The 2018 season is a big one for Clayton Kershaw. The three-time Cy Young winner isn’t just chasing the World Series ring that still eludes him, he’s trying to remain healthy wire-to-wire for the first time since 2015. At the end of the year, he’ll have the chance to reclaim his spot as the game’s highest-paid pitcher if he chooses to exercise an opt-out clause in the seven-year, $215 million deal he signed in January 2014.

Via the Los Angeles Times‘ Andy McCullough, neither Kershaw nor the Dodgers are tipping their hands as to what might happen beyond publicly agreeing that they’re maintaining an “open dialogue” regarding the soon-to-be 30-year-old lefty’s contract status. If he does opt out, he’ll co-headline a stacked free-agent class alongside Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, with Josh Donaldson, Dallas Keuchel, Craig Kimbrel, and Andrew Miller among the other luminaries. There’s no indication that Kershaw would rather pitch for another team besides the Dodgers, who drafted him with the seventh overall pick in 2006, but he may not get a better chance to hit free agency while so close to the top of his game.

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When we last saw the Dodgers’ rotation, Yu Darvish was being lit up like a pinball machine in Game 7 of the World Series due to a pitch-tipping issue that the organization somehow failed to identify. Though the Dodgers made a serious run at retaining the 31-year-old righty, the team was limited by its financial constraints, and Darvish opted to sign a six-year, $126 million deal with the Cubs instead. With exhibition season now underway, the defending NL champions’ rotation still appears as though it could use fortification.

Darvish, a July 31 deadline acquisition from the Rangers, isn’t the only starter gone from the fold. In a mid-December move designed to give them more financial flexibility, the Dodgers dealt the injury-prone Brandon McCarthy (16 starts, 3.98 ERA, 3.28 FIP, 2.4 WAR) and Scott Kazmir (a mere 12 minor-league innings due to hip and arm issues), two other players, and cash to the Braves in exchange for Matt Kemp. The trade has helped them shimmy under the $197 million competitive-balance-tax threshold, but their subsequent failure to offload Kemp and some portion of his remaining $43 million salary for 2018-19 doomed their pursuit of Darvish.

Nobody’s weeping for a wealthy team that’s lost 25 starts while retaining eight of the 10 members from a unit that compiled the majors’ third-best ERA- (82) and FIP- (88). Compared to 2015, when they used an MLB-high 16 starters, and -16, when they tied for second with 15 starters, that counts as stability, and yet in each of the past two years, just one Dodger has reached the 162-inning threshold to qualify for the ERA title. The Andrew Friedman/Farhan Zaidi regime has actively used the team’s depth and financial might to lighten the workloads of all of their starters. Not only did the unit’s 885 innings rank 10th in the NL last year, but only 742 times did a Dodger starter face a batter for the third time in a game, the majors’ lowest total.

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Pitchers and catchers report to camps this week, and while overaged futility infielders 14 years removed from shoulder surgery have a few more days before going on the clock, here I am, too. For those unfamiliar, I’m Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs’ newest senior writer. I’ve spent the past 11-ish years writing about baseball full time, first for Baseball Prospectus and then Sports Illustrated, with a pit stop at the lamentably late Pinstriped Bible and, this past summer, a book called The Cooperstown Casebook.

At any given time, there are only a few hundred people who get to write about baseball for a living. In that regard, as in so many others, I’m a very lucky person. Luck is the residue of design, as Branch Rickey famously said long before I came along. (While old enough to be disqualified from prospect lists, I’m not that old). It’s a mantra I’ve repeated for decades.

I didn’t rise through the ranks of traditional baseball coverage; instead, as a biology major-turned-graphic-designer who one moonlit evening in mid-2001 decided that the world simply couldn’t live without my opinions about baseball, I started up The Futility Infielder. Thanks to some exhaustive coverage of the Hall of Fame balloting — a renewable wellspring I somehow had the good fortune to stumble across — I came to the attention of Baseball Prospectus a couple years later. After creating a catchy (and surprisingly enduring) metric for Hall fitness, I began a long run at BP, gradually transitioning out of the design world and into full-time writing. In May 2012, SI hired me to start up their new daily baseball blog, where I was free to apply the kind of analysis that I’d had been doing in parallel to so many other statheads, this time via a mainstream platform.

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