In a matter of weeks, the career of Clayton Kershaw will be complete and the more distance we get from it, the more we’ll start looking back with fondness at getting to witness one of the greatest pitchers to ever set foot on a mound or, in excellent baseball parlance, toe the slab.
No matter which way we approach his level of greatness, the Dodgers legend clears the Hall of Fame threshold with ease and will fly in with well over 90% of the vote on his first ballot in five years. In fact, make that 95%. Or 98%. I don’t know exactly, but I’m confident he’ll be close to 100%. That level of respect is well-deserved for anyone who witnessed his career and has and even rudimentary understanding of what constitutes a Baseball Hall of Famer.
A lot of times when a great player retires, I’ll discuss the merits of his Hall of Fame candidacy. In the case of Kershaw, he’s one of those where we don’t need to discuss “if” he is but instead skip right to the part where we examine just how high on the totem pole of greatest players ever he sits.
We can start with this: If someone asks you who the greatest pitcher of this current century was/is, there’s an easy and obvious Big Three and that would be Kershaw, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. If we sort by WAR since the start of the 2000 season, the leaderboard goes Verlander (82.6), Kershaw (77.6), Scherzer (75.5), Zack Greinke (72.4), Roy Halladay (62.4) and CC Sabathia (61.8) before we get into the likes of Mark Buehrle, Cole Hamels and Chris Sale. I do think it would be fair to loop Greinke in and make it a Big Four, by the way, but there’s no question Kershaw’s in the discussion for the top spot.
Kershaw is fourth in wins and fourth in strikeouts in the 2000s. He led the league in wins three times, ERA five times, innings once, strikeouts three times and WHIP four times. He led in pitcher WAR three times.
The funny thing about the strikeouts part above is he wasn’t even really considered a power pitcher. Sure, he led the NL in strikeouts three times and the majors once, but he wasn’t like a Randy Johnson-level fireballer. Even among his fellow Big Three guys, Verlander and Scherzer were certainly looked at like the power pitchers of the bunch. Kershaw was just that good at carving hitters up that the strikeouts came with it. That explanation might sound weird if you didn’t regularly watch him work, but for those of us who did, we know that it wasn’t overpowering as much as beating the hitters in so many different ways. And, of course, he could overpower hitters, too. It was but one of many items in his toolbox.
Clayton Kershaw by the numbers: Records and statistics that defined the future Hall of Famer’s MLB career
Mike Axisa
We could also put the handedness qualifier on. That is, Kershaw is left-handed. Who are the greatest left-handed pitchers of all-time? Before even looking anything up, I know he’s damn sure one of the very top ones.
It is tricky to compare pitchers across eras. Several stats attempt to do so and with a position player, WAR is one of those measures that does a decent job. With starting pitchers, though, it’s such a different game in terms of workload.
As an illustration, Kershaw never topped 240 innings in a season. He led the majors with 232 ⅔ IP once. Hall of Famer Lefty Grove, who pitched predominantly in the 1920s and 1930s, topped 250 innings 11 times, topped 275 innings five times and never led the league in innings pitched. Steve Carlton, from the ’60s, ’70s and 80s, once threw 346 ⅓ innings. He topped 250 12 times and went over 290 five seasons. And WAR is a cumulative stat, though it does measure against peers by individual season.
The top Southpaws all-time in WAR?
- Lefty Grove: 113.2
- Randy Johnson: 103.5
- Warren Spahn: 92.6
- Eddie Plank: 88
- Steve Carlton: 84.1
- Clayton Kershaw: 77.6
- Tom Glavine: 74
- Carl Hubbell: 68.8
Eddie Plank pitched in the Deadball Era while Kershaw had to deal with hulking power hitters for 18 years. I’m perfectly fine with eyeballing this list and saying Kershaw was one of the five best lefties all-time along with Grove, Johnson, Spahn and Carlton, even if we didn’t rank them exactly according to WAR (it isn’t perfect, after all; no stat is).
Now, there are peak Hall of Famers who were lefties and just didn’t accumulate a ton of innings due to injury or other factors. Obviously, with Kershaw being a Dodgers pitcher his whole career, Sandy Koufax comes to mind.
We have to remember, though, that nearly all of Koufax’s greatness was packed into five seasons. Through his first seven seasons, Koufax was 54-53 with a 3.94 ERA (105 ERA+), 1.37 WHIP and 952 strikeouts against 501 walks in 947 ⅓ innings. He went, insanely, into overdrive for five seasons after that, winning the ERA title all five years along with three Cy Youngs, an MVP and two World Series MVP.
Still, Kershaw had a seven-year span where he was three Cy Youngs and an MVP along with five ERA titles and he was truly great several more seasons. He had the ridiculous peak and the longevity.
I’m comfortable saying that, while Koufax was more dominant in his five-year prime, Kershaw had the better overall career. The rate stats all bear that out.
If we just dropped the throwing-arm qualifier and went with the greatest pitchers of all-time, we probably can’t get Kershaw all the way into the tippy-top tier, but he isn’t all too far off.
The JAWS system attempts to mesh WAR with the prime performance of each player while making an adjustment for how out-of-whack the stats are for Deadball Era and earlier pitchers. Kershaw is 20th all time there. For a frame of reference, the pitchers above him, in order: Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Roger Clemens, Grover Alexander, Lefty Grove, Tom Seaver, Kid Nichols, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Warren Spahn, Pedro Martinez, Bob Gibson, Phil Niekro, Bert Blyleven, Steve Carlton, Eddie Plank, Justin Verlander and Gaylord Perry.
Again, no stat is perfect and all era-related caveats apply, but if you just glanced at a ranking of pitchers in that order, wouldn’t you generally think, “yeah, that looks pretty good” with maybe a few nitpicks? It has Kershaw 20th all-time. If you wanted to push a few who aren’t listed over Kershaw, I’d say that’s cool with me, but I get to remove a few, too, so we’ll call it even. This means, yeah, I’m comfortable saying he’s a top-20 all-time pitcher.
Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate just what a rare talent Kershaw was is to zero in on this. Per Fangraphs, 11,765 pitchers have thrown at least one inning in Major League Baseball history. There’s a good argument Kershaw ranks in the top 20, which is in the top 0.17% to ever grace the mound.
Clayton Kershaw was one of the five greatest lefties ever, one of the 20 greatest pitchers ever and sits in the top 0.17% to ever take the mound and complete at least one inning in Major League Baseball.
What we witnessed over the course of the last 18 years was an upper-tier legend.
