IT’S SAD WATCHING KERSHAW CRUMBLE AS DODGERS ODDLY TRY TO GET BY

No pitcher ever has waffled between regular-season brilliance and postseason struggles, but Kershaw was unfairly positioned for Game 1 duty by a ballclub overly dazzled by a hokey regular season

     For much too long, with green and orange jugs behind him and empty bats to his right, he sat alone in the Dodgers dugout. Two water cups were on the floor, others soon to come, with teammates refusing to look at him as they manipulated past. Boos were just ceasing in the stands.

     A vague, wistful, revealed-to-the-world stance should have been performed in the clubhouse, where we couldn’t see what Clayton Kershaw was thinking about life, baseball and why he was still here.

     Ever see a regular-season pitcher, one of the best the sport has created, confirmed again and again as a postseason illusion? It has become an overcast part of his Hall of Fame presence, something flawed, a 13-13 record with a 4.49 ERA in 194 1/3 innings, the highest among 31 pitchers with more than 100 playoff innings. Here was his opportunity, with his manager roaring, “This has been my most exciting year,” as a team tried to get by with the arrest of a starter, a long-ago departure of another, an elbow operation that shelved a third and various misplaced mound regulars.

     On this night, Kershaw never was uglier. He relinquished five runs on five hits without managing an out. He shouldn’t have opened the National League Division Series, with nothing better in his repertoire than a third shot in the rotation, with a shoulder problem that would have shut down others. “Unconventional,” is how Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations, defined the mission. Instead, this was the worst start of his career and worst in the team’s postseason history.

     The Worst.

     “Disappointing. Embarrassing,” Kershaw said after an 11-2 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks. “You just feel like you let everybody down. The guys, a whole organization, that looked to you to pitch well in Game 1. It's just embarrassing, really. So I feel like I let everybody down. It's a tough way to start the postseason. Obviously, we still have a chance at this thing, but that wasn't the way it should've started for me.”

     They don’t have a chance, actually. This is how the Dodgers tried to survive 2023, hokey and murkily. As usual, they led the big leagues in attendance, drawing almost four million while continuing to keep people at home with a 25-year, $8.35-billion TV deal. They fed the future, letting fans know they intended to bring Shohei Ohtani up the 5 freeway with $500 million or so. People were dazzled in southern California, with one columnist writing the other day, “Read it and leap, the Dodgers will win the 2023 World Series championship.” In truth, they’ll be lucky to win one game against the Diamondbacks, who have starting pitchers and young, speedy guns like Corbin Carroll to impose the so-called upset.

     Every postseason, teams like the Dodgers make you wonder why they play 162 games, win 100 and claim an 10th NL West title in 11 years — only to be gone in five, four or three tries against a backstop that finished 16 games back. As Freddie Freeman said Friday, without speculating about an NLCS against an Atlanta team that got rid of him: “You've got a four-deck stadium. It's the only one in baseball. You've got 50,000 people, every single night here. For them to go out of their way to make you feel good when you're doing your job, it means a lot. I do appreciate it. It does make you feel good inside and also just means you're doing your job pretty good. That's what I'm also happy about."

     Not today. “I don’t think anybody in the baseball world was expecting that,” Freeman said.

     And if they lose Monday at Dodger Stadium and then at Chase Field, where they once celebrated a championship in the outfield pool, the Dodgers will be forced to stand again in their normal postseason bluff. One last time, Kershaw will consider whether it’s time to leave Los Angeles, perhaps for his hometown and enlivened Texas Rangers, or maybe for retirement with almost 3,000 innings on his arm.

     Either way, this isn’t how it should end.

     “Nothing health-related here. Just bad pitching,” he said.

     “I’m watching our guys beat up on one of the best pitchers that we’ve seen in our lives,” said Arizona starter Merrill Kelly, “and watching them do it in the first game I’ve ever pitched in the playoffs.”

     Explain how a regular-season plunderer who has gone 210-92 with a 2.48 ERA, from April to September, can be so fallible in the playoffs. It might explain why the Dodgers have stumbled every season but once in his tenure. But four million folks keep coming to Chavez Ravine anyway. Monday, tickets should be available, in what should be a sorrowful time in the rich bright tone of azure, the color of the Big Blue uniforms, which have won only once in 35 years.

###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.