Alden Gonzalez
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.”
The farewell season of Kershaw’s 18-year career had played out like a dream, from recording his 3,000th strikeout on the final pitch of his outing on July 3 to winning his last home start on Sept. 19 to being crowned champion — for a third time in six years — on Nov. 2. Now it was over, and the only words he seemed to find were “thank you,” a phrase he uttered 10 times in a speech that lasted 105 seconds.
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.
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.
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.
“He knows how to do all the little things and shows you he can still win ballgames, even with reduced stuff, which I love, because it just destroys all the minds of all the analytics and all the people who say you can’t pitch like this,” said Max Scherzer, one of few pitchers who can match Kershaw’s credentials. “He goes out and shows you, you can. We can’t model everything about pitching. Analysts don’t have all the answers. For me, when I see him go out there and do his thing like that, I love it because it gets to shut up a lot of people.”
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.
“I did as well as I could’ve hoped this year, honestly,” Kershaw said.
That was never more true than in August, when Kershaw gave up six runs in 28⅔ innings, during which he gave up only one home run and issued three walks. At one point in that stretch, a prominent member of the Dodgers stated that Kershaw’s stuff was no longer even good enough to be drafted as an amateur, and yet he was rolling through some of the best competition in the world.
“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.”
Knowing his on-field role in the postseason would change, Kershaw spent the final month of his career learning how to be a reliever — asking questions of those who know the trade, experimenting with different ways to stay loose and ultimately growing an appreciation for a role he’d never taken on for a sustained period.
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.
“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.”
For years, Kershaw seemed to put an entire organization on his back. Never was that more true than in the playoffs. He continually took the ball on short rest and pitched deeper into starts than he often should have, all in an effort to make up for what was lacking around him. His shortcomings — the four-inning start with the Dodgers facing elimination in 2013, the eight-run seventh inning in the playoff opener in 2014, the squandered four-run lead in Game 5 of the 2017 World Series, the back-to-back home runs in Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS — defined him, until he finally broke through as a champion in 2020. Since then, in what has felt like reparation, Kershaw has been the one held up by others.
It has given him gratitude. Also, closure.
“You want to be on the best team,” Kershaw said. “Yeah, there may be some opportunities where I could’ve started somewhere and been a part of a postseason run as a starter, but I want to be here, I want to be a Dodger, and that means being around the best group of guys. It makes a lot of sense to me that this is probably the right time to be done, when you’re not one of the best four when you’re perfectly healthy. I’m at peace with that, and I feel good about it.”
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.
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.
“If I can help him,” Kershaw told him, “it makes me feel better.”
Glasnow called Kershaw “the most selfless pitcher,” a rarity for someone who has achieved so much.
“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 and when injuries began to make Kershaw ponder his longevity. 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.”
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.
“It just puts into perspective what it takes to truly be great and to last a long time in this game,” Dreyer said.
Wrobleski, though, also noted its simplicity.
“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.”
“Come on!” Freeman recalled thinking. “I wanna see how hard this fastball comes in.”
When a fastball was finally called, Kershaw threw it 91.9 mph, his hardest since the middle of the previous season. On the next pitch, another slider, he got Nathan Lukes to ground out, keeping the score tied. The Dodgers ultimately won on Freeman’s walk-off home run in the 18th inning, and that sequence wound up being not just the last time Kershaw pitched in a game at Dodger Stadium, but the last time he would pitch in any game ever.
“You can’t script that,” Kershaw said. “That’s so cool.”
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.
“But it’s just amazing. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
The Dodgers had somehow survived 18 innings in Game 3, riding Will Klein — an unheralded, journeyman reliever who cracked the World Series roster only after a family emergency kept Alex Vesia off of it — for the final 12 outs. They later won back-to-back games in Toronto while facing elimination. When the Blue Jays put two on with one out while trailing by two runs in the ninth inning of Game 6, the Dodgers turned the first game-ending, 7-4 double play in postseason history. In Game 7, they needed a ninth-inning home run from light-hitting Miguel Rojas, two improbable defensive plays and a herculean effort from every member of their starting rotation to pull through.
As he watched it all unfold, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman kept thinking about Kershaw, and how badly he wanted this for him.
“We wanted to win for everyone,” Friedman said, “but for him especially.”
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.
“I think at the end of the day, everybody gets hurt,” Kershaw said. “Everybody throws harder, everybody gets hurt, and everybody’s not good for very long. And those are all questions that we all have about how to make the game better. It’s a billion-dollar answer if you can figure out how to keep guys healthy and keep guys good. So, yeah, I’m curious about that.”
Kershaw had long been at peace with retirement, a decision he felt more conviction about as his final year progressed. Having success during the regular season made him feel as if he were leaving on his own terms; looking around and seeing how much better everybody else’s stuff is let him know, in his words, that it was “time for me to be done.”
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.
“I don’t know what the right word is,” Kershaw said, “but I’m just grateful for it.”
