Alden GonzalezNov 6, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.Follow on X
LOS ANGELES — “We Are Young,” the pop-rock track that became his entrance song, blasted through the Dodger Stadium speakers one final time Monday afternoon, and Clayton Kershaw, with the sleeves already cut off his championship T-shirt, struggled to hold himself together.
“I told Freddie [Freeman] I’m gonna try not to cry today,” he said to a crowd of 52,703 who had assembled for yet another World Series parade, “but I don’t know if that’s going to work.”
Over the course of three decades, Kershaw, 37, had lifted the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise like no one else, so much so that part-owner and Lakers legend Magic Johnson compared his impact, on the field and throughout the L.A. community, to Kobe Bryant’s. He shaped culture, elevated expectations and served as a standard-bearer for an eventual dynasty, building a legacy that will endure long after his pitching career. But in this moment, it was Kershaw who was thankful.
“Last year, I said I was a Dodger for life,” said Kershaw, who announced his retirement on Sept. 18. “And today, that’s true. And today, I get to say that I’m a champion for life. And that’s never going away.”
KERSHAW IS NOT just an icon for these Dodgers. He is a bridge — the one player who was there for the success of veteran-laden Dodgers teams in the early 2000s, saw them through the ugliness of former owner Frank McCourt’s bankruptcy in the years that followed and remained a fixture as the current group evolved from one that continually disappointed in October to one that now embodies the greatest era in franchise history.
From 2020 to 2025, Kershaw absorbed injuries to his back, elbow, forearm, shoulder and toe. His fastball came in five ticks slower than it did when he debuted. His ERA was still 2.90. Among the 96 pitchers who compiled at least 500 innings over the past six years, only three had a lower mark.
When Kershaw signed his fourth consecutive one-year contract with the Dodgers in the middle of February, he was considered superfluous. By the time he rejoined the rotation three months later, and had fully recovered from the knee and toe injuries that plagued his previous season, he had become a necessity.
Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow were on the injured list because of shoulder injuries that would force them to sit out a combined 27 turns through the rotation. Roki Sasaki had struggled mightily through his initial introduction to the major leagues. Shohei Ohtani had only begun to build back up as a starting pitcher. The bullpen had already been heavily taxed in an effort to make up for it all. By making competitive starts, Kershaw helped keep the Dodgers afloat.
“He pitched a lot of innings for us that we really needed,” Snell said. “He’s a big reason we won a lot of games.”
The average four-seam-fastball velocity in MLB jumped for the fifth straight year in 2025, up to 94.4 mph. Kershaw’s averaged 88.9 mph. At times, it hovered around 87, while paired with a slider that often lacked its necessary bite and backed by a loopy curveball that has become outdated in the modern game. And yet Kershaw succeeded. In 22 starts, he put up an 11-2 record and a 3.39 ERA.
“At a time when velocity is king in baseball and everybody’s chasing it,” 25-year-old fellow starting pitcher Emmet Sheehan said, “it shows that being able to pitch and knowing what the hitter’s trying to do and keeping him off balance — it works.”
When September arrived, the Dodgers’ rotation had finally rounded back into form. Their starters posted a 2.07 ERA that month, by far the lowest in the sport. And when the playoffs came, it was clear that Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow and Ohtani would make up the Dodgers’ rotation. Kershaw had long accepted that.
“The writing was kind of on the wall,” Kershaw said. “No matter how well I pitched, or started, for the season, we have four amazing starters. Obviously I would’ve been ready, but the way those guys are throwing the baseball, it’s really hard to argue with that.”
“He’s handled this last month with class, professionalism,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “All the while, he’s always said that he wants to do anything he can to help the team. He’s followed through on that. All the stuff, finishing out the season and how everything kind of played out, was a lot on his plate. He handled it with grace. And then the kind of uncertainty of role going to the pen, he’s just fallen in line.”
HIGH-RANKING DODGERS officials say they believe Kershaw’s competitiveness with subpar stuff helped the team’s other starters establish more of an attack mentality. “If he can get outs like that,” the thinking went, “I definitely should.” His impact — the kind that will stick with the Dodgers as they attempt a three-peat next season — also showed up in other ways. Glasnow is one example.
“I think from other superstar people I’ve met, he’s kind of an anomaly in that sense,” Glasnow said. “And I think it’s the faith he carries. He really lives it. He really lives a really selfless life.”
Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior said he saw Kershaw’s willingness to help others show up at a time when the pitching staff around him began to skew younger. It began with Walker Buehler, who arrived from a data-driven Vanderbilt program and opened Kershaw’s eyes to the importance of advanced analytics, and continued to a current staff filled by young pitchers such as Justin Wrobleski, Jack Dreyer and Sheehan.
Kershaw offered advice largely on strategy — how to get free strikes, when to attack the zone, where to throw certain pitches in certain counts and, in Wrobleski’s case, how to make best use of the time between innings. But most of his influence came through example.
“The best way that I learned growing up was not by a bunch of people yelling at me or talking to me in general,” Kershaw said. “It was just by observing and watching, and then questions kind of arised from that. That’s what I started to do. I started to watch guys maybe a little bit more.”
“It just puts into perspective what it takes to truly be great and to last a long time in this game,” Dreyer said.
“It’s not like he’s doing anything crazy or doing anything super outlandish,” he said. “He’s hammering the nail every day, or making sure he’s hitting his checkpoints, never deviating from his thing and just kind of knowing what he needs to do to get ready for his next start and just doing it.”
FREEMAN WORE THE PitchCom in his ear when Kershaw entered with the bases loaded, two outs and the score still tied in the 12th inning of Game 3 of the World Series. The first pitch was a slider that came in at 89.7 mph, and Freeman was stunned. Kershaw hadn’t thrown a slider that hard all season. For six consecutive pitches, the robotic voice in Freeman’s ear kept saying “slider.”
Six days later, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, after the finale of one of the most thrilling World Series in recent memory, Kershaw still couldn’t believe his Dodgers had pulled through in Game 7 and defeated the Toronto Blue Jays to become the first team in a quarter century to repeat. He was still in shock, he said.
In the midst of their final champagne-and-beer celebration, Friedman basically offered Kershaw a job with no strings attached to it — just one that ensured he’d be around from time to time. Kershaw has no interest in coaching, he said; at the moment, his focus is on being a father to what will soon be five children. But there is a curiosity within him that might not fade, one rooted in the current state of pitching.
After the Dodgers lost Game 5 of the World Series last week, Kershaw lingered on the Dodger Stadium infield with his four kids, pregnant wife and other members of his extended family for several minutes, at one point snapping a photo with members of the grounds crew. He was saying goodbye, just in case. The Dodgers could have lost in Toronto, and Kershaw would have had his closure. That he returned days later for a more proper goodbye left him almost speechless.
Kershaw built the bulk of his Hall of Fame career in his 20s, during a nine-year stretch from 2009 to 2017 when he won 139 regular-season games, put up a 2.25 ERA, threw 1,827⅓ innings, collected three Cy Young Awards, claimed an MVP and accumulated 56.5 FanGraphs wins above replacement, more than any other pitcher. But his legacy has been built on perseverance — on the years that followed, when his fastball faded, the injuries piled up and the stress of throwing more often than anybody began to catch up to him.
Kershaw was barely called upon, but he was nonetheless useful. In Game 3 of the National League Division Series, he came back out for the top of the eighth because the Dodgers were basically left with no other options and took his lumps for an inning, allowing other arms to stay fresh for Game 4, which ended up being an 11-inning, series-clinching victory. Three weeks later, on Oct. 27, he recorded one of the biggest outs in what became the second-longest game in World Series history. While preparing to check into that game, Kershaw got up to throw off the bullpen mound three separate times.
At times, Glasnow found himself carrying bad starts with him a little longer than he’d like, to the point where he felt it affecting his focus thereafter. Starting pitchers follow a very stringent routine. The four to five days in between starts are crucial, and nobody made every minute of that window count more than Kershaw. His work ethic is legendary, but consistency is his hallmark, and Glasnow wanted to know how he didn’t let rough outings interrupt it. Kershaw’s advice: find a teammate who needs support.
Early in his time with the Dodgers, Sheehan arrived in the clubhouse to find Kershaw already drenched in sweat from a workout. It made him want to arrive earlier. On road trips, he always made sure to catch the same bus Kershaw did. In high school, Dreyer, a 26-year-old left-hander from Iowa, created a side-by-side photo of Kershaw’s delivery and his and kept it in his camera roll to study. Since becoming his teammate, Dreyer has been struck by the amount of detail that goes into his preparation.