaw.
When he was called up to the big leagues in 2008 at age twenty, he was the game’s youngest player. To prove he belonged he took a typical tack. “I tried to strike everyone out,” he said. The problem with going that route is strikeouts are tiring: each one takes at least three pitches if you’re lucky, but more often cost five, six, or seven. Starters are given 100 to 110 or so pitches before they’re removed from games. If they try to strike everyone out, they can burn through their bullets by the fifth inning, and leave the next four innings up to the bullpen. Kershaw learned that if he wanted to stick around deep into games to have more of a say in the outcome, he’d have to learn how to get as many cheap, one- or two-pitch outs as he could. In his first season he went seven innings just twice. In 2012 he did it twenty-two times.
But being great wasn’t enough for Kershaw to sleep well at night: he pushed himself to be perfect. Kershaw had a gift for making hitters fail in spectacular fashion. He had done this, generally, by moving about the world as if he were a machine on the days he pitched. And he’d done it specifically by crafting two of the nastiest pitches opposing hitters had ever seen. In his five big-league seasons, Kershaw had used his left hand to spin 1,688 curveballs toward home plate—many of those right into the wheelhouses of men who were paid millions of dollars a year to identify mistakes and pulverize them. Just one of those pitches had been hit for a home run.
Kershaw’s breaking ball, christened public enemy number one by Dodger broadcaster and high priest Vin Scully, moved like a symphony when he snapped it off right. Sometimes it started out high and huge, like a harvest moon heading toward the batter’s eyes. Other times it looked like a strike forever. No matter where it began it would fall straight down like an anchor as it hurtled toward home plate. When hitters were looking fastball they often fell over the pitch on their front foot. And even when they guessed right, when they sat back and waited on it and swung as hard as they could, their wobbling knees made it damn near impossible to generate any power. When Kershaw’s curve resulted in a called strike three, as it often did, the average batter shook his head in defeat and began the slow walk back to his team’s dugout because there was nothing else to do. A good hitter collects a hit 30 percent of the time. Against Kershaw’s breaking ball they stood a 10 percent chance.
Most pitchers are lucky to have one breaking pitch they can use to strike out hitters. Kershaw had two. Halfway through his second year in the big leagues, batters realized that swinging at his curveball was futile, so they stopped doing it and sat on his fastball. Kershaw began to struggle, often needing 100 pitches to get through five innings. There was even talk of sending him back down to the minors. Before a game at Wrigley Field, he was getting ready to throw a bullpen session with catcher A. J. Ellis. The Dodgers’ bullpen catcher at the time, Mike Borzello, approached Kershaw with an idea. “He asked me if I could try throwing a slider,” said Kershaw.
Ellis had caught Kershaw when he was working on a new pitch before, with mediocre results. At the beginning of the 2007 season, Kershaw skipped High-A ball and went from Low-A ball to Double-A Jacksonville. Because he didn’t yet have an effective changeup, the Dodgers wanted him to throw fifteen of them a game, no matter what, to try to develop one. They didn’t care if batters hammered it. Though Ellis and Kershaw would later become the best of friends, their first meeting was no lovefest. Ellis went to catch one of Kershaw’s bullpens in Jacksonville when Kershaw was working on his changeup. Frustrated by the pitch’s lack of deception, he kept throwing it high and away so the batter wouldn’t swing at it. Ellis called out to him and said: “Hey! Get the ball down!” Annoyed, Kershaw looked back at Ellis and yelled: “Hey! Relax!”
“And that was when I realized it was better if I didn’t try to talk to him when he pitched,” said Ellis.
It was a fluke that Ellis wound up being present for the moment at Wrigley Field two years later that changed the course of Kershaw’s career. It was May 2009 and Ellis had just been called up to the big leagues that morning to be the third catcher on the Dodgers’ roster, to be used only in an emergency. Joe Torre told him he was going back down to the minors after the weekend. Borzello mentioned to Ellis that he had Kershaw toss him a few sliders the day before on flat ground, but he wanted the kid to try throwing the pitch from a mound. “So Clayton steps on the mound, and the very first one he throws is just, like, unbelievable, and my eyes are huge and Mike’s eyes are huge and we’re just looking at each other like did you see that?” said Ellis. “And Clayton walks over to us kind of shy and asks, ‘So what do you think?’ And I’m thinking, Well, no one’s ever going to talk about you going to the minors again.”
Kershaw’s curveball may have gotten him into the show, but his slider made him a star. When he threw it where he wanted to it darted across the strike zone from ten o’clock to four o’clock, a perfect complement to his 12-to-6 curve. It approached the plate traveling anywhere from 82 to 86 miles per hour, which made it even trickier for hitters to pick up his mid-90s fastball or his mid-70s curve. Not that it mattered much. Even if batters knew what was coming, when he located the slider where he wanted it was damn near invisible.
“You just don’t see that pitch,” said Arizona Diamondbacks manager and former Dodger great Kirk Gibson. “He buries it down and in, and you wonder, Why are hitters swinging the bat? They don’t see it.”
Most hitters study the opposing pitcher’s tendencies before his starts, looking for tics and tells to solve him. With Kershaw, however, the best use of a batter’s time might be spent in a pregame prayer asking that his slider not be working that night.
“You watch tape, or you watch him on TV, and you come up with a game plan,” said Arizona’s left fielder Mark Trumbo. “But then when you get in the box it’s totally different. You’ve gotta trust what your eyes see. But when he’s on the mound nothing adds up. You think the ball’s going to be in one area and it ends up being somewhere else and then you’re just not quick enough to get to it.”
Kershaw may have been better at spinning baseballs 60 feet and 6 inches than anyone else, but as he tucked into his cereal a few hours before opening day in 2013 there was something bigger on his mind than his start versus the San Francisco Giants. In a few hours he would embark on the most important year of his life. Kershaw had two more seasons under the Dodgers’ control until he became a free agent, at which point he would be allowed to auction off his prized left arm to the highest bidder. He had only ever worn Dodger blue. The club’s new owners had promised the city of Los Angeles multiple championships. Locking Kershaw into the top of their rotation for as long as they could was their number-one priority, and had been for months. The stakes were enormous, and both sides knew it. What no one knew was how much it would cost the Dodgers to extend his deal to take him off the market before they potentially lost him forever. Kershaw had played his contract negotiations so close to the vest that even his closest friends had no idea whether he would stay.
To help stack their rotation behind Kershaw, four months earlier the Dodgers had signed another brilliant starting pitcher and former Cy Young winner, Zack Greinke, to a six-year contract worth $147 million. It was the second-most lucrative deal for a pitcher in baseball history, behind only the seven-year, $161 million contract the Yankees gave to C.C. Sabathia. Greinke and Kershaw shared the same agent, Casey Close. J. D. Smart had represented Kershaw since the beginning of his career, but when Smart joined Excel Sports Management at the end of 2012, Close, the head of its baseball division, began assisting in Kershaw’s contract negotiations. Six weeks earlier, Close approached the Dodgers with an idea for an offer he found suitable for Kershaw: seven years, $195 million with an opt-out after five, just in case the marriage wasn’t working out. Close had negotiated the same escape clause in Greinke’s deal, and Kershaw knew he wanted it, too. It wasn’t that Kershaw didn’t want to be a Dodger for the rest of his career. It was just that at twenty-five, when he tried to imagine his life beyond thirty, he couldn’t do it.
There was something else, too. Kershaw didn’t care about money. Well, of course he cared about money, but not in the way professional athletes who worship the Louis Vuitton quarterly catalog did. The team dress code required players to wear slacks on travel days. Aside from those occasions—and when he was in uniform—one of Kershaw’s goals for 2013 was to make it through the season without having to put on long pants. (He made it a month before a forty-degree day in Baltimore forced him to change out of shorts and throw on a pair of jeans.) For special occasions, like Cy Young announcements and all-star press conferences, he might break out his favorite dress shirt: a red and blue checked long-sleeve button-down he liked to roll up to his elbows. But other than that he preferred plain T-shirts and basketball shorts.
It wasn’t that Kershaw didn’t think he deserved to be paid for his talent. His competitiveness inspired him to fight for every dollar. It was just that wearing money on his feet or around his neck embarrassed him. A devout Christian, Kershaw believed that his wealth could best be used to help others in need. His faith had taught him that he needed only enough money to ensure his family never had to worry. The rest was for giving away. Major League Baseball had recognized him for his work with orphans in Zambia months earlier by presenting him with the Roberto Clemente Award, the prestigious honor given annually to the player who best exemplifies the Pittsburgh Pirate legend’s service to others. Besides, Kershaw believed that money didn’t change who a person already was: it only amplified it. He had spent his entire life struggling to surrender to things he couldn’t control. Promising five prime seasons to the Dodgers seemed long enough. The new owners said they wanted to win, sure, but before they bought the team the Dodgers had been run by a professional litigant who rode into town making the same glittery championship promises before driving the organization into bankruptcy. Kershaw had no reason to think it would happen again. Except: what if it did and he was stuck? No, he wanted to sign for five years. Any longer than that was terrifying. But the Dodgers had something else in mind.
• • •
Clayton Kershaw knew that every pitch he threw could be his last. Every pitcher did. But he didn’t believe it, not really. He’d never been injured during his five-year career, at least not badly enough to warrant going on the disabled list. Not only did he have that curveball and slider going for him; he also went through the world with the same sense of invincibility that informs the thoughts and actions of every healthy twenty-five-year-old man yet to suffer the indignities of a body in decline. He stood six foot four and weighed 225 pounds, a perfect frame for a major-league pitcher. In perhaps the biggest blunder in franchise history, the Dodgers had traded a young Pedro Martinez away twenty years earlier because management thought his body was too scrawny to hold up. He went on to have a Hall of Fame career. Kershaw had about seventy-five pounds on Martinez. Still, a large frame didn’t guarantee wellness. By signing his contract extension before the season began, Kershaw could have eliminated the risk of getting injured and losing a nine-figure deal. But when the Dodgers didn’t meet his agent’s terms, rather than settle he decided to roll the dice.
Every time Kershaw took the mound before signing that extension he staked his future livelihood to his ability to throw baseballs as hard as he could while keeping his elbow and shoulder from getting hurt. His meticulous routine was the only thing standing between him and insanity. Kershaw had used the same glove for three years. He also loved the comfort of numbers, and found it soothing to commit license plates in parking lots to memory. On days he pitched, he clung to his schedule with military precision.
The majority of Kershaw’s home starts began at 7:10 p.m. The days he pitched went like this: After waking up and eating his cereal, he would sit and watch TV with Ellen. Around 2 p.m. he would arrive at the field and make himself a turkey sandwich with cheese, pickles, and mustard, and grab a side of potato chips. Between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m. he attempted to burn off his nervous energy by alternating between walking around the clubhouse, bouncing baseballs off the walls, and trying to guess the other team’s lineup—which he wasn’t often wrong about. Though Kershaw rarely watched himself pitch, between outings he liked to study the most recent starts that Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner and Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels made against the opponent he was set to face. Because Bumgarner and Hamels were both excellent lefties, he found value in scouting a team’s approach against them, figuring they’d try to attack him in a similar way. Then, at 4 p.m., Kershaw would grab a yogurt and a handful of fruit and head into the training room in the team’s clubhouse to take a nap. On days he could not sleep, he consoled himself by watching East Coast ball games that had already started.
Between 5:15 and 5:30, Ellis and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt joined him to go over the other team’s lineup and talk strategy. Most starting pitchers develop a game plan based on the weaknesses of the hitters they face that night, but it’s subject to change. Greinke, for instance, pitched by feel: he corrected course after every pitch and bounced ideas off Ellis in between innings. Not Kershaw. Since his strengths typically bested a batter’s strengths, once his game plan was set he didn’t often deviate course. “We’re like the pit crew,” said Ellis. “He comes to us when he needs something, otherwise we don’t interfere.”
At 5:58 p.m. on the dot Kershaw placed heat packs on his shoulder, elbow, and sometimes his back. Then he covered the same areas with Icy Hot and finished getting dressed. At 6:20 p.m. he walked into the dugout wearing a blue Dodgers team jacket over his uniform and poured himself a cup of water. For the next three minutes, he sat on the bench and alternated between staring at the ground and staring into space. “Just zoning out,” he says. At 6:23 on the dot he took the field and began warming up. Though Kershaw wore number 22 and is superstitious about numbers, he had good reason for not walking onto the field at 6:22. “I don’t need the extra minute,” he says.
After taking the field, Kershaw trotted down the line toward the outfield grass and put his hands on the ground to elevate his body into the yoga pose known as crow. Then after a couple of arm windmills, he jogged to the center-field wall and punched it once with his right (nonpitching) fist. After a few more laps from the foul line to the fence, some backward and some with high knees, he stretched with the help of a Dodgers strength coach, starting at 6:36.
At 6:40 p.m. he began playing catch with Ellis. “Sometimes I’ll joke with him, ‘Six thirty-eight today? Six forty-one?’ ” says Ellis. “I don’t think he finds it very funny.” Ellis loved Kershaw like a brother but sometimes worried the young pitcher’s intensity would cause him to have a stroke. A few months earlier, a well-meaning man sat next to Kershaw in the dugout before he was about to take the field and pitch a meaningless spring training game and attempted to make small talk. Kershaw squirmed in his seat and offered a few polite one-word answers. But after a few minutes he couldn’t take it anymore. He looked the man in the eye, apologized, and ran. That man was Mark Walter, the principal owner of the Dodgers. Walter had no idea about Kershaw’s strict pregame regimen, and when he found out later, he felt terrible. Still, to be so focused that you blow off the man who has the power to make you the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history was pretty damn impressive.
From 6:40 to 6:48 Kershaw played long toss with Ellis, stepping back a few feet after each throw until he reared back and lobbed balls some two hundred feet to his catcher. At 6:50, he walked to the Dodgers’ bullpen to begin throwing to Ellis off a mound. At 7:02, after the national anthem was sung, he began the long walk back to the dugout. At home, Dodger faithful screamed his name and begged for autographs. On the road, visiting fans shouted obscenities. He blotted out all of it. At the beginning of each season Kershaw showed up clean-shaven and wore his sandy blond hair cropped close to his head. But as the season wore on he let the hair on his head and on his jaw grow long and scraggly. Before he threw a pitch, Kershaw put his glove in front of his face so that only his eyes were visible to the batter. He tried to grow a beard to look older, but his hair was too fine and wispy to make him look menacing. And even if his facial hair could grow in thick on his cheeks, his eyes were too open and vulnerable for him ever to look mean. By Memorial Day the ends of his hair would poke out from behind his ears under a ball cap he never washed. Before 7:10 starts, he would walk to the rail of the Dodgers dugout and stand on the edge, nod to his teammates, then lead them onto the field. “It might sound stupid, but it’s the little things that help me in baseball,” Kershaw says. “Like if I didn’t do one of those little things and then went out and pitched bad it’d probably be in the back of my head like, Why didn’t I do that? And then in my head afterward I’d be like, You know what? I let the team down today because something was off by a minute.”
• • •
Clayton Kershaw was born on March 19, 1988, in Dallas. His mother, Marianne, worked as a graphic designer crafting logos for companies like Bibbentuckers, a local dry cleaner. His father, Chris, wrote radio jingles that won awards. They both made decent money when he was a little boy—enough to be middle class—and his father coached his Little League teams. Life was good until it wasn’t.
Kershaw’s parents started having problems around the time he turned ten. He remembers noticing them sleeping in different bedrooms, but thought it was just a by-product of his dad working late. “He was crazy talented,” Kershaw says of his father. “He played every instrument. But you get in that lifestyle and it’s like, Oh I’m not talented until three or four in the morning. And then you stay up all night.”
Even though he was an only child, he was spared from being caught in the middle of their demise. “They did a good job protecting me from it,” he said. “I didn’t know a whole lot of it. I didn’t know about any of that stuff going on when I was little, so that was huge.”
After his parents divorced, Kershaw lived with his mother. Money was tight and private school was no longer an option. So his mom stretched herself thin renting a home in affluent Highland Park, just outside Dallas, so he could go to public school there. Kershaw had played youth soccer with two boys from his new school: future Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, and another friend named Josh Meredith. When he switched schools, he was relieved to wind up in Meredith’s class, so he at least had one friend. Years later, Meredith was the best man in his wedding.
Kershaw was an anxious child. “I was kind of a worrier,” he said. “I wanted to control everything. I had friends, and Josh was always around but I was always worried about different things. Being late was the scariest thing. Like if I was late for baseball practice that was the end of the world for me. My dad was perpetually late. He’d pick me up sometimes to go to practice and I would just wait like a dog in the front window. Like, please show up, please show up, please show up.” He cites his sixteenth birthday as one of the best days of his life, because he got his license. He could finally drive himself somewhere two hours early if he wanted.
The upside to Kershaw being a worrier was that his mother never bothered to remind him to do his homework or turn the TV off and go to bed at a reasonable hour on a school night. She knew he would do it on his own.
Because his mom worked late, Kershaw would usually head to a friend’s house after school, and often camped out there for a few days. Sometimes he wouldn’t check in for hours. That was no problem, because his mother knew he was so paranoid about following the rules that he would never do anything to get himself in trouble.
“She took a very hands-off approach because she knew I would take care of myself,” Kershaw said. “That lack of authority was perfect for me. The responsibility I took on helped me grow up.”
When Kershaw’s parents split up his life became about controlling variables. He found Jesus as a teenager because the idea of turning over his worries to a higher power was a huge relief. He couldn’t control everything, but he could build his own family, and once he let someone in, he remained fiercely loyal. He was a man who met his best friend in the second grade and his wife in the eighth.
In Dallas there are two high school sports seasons: football and off-season football. Kershaw played center on the freshman football team and Stafford lined up behind him. The coach put him on the offensive line because he was, as he describes it, “a pudgy little doughboy.” But he got bored and quit after one year, because being a lineman wasn’t the most fun job for a fifteen-year-old.
He grew six inches in the summer between his sophomore and junior years, and turned his focus to baseball full-time. His father went to his games and sat in the stands, but the two seldom spoke. “I’d say hi to him, maybe see him for a dinner every once in a while,” he said. When he talks about his father now, which isn’t very often, he doesn’t let himself acknowledge the pain of having a complicated relationship with one of the principal people in his life. “The years that I needed a dad around, like age one through ten, he was there,” said Kershaw. “And they had a great marriage and I had a great dad. I was raised by then, so that’s good.”
He also had the Melsons. Ellen Melson grew up in a close-knit family with two brothers and a sister. Kershaw became a fixture at their home, and reveled in its wholeness. Every Thanksgiving the Melsons would have Kershaw and his mother out to their ranch outside Dallas. Kershaw’s father passed away a month into the 2013 season at age sixty-three, never having made it to Dodger Stadium to see his son play. The cause of death was diabetes and other health problems. “He deteriorated really fast,” said Kershaw. He left the team to go back to Texas and attend his father’s funeral.
Because he was raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, Kershaw knows his life could have gone another way. But the early anxiety he endured propelled him to greatness. The fear of having no control became the fuel that remained. On the mound he was an unflinching warrior who had never been wounded. But off the field his shyness could still appear in fleeting moments. “Some people can go to a party where they don’t really know anyone and be totally social and have a great time,” he said. “I am not one of those people.” Every year he had been in the big leagues he collected the autographs of his coaches and teammates on a baseball. During his first three seasons on the Dodgers he played under Joe Torre. But the 2008 ball from his rookie campaign is still missing Torre’s signature. He’d been too timid to ask.
Scouts began noticing Kershaw in the eleventh grade. By the time his senior season rolled around he was a six-foot-four, 215-pound lefty who mixed a 95 mph fastball with a curveball teenage boys had no hope of hitting. He went 12–0 for the Highland Park Scots that season, with a 0.77 ERA. He struck out 139 batters in 64 innings. USA Today named him the 2006 national high school player of the year.
Teams with the highest picks in the Major League Baseball draft have one job and one job only: not to screw it up. And while Kershaw had been dominant, there was no greater draft risk than a high school pitcher. Throwing a baseball overhand at 95 miles per hour for a living is a horrendous thing to do to an arm. And teenagers who touched the mid-90s with their fastball flamed out quicker than most. High school coaches rarely consulted with travel ball coaches on the appropriate workload a young arm could handle. Fundamentally, a prep school coach’s goal (to win) was at odds with what was best for a teenage pitcher (to advance to the next level with an intact elbow and shoulder).
After graduation, Kershaw planned to go to Texas A&M, where Ellen would enroll in the fall. If he played ball for the Aggies, he’d be eligible for the draft again after his junior season. Conventional wisdom says that drafting a twenty-one-year-old pitcher with three years of college experience is less terrifying than betting on an eighteen-year-old who has only ever faced other teenagers. The Dodgers held the seventh pick in the 2006 draft, a consolation prize for their 2005 season being their worst in thirteen years. The last time Los Angeles had picked in the top ten was in 1993, when they selected Wichita State pitcher Darren Dreifort second overall, right after the Mariners took Alex Rodriguez. Though he was billed as a future ace, Dreifort struggled to stay healthy during his nine-year career, and underwent at least twenty surgeries for a degenerative connective tissue disease before he was forced to retire. Dreifort posted a 4.36 career ERA. The Dodgers lost more games he started than they won.
While Kershaw was considered the top high school pitcher going into the draft, there was even more pressure on the Dodgers than usual to get their first-round pick right. The club had been burned the year before, when they drafted University of Tennessee pitcher Luke Hochevar in the first round. They reached an agreement with Hochevar’s representative, but when he dumped that counsel and hired the superagent Scott Boras, the deal fell apart and they failed to sign him. Hochevar opted to pitch a year in independent ball instead.
With that debacle fresh in their memories, the Dodgers’ front office was wary of selecting another Boras client. So the club’s director of amateur scouting, Logan White, put Kershaw and Long Beach State third baseman Evan Longoria at the top of the team’s draft board. Six teams picked ahead of them. The Dodgers held their breath.
The Royals, Rockies, and Devil Rays picked 1-2-3. They selected Hochevar, Stanford pitcher Greg Reynolds, and Longoria, respectively. Hochevar posted an ERA over five in his first seven seasons. Reynolds blew out his shoulder right away. He won six games total over three seasons in the big leagues before moving to Japan to play for the Seibu Lions. Longoria became a superstar for the Rays, and the face of their franchise.
The Dodgers had hoped to draft the face of their franchise on that fateful day as well. But it was the day before the draft that altered the course of their history. That day, Kershaw pitched a high school game on a tiny field in Lubbock. The night before his start, University of Houston right-hander Brad Lincoln pitched across the state in a game versus Rice. Teams picking near the front of the draft sent their top scouts to Texas to take one final look at both pitchers. Lincoln dazzled. Kershaw stunk. In Kershaw’s final audition before the draft, the first guy he faced hit a home run. He couldn’t throw his breaking ball for a strike and walked four batters. His team still won the game, but he said later his performance made him want to puke.
The Pirates picked fourth and took Lincoln. The Mariners went next and selected Brandon Morrow, a pitcher from the University of California, Berkeley. Detroit was on the clock. “I totally thought I was going to the Tigers,” said Kershaw. “I was sure of it.”
But Detroit decided to go with University of North Carolina pitcher Andrew Miller instead. When Kershaw fell to the Dodgers at the seventh pick, White was ecstatic. “If he had pitched well that night we might have lost him,” White told the Los Angeles Times years later. In his first six seasons with three different teams, Miller posted a 5.79 ERA, bouncing between starting jobs and the bullpen. He eventually became a dominant relief pitcher, but given the way Kershaw panned out, the Tigers would love to have that pick back.
After the Dodgers drafted Kershaw and offered him a $2.3 million signing bonus, he decided not to play ball at A&M after all. The first thing he did was write a half dozen checks to the people his mother had to borrow money from so they could afford to stay in the Highland Park school district. Kershaw says he never knew about those loans until after he signed. “She took on some pretty serious debt so I could play on the best sports teams,” Kershaw said. “She did a great job making sure I never went without.”
The next pitcher chosen in the draft was a skinny kid out of the University of Washington named Tim Lincecum. Though the five-foot-eleven righty had overwhelmed collegiate hitters for the Huskies, and won the Golden Spikes award as the nation’s top collegiate baseball player, teams were terrified of his unorthodox, windmill-like delivery, and unimpressed by the fact that, like a young Pedro Martinez, he appeared to be 150 pounds soaking wet. Undaunted by his slight frame, San Francisco selected Lincecum tenth. He dazzled in his second year in the big leagues in 2008, winning the National League’s Cy Young and earning the nickname “the Freak” for his ability to dominate the competition despite being so small. When he won the award again the following year, Dodger fans groaned. Many wondered why the club selected Kershaw while Lincecum was still on the board. Making matters worse, while the Dodgers were mired in the McCourt mess, Lincecum helped the Giants win World Series championships in 2010 and 2012. When Kershaw took the ball for the Dodgers on opening day in 2013, he was facing the reigning champs. Over time, Lincecum’s size would catch up with him. And when Kershaw made his ascension to the top of the baseball universe, Lincecum began his fall back to earth. In 2012, Kershaw’s earned run average was about half of Lincecum’s. White was right to draft him ahead of the college righty after all.
With Lincecum deposed as ace, the Giants gave the opening day start to Matt Cain. Though Cain didn’t have his best stuff, he labored through six innings to match Kershaw scoreless frame for scoreless frame. The 0–0 tie was nothing unusual for Kershaw. The Dodgers had a difficult time scoring runs when he pitched, a fact that had cost him wins, and without them the Cy Young the year before. But it wasn’t as if Dodger hitters went into hibernation on purpose when he took the mound. It seemed as though every opposing pitcher Kershaw faced was inspired to pitch the game of his life, hoping he could one day tell his grandchildren he had beaten the best.
In the eighth inning, with the score still tied at 0–0, Kershaw had grown tired of the ineptitude of Dodger hitters. The Giants had replaced Cain with George Kontos, a right-handed reliever in his third year in the big leagues. Kontos knew the scouting report on Kershaw’s hitting: awful. In his five big-league seasons he had hit .146, with one extra-base hit in 332 plate appearances. Just after Kershaw stepped into the batter’s box, Kontos fired a 92 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. Early in games, Kershaw might take a couple of pitches to do his part to help tire the opposing starter out. But as the game reached the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, his typical strategy was to grab a helmet and run to the batter’s box before Don Mattingly could lift him for a pinch hitter. Then, if he led off the inning, he’d swing at the first pitch to end the at-bat as fast as possible. His energy was precious in crunch time, and he needed to conserve every ounce of it for the mound. Plus, there was something else. Cain had struck him out in his first two at-bats that day, and he was embarrassed. “I went up there swinging at the first pitch because I really didn’t want to strike out again,” Kershaw said afterward.
He started his swing almost as soon as the baseball left Kontos’s right hand. His bat whizzed through the strike zone and whack! The crowd knew it was gone before he did. Kershaw sprinted out of the box toward first base with his eyebrows raised in disbelief and his mouth hanging open. And when he rounded the bag and saw the ball clear the center-field fence to give the Dodgers the lead, he screamed and continued to race around the bases toward home, as if he had to cross the plate before they could take the home run away from him. He grinned the whole way round. It was the first time his teammates could remember seeing him smile during a game in which he was still pitching. It was his first career home run. The last time he homered was in a spring training game on his twenty-first birthday. On every birthday since, Ellis had wished him a happy anniversary of his last home run.
After he touched home and returned to the giddy mob of teammates waiting to pounce on him in the dugout, Kershaw did something else he was loath to do: he granted the crowd a curtain call. In the top half of the ninth inning, Kershaw returned to the mound and retired the defending champs in order on nine pitches. On the biggest day of his professional career to that point, Kershaw had tossed a four-hit shutout on ninety-four pitches and gave the Dodgers the lead with a late home run. He’d beaten the Giants in every way possible. After the game, before he went and found Ellen, talked to the media, or did anything else, Kershaw headed straight for the team’s weight room to ride a stationary bike alone. Nothing would interrupt his routine.
When Kershaw hit the home run, Magic Johnson jumped to his feet in the owners’ box next to the Dodgers dugout. After he rounded the bases and crossed home, Johnson turned and high-fived Mark Walter with both hands, then leaned toward him and yelled, “Wow!”
The next day, Kershaw was shagging balls on the warning track at Dodger Stadium during batting practice when the team’s traveling secretary, Scott Akasaki, walked out onto the field from the dugout and waved at him. This was odd. Typically, the only time Akasaki ever flagged down a player during BP was when he was being traded or demoted. Neither scenario seemed possible. Curious, Kershaw jogged back toward the dugout and asked Akasaki what was up. Akasaki led Kershaw into a tunnel, saying that Ned Colletti wanted to see him. Colletti walked Kershaw back to a room under the stadium near the batting cages that he’d never seen before. The door swung open to reveal the secret owner’s bunker. Inside sat Walter, Stan Kasten, Todd Boehly, and Kershaw’s two agents, Casey Close and J. D. Smart. They wasted little time with small talk. On the table was an offer for $300 million.