Clayton Kershaw returns in time for Dodgers' stretch run
Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in baseball, will return to the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers Friday night after an 11-week absence caused by a herniated disc in his lower back.
He is doing so in the wake of Los Angeles expanding its National League West lead over the rival San Francisco Giants to a season-high five games with just 23 left to play. Given that confluence of events, a successful return by Kershaw seems likely to snuff out any remaining hope the Giants might have had of reclaiming the division and could have significant postseason and Cy Young Award repercussions, as well.
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Having thrown just 34 pitches in three dominant innings of work for High-A Rancho Cucamonga in his lone rehab start last Saturday, Kershaw is likely to be limited to 60 to 70 pitches in his matchup against Miami Marlins ace Jose Fernandez in Miami. The Dodgers hope he can stretch those pitches over five innings. That would position Kershaw to go as far as seven full innings against the Yankees next Wednesday in what would be his Yankee Stadium debut. If he clears those hurdles, the limits should be off for his final three regular season starts, two against the Giants, making a San Francisco comeback all the more unlikely.
Already the Giants’ chances of winning the West are down to 7.3% per Baseball Prospectus’s Playoff Odds Report. That’s due less to the Dodgers’ remarkable ability to persevere through a record-tying cavalcade of injuries—matching the 2012 Red Sox by having 27 men on the disabled list at one time—than to the Giants having compiled the worst record (17-32) in baseball since the All-Star break.
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The Dodgers, meanwhile, have weathered the absence of their ace with remarkable aplomb. Since Kershaw’s last start on June 26, the Dodgers have posted the second-best record in baseball, a 38-24 (.613) mark bested only by the Cubs over that span. Their salvation has been an offensive surge which has seen the Dodgers go from scoring 4.14 runs per game through June 26 to 4.98.
That surge in run scoring has masked the fact that the Dodgers’ pitching has indeed suffered from the loss of Kershaw and company. The Dodgers allowed just 3.6 runs per game through Kershaw’s last start on June 26. They have allowed 4.4 runs per game since and have played almost as far above their Pythagorean expectancy as the Giants have played below theirs.
Even with Kershaw returning, the back of the rotation is a patchwork of two spots split among four rookies, three of whom—top prospect Julio Urias and righties Ross Stripling and Brock Stewart—have workload concerns. The fourth, 24-year-old righty Jose De Leon, has made just one major league start. With Scott Kazmir having failed to make it out of the first inning of his rehab start on Wednesday due to continued pain in his neck and ribs, and Brandon McCarthy hit hard by high-Class A hitters in his rehab start on Monday, there’s no guarantee that any of the team’s other veteran starters will contribute down the stretch.
Despite that lack of depth, a rotation topped by Kershaw, deadline addition Rich Hill and stalwart Kenta Maeda would still match up well in a likely Division Series confrontation with the Nationals, who have lost Stephen Strasburg to injury yet again Wednesday night. Maeda is an upgrade on last year’s Game 3 starter, Brett Anderson, and one could argue that the one-two punch of Kershaw and Hill could be as good heading into October as the Kershaw-Zack Greinke combination was a year ago.
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In Kershaw’s case, as great as his career has been, his performance over the first three months of this season represented a new peak with his 218 ERA+, 1.67 Fielding Independent Pitching and 16.11 strikeout-to-walk ratios over that span all representing career bests. As for Hill, compare what he has done in 20 starts since making his return with the Red Sox last September to what Greinke did for the Dodgers last year:
Pitcher - ERA - ERA+ - FIP - WHIP - K/9 - K/BB
Greinke - 1.66 - 220 - 2.76 - 0.84 - 8.1 - 5.00
Hill - 1.85 - 223 - 2.40 - 0.94 - 10.5 - 3.91
There’s reason to expect a quick Kershaw return to peak performance. Coming off the only other disabled list stint of his career in May 2014, after a trip to Australia and a strained teres major muscle behind his pitching shoulder, Kershaw striking out 18 in his first 14 innings while allowing just three runs and walking no one in two starts. He allowed more than three runs in just one of his remaining 24 starts and won Cy Young and MVP awards despite missing a month.
This year he has missed more than two months, but he was so good before landing on the DL that Cy Young contention is still not beyond his reach should he perform as well over his final five starts as he did in his first 16.
Kershaw averaged 7.6 innings per start prior to his injury. If he throws five innings Friday, seven on Wednesday, then returns to that average for his final three starts, he’ll finish the season with 155 2/3 innings pitched, putting him 6 1/3 innings shy of qualifying for the ERA title.
Since the Cy Young award was created in 1956, only two starting pitchers have won the award in non-strike years with fewer than 200 innings pitched. One was Kershaw in 2014, when he threw 198 1/3 innings. The other was Rick Sutcliffe in 1984. The Chicago Cubs acquired him June 13 of that season and he threw just 150 1/3 innings in the NL that year, but his 16-1 record was enough to win over the electorate voters.
Won-loss records are less important to Cy Young voters these days, but they can still influence voters. Kershaw is already 11-2 and has a decent chance to finish with 15 wins. If he can maintain his remarkable rate stats, there could be a legitimate sabermetric argument for Kershaw winning the award.
Despite not pitching since late June, Kershaw enters Friday night’s start tied with Madison Bumgarner and Noah Syndergaard for second place among NL pitchers in Baseball-Reference’s wins above replacement, trailing only Washington’s Max Scherzer. FanGraphs’ version of WAR has Kershaw in second by himself behind only Syndergaard. Baseball Prospectus’s WARhas Kershaw in fifth, but within striking distance of fourth-place Bumgarner and third-place Scherzer, who, based on more traditional statistics, appear to be the two pitchers most likely to win the award.
Scherzer, who leads the NL with 197 innings pitched, is on pace for 231 innings pitched. If both pitchers finish the season with their current ERAs (1.79 for Kershaw, 2.88 for Scherzer) and the innings totals projected above, the difference between Scherzer and Kershaw will be 75 1/3 Innings, but also 43 earned runs allowed, which translates to a 5.14 ERA over those 75 1/3 innings. That suggests the quality of Kershaw’s performance will have been more valuable than the quantity of Scherzer’s.
Could Kershaw win the Cy Young Award with 155 2/3 innings pitched in 21 starts? If they yield a 15-2 record, 186 strikeouts, a 1.79 ERA, 0.73 WHIP and a strikeout-to-walk ratio north of 16, which is what his numbers project to, it’s not out of the question.
Indeed, with a player as great as Kershaw, there’s very little that seems truly impossible.
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