Clayton Kershaw Joins The Exclusive 3,000 Strikeout Club

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). Only three lefties had done it (Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson, and CC Sabathia – Hall of Famers, all). Only four had done so with one team (Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson, Carlton, and John Smoltz, but the latter two also played for other teams in their career). There are only two active players who are members of the club; the two pitchers who, with Kershaw, make up the troika of this generation’s best pitchers: Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander.

In Kershaw’s last four games prior to Wednesday night, he had recorded 7, 5, 4, and 5 strikeouts. So, when he toed the rubber at Chavez Ravine to face the Chicago White Sox, needing only three additional Ks to join the 3,000 club, the 53,536 in attendance expected to witness history. And Kershaw tantalized the crowd for much of the first few innings, going to two-strike counts on the first four batters, seven out of the first nine, and eight out of the first eleven, before recording his first strikeout in the third inning.

Kershaw would not record another strikeout until there were two outs in the fifth, finishing off second baseman Lenyn Sosa on his 92nd pitch, which matched his season-high. Kershaw admitted that he could feel the tension with the fans.

The murmurs in the ballpark were that Dave Roberts wouldn’t have the temerity to not send Kershaw back out for the sixth inning. On the broadcast, the announcers explained that Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, and Kiké Hernández stood in front of Roberts, glaring at him, daring him to remove their friend, their comrade, their beloved teammate from the game. Roberts smiled and offered a thumbs up, denoting that Kershaw was good to go.

The irony of the moment was that the story of Kershaw’s career has been being kept in the game one batter or one inning too long. There have been countless occasions when he was asked to get another batter, another few outs, when his weary body was simply incapable of doing so. Roberts and co. were tempting fate and begging history not to repeat itself.

The fans, kept in suspense about Roberts’ decision, roared when Kershaw stepped out of the dugout and jogged to the mound. In his post-game interview, the weary pitcher said that the crowd’s reaction to his coming back out to pitch in the sixth inning is something he will remember forever.

Kershaw got Mike Tauchman to ground out to first to start the frame. Michael A. Taylor laced a 1-0 pitch down the left field line for a double. He then tried to steal third, but Will Smith cut him down. Unfortunately, Taylor collided with Muncy, which resulted in a prolonged delay as the third baseman was helped from the field (imagining will be completed on Thursday to determine the extent of the injury). Kershaw took a few warm up throws while Hernández got loose as Muncy’s replacement, but one wondered if the additional delay would adversely affect the 37-year old hurler. A 91 MPH fastball to rookie Vinny Capra, who was not yet twelve years old when Kershaw made his major league debut, made it 0-1. A curveball in the dirt squared the count. Capra, who hails from the land down under, swung over an 86 MPH slider to bring Kershaw one strike away and the crowd to its feet. What followed was an 85 MPH slider on the outside corner that Kershaw would later say wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Regardless, when home plate umpire Jim Wolf turned to his right and called Capra out, history was made.

In the aftermath, the Dodgers did not swarm Kershaw. Rather, they allowed him to walk off the field on his own, soaking up the adulation two hours, six innings, and eighteen years in the making. Kershaw saluted the crowd and blew kisses to his family in the second deck. When Kershaw finally made it to the dugout, his teammates began a procession of hugs, culminating with a giant embrace by his skipper, the man who has relied on him and possibly pushed him too hard too many times over the past 10 years, but whose faith in the pitcher has never wavered. And then the PA announcer directed the fans to DodgerVision, which showed a three-minute montage of Kershaw’s greatest hits. Forget the 2:25 between inning time limit, the celebration ran for at least five minutes, and neither the Dodgers nor the White Sox gave one lick. Rules were made to be broken.

Kershaw made history on his 100th pitch, two-thirds of which were strikes. But, he left the game trailing 4-2. The Dodgers wasted opportunities in the seventh and eighth, and it looked as if Kershaw might get his first loss of the season on one of the biggest nights of his career. Fear not.

Michael Conforto, who robbed extra bases in the first inning to keep the White Sox from blowing open the game, singled to lead off the bottom of the 9th. Tommy Edman and Hyeseong Kim then walked to load the bases with no outs for Shohei Ohtani. The stage was set for an historic ending, but Ohtani grounded into a run-scoring force out, making it 4-3. Mookie Betts followed with a sacrifice fly to even things up. With Will Smith at the plate, Ohtani stole second. Smith eventually walked, bringing up World Series hero Freddie Freeman. Freeman, who has been struggling of late, lined the first pitch he saw into right field to score Ohtani and give the Dodgers the win.

The lights in Dodger Stadium flickered, Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” blared from the speakers, the crowd went wild, and another chapter in this storied franchise was written. As Dave Roberts said after the game, “It happened the way it was supposed to happen.”