Clayton Kershaw Silences Mets, Narratives

The stories were silly to begin with. That the best pitcher in the world was somehow hardwired to falter when the calendar flipped from September to October. That the same hitters who floundered against Clayton Kershaw throughout the regular season would feast come playoff time.

The seven dominant innings Kershaw hurled against the Mets on Tuesday shouldn’t go a long way in changing anyone’s opinion of what Kershaw can do under the bright lights, only because the 50 innings prior shouldn’t have, either.

I probably haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know. Clayton Kershaw is incredible. At times, in the postseason, he’s appeared as something less than incredible, but lately, he’s looked more like himself. Even in his Game 1 loss to New York, which oddly seemed to fuel the anti-Kershaw postseason narrative, he was great, making what amounted to one real mistake to his apparent-kryptonite, Daniel Murphy.

Though the outcome of Game 1 was the opposite of what Kershaw desired, he pitched well, and so on the surface, it didn’t appear that much needed to change. Of course, that’s just the surface, and Kershaw goes well beyond the surface. Kershaw and catcher A.J. Ellis, that is.

Ellis contributed an enlightening article to the Player’s Tribune last month, concerning the act of catching Kershaw and Zack Greinke and the way each prepares for their starts. Pulling from that article:

“Before each of Clayton’s starts, he and I, with pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, sit down together two hours before the game. Clayton dictates that entire meeting, running through the starting lineup in detail. ‘Here’s what I want to do … ‘ Hitter after hitter.

Usually he’s spot-on with his approach and it matches with my scouting and game plan. Occasionally, I’ll throw in my two cents, but I’d better make damn sure my two cents fits with what he wants to do, because otherwise he’ll snap at me. ‘I’m not doing that. That makes no sense.'”

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Of course, “going over scouting reports” isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but Ellis has caught plenty of pitchers in his day, and the way he talks about Kershaw makes it clear that, to Ellis, Kershaw is something of an outlier in this regard. Which is why, when you see something like this…

… it becomes immediately interesting. In Game 1, Clayton Kershaw threw the Mets 45 sliders. It was the most sliders he’d thrown against a team all season. It was the most sliders he’d thrown against any team, dating back to 2011 when he’d also thrown 45 against the Braves. On a per-pitch basis, Kershaw relied on his slider moreso in Game 1 than he ever had before in his career. With a pairing as deliberate as Kershaw and Ellis, that doesn’t happen on accident.

“The playoffs are different, for sure,” Ellis said in the Tribune article. “Cliche as it sounds, each game is like its own one-game, winner-take-all playoff. Everyone keeps their routine, but everything is intensified. The flow of information is greater, because you’re targeting one team so specifically, and head-to-head matchups are bound to present themselves.”

Neither, then, does this:

This is fascinating to me, as is the idea of a starting pitcher having to face a team multiple times in a playoff series in the first place.

You’re likely familiar with the times through the order penalty. The more a hitter sees of a pitcher in a game, the larger advantage the hitter has. A part of this, certainly, has to do with the pitcher being considerably fatigued once he faces a lineup for the third time around. It also has to do, though, with the hitter seeing multiple repetitions of the pitcher’s offerings. As the game goes on, a lineup begins to get a feel for a how a pitcher works. They begin to get a feel for how each pitch looks coming out of his hand, and they are better suited to time him up.

Couldn’t that same effect, then, exist on a smaller scale in a playoff series, when a lineup sees the same starter multiple times in a four-day span? This isn’t something a pitcher has to worry about in the regular season. In the regular season, a pitcher might face a team one time and be done with them for the rest of the year. If he does face the same team multiple times, the starts are likely spread apart by weeks or months, and the lineup could look drastically different.

The Mets had just seen Clayton Kershaw. Although, the version they saw of Kershaw in Game 1 didn’t resemble the typical version of Kershaw at all, nor the version they ended up seeing in Game 4.

In Game 1, Kershaw peppered the Mets with sliders at a career-high rate. If there was ever a team that might have been timed up for Kershaw’s slider, it would be the team that had just seen 45 of them four days prior. So what does Kershaw do his next time out? He gives them a higher rate of fastballs than he’d given any team in nearly three months.

That part of the gameplan may have been influenced by Ellis:

“Probably give A.J. credit on that,” Kershaw told Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com. “He felt confident throwing the heater tonight with a lot of guys and able to get some outs behind in the count on it, which was great. … Throwing fastballs will either get you in trouble or keep your pitch count down. So fortunately for me tonight it kind of kept it down a little bit.”

It’s almost like Kershaw pitched the Mets backwards, except over the course of two starts. Maybe I’m grasping at straws with this rationale, but clearly a reason exists that Kershaw and Ellis would drastically alter their approach against the same lineup in a playoff series, and it’s not the first time the pairing have done something similar. Our own Craig Edwards pointed out to me that, last season, in the NLDS against the Cardinals, Kershaw threw his curveball at a typical rate of 11% in Game 1, then more than doubled that to a near-career-high rate of 27% in Game 2.

Clayton Kershaw doesn’t need to do anything differently to be the best pitcher in the world — he already is. All season long, he maintained a remarkably consistent approach in the way he utilized his pitch mix, until he had to face the same lineup twice in five days. While I’d kill to be a fly on the wall for Kershaw and Ellis’ pre-game meetings with Honeycutt, the fact of the matter is we’ll never quite know why they decided to attack the Mets with such wildly contrasting game plans. What we do know, is that, in order to remain on top, you’ve got to stay a step ahead of your opponents. Look no further than Clayton Kershaw for proof.

Thanks to Sean Dolinar for graphical assistance.