Clayton Kershaw becomes the 20th pitcher to record 3,000 strikeouts, becoming only the third left-hander to do it, and becoming only the fifth to do so with one team.
It started innocently enough. Sunday, May 25, 2008. At 1:10 p.m., under the bright sun at Dodger Stadium. The St. Louis Cardinals – a team that would come to torment the pitcher at various times in his career – in town finishing a three-game series. The Dodgers, looking to avoid the sweep, sent their rookie left-hander to the mound for his first major league start. He wore #54.
The first batter Clayton Kershaw faced as a big leaguer was his eventual teammate, Skip Schumaker. His first major league pitch was called a ball. His second was called a strike. Schumaker then fouled off four straight pitches before striking out on a fastball. One batter, one strikeout. A sign of things to come.
The next batter, someone named Brian Barton, walked on four pitches. Nerves, maybe? Future teammate and future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols was next, and he promptly doubled to deep left center to score Barton. Three batters, one walk, one K, one hit, and one earned run. Kershaw righted the ship, striking out Ryan Ludwick and Troy Glaus to finish his first inning.
When his day was over, after five innings and a total of 102 pitches, Kershaw struck out seven Cardinals, allowing only one additional walk and one additional run. He left the game poised for the win, but Jonathan Braxton blew the save (a happenstance that the big lefty would need to get used to), before the Dodgers won the game with a run in the 10th inning.
Nearly five years later, on April 17, 2013, in his 156th game, he recorded strikeout number 1,000, also with a fastball, sending Yander Alonzo back to the dugout.
Four years after that, on June 2, 2017, career game number 283, another fastball felled the Brewers’ Jonathan Villar for number 2,000, which was one of 14 strikeouts that day in Milwaukee.
It would take another eight years. It would take an additional 166 trips to the mound. It would take more than ten trips to the injured list. It would take career lows (“more downs than I care to admit,” Kershaw would later say) and multiple one-year contracts after repeatedly contemplating retirement. It would take getting the post-season monkey off his back by winning the 2020 World Series, and then watching from the sidelines with two injuries as his teammates won another in 2024. It would take the heart of a lion and the strength of a bear to continue to battle father time and the frailty of the human condition.
Prior to Wednesday night in Los Angeles, only 19 pitchers had ever recorded 3,000 strikeouts (by comparison, 24 have 300 wins).
