Clayton Kershaw is a pitching legend.
Just how legendary?
We'll let statistician Jim Passon from X take this one: "If Clayton Kershaw allows 146 earned runs to cross the plate before he records another out, he would still have an ERA below 3.00."
Safe to say the legendary lefty wouldn't stay in a game long enough for that to happen.
Kershaw, who announced recently his end-of-season retirement, will make the final home regular season start of his career on Friday. He enters it with a career 2.54 ERA at the MLB level.
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Kershaw has a legitimate case as the greatest southpaw pitcher ever. He's certainly been the best of this era.
His greatness can be summed up in so many ways.
He was the National League MVP -- not just Cy Young, but MVP -- in 2014. That season, he went 21-3 with a 1.77 ERA and 239 strikeouts in 198.1 innings.
That was the fourth consecutive season in which he led the NL in ERA.
He might have been even better in 2015, when he had a 2.13 ERA, three complete game shutouts and a career-high 301 strikeouts in 232.2 innings pitched.
Kershaw's early-career bugaboo was a few negative postseason moments, but he turned that around with World Series rings in 2020 and 2024.
He won three Cy Young Awards, and this season, he surpassed the 3,000-strikeout plateau.
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Kershaw's ability to reinvent himself as he aged was remarkable, too.
Even this season, at 37, Kershaw is 10-2 with a 3.53 ERA.
He broke in with a dominant, loopy curveball. He'll retire as a pitcher who throws his slider even more than his fastball.
And through it all, Kershaw has limited runs. At the end of the day, that's a pitcher's job.
And he's done it as well as almost anyone ever.
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