The Clayton Kershaw Experience

My love for Clayton Kershaw is well known (see also this and this).  This year he's become the unquestioned best pitcher in baseball.  After his performance last night, his ERA is 1.80.  Matt Harvey is having a great year, but he's 0.45 behind Kershaw in ERA.  Harvey has the second best ERA in the league, but that's a big difference.  To give you some perspective on how big of a difference that is, there are seven guys in the Majors that are closer to Harvey in ERA than Harvey is to Kershaw.  There are three starting pitchers with a WHIP less than 1.  Kershaw is at 0.85.  To be fair, the other two pitchers below 1 also have ridiculous WHIPs (Harvey at 0.89 and Scherzer at 0.9), but they're not as good as Kershaw.

Anyway, I was thinking about going to see the Dodgers in Philadelphia.  This was the last weekend of the year that I could go to a baseball game.  I'm busy next weekend (more on that in a week or so) and football starts the weekend after that.  I was waiting to see if Kershaw would pitch against the Phillies.  Once I saw that he was pitching on Saturday, I had to get there to see him one more time before the season ended.

Clayton Kershaw is a no hitter waiting to happen.  I've already written about getting excited about the possibility of a no hitter.  I say you get excited after five innings.  With Clayton Kershaw, I get excited after three innings.  If he gets through the lineup once with no problems, the no hitter watch is on.  So maybe there is a 0.6% chance of Kershaw pitching a no hitter in any given start (Sandy Koufax pitched no hitters in 1.27% of his starts, I'm giving Kershaw slightly less than half of Koufax's probability, probably just a little conservative considering Homer Bailey currently has pitched no hitters in 1.48% of his starts).  There's nothing that I want to see in person at a baseball game more than a no hitter, and I wasn't going to take the chance that I'd regret not taking a short trip to Philadelphia on a Saturday in the summer because Kershaw pitched his first no hitter.

Last night Kershaw cruised through the first four innings.  In the top of the fifth, he had an RBI double to make the score 2-0.  At that point, the Phillies fan sitting next to me said, "The only point of staying is to see if this guy can pitch a perfect game."  There are plenty of great pitchers that never pitched a perfect game so I won't predict that for Kershaw, but I believe the no hitter is coming one day.  Maybe not his next start, maybe not the start after that, but maybe the start after that (I stole that from this SNL skit).  Last night wasn't the night though.  Kershaw gave up a hit to the first batter in the fifth.  The only trouble he got in was in the eighth, but he managed to get out of a jam.  After eight scoreless by Kershaw, Juan Uribe put the game away in the top of the ninth with a three run homer and the Dodgers won 5-0.

It was definitely worth seeing Kershaw in person even though he didn't pitch his first no hitter.  It's cool to see how he just demoralizes the other team's fans when he's on.  The only bad part of being there and not watching it on TV is that you don't fully appreciate how great his pitches are.  Unless you're sitting really close, you're not going to see the downward movement on his curveball.  I could tell when he threw the curveball because it's much slower than his other pitches and the batters usually take their worst swings against his curve, but I couldn't see how it was moving from where I was sitting.  That's the only drawback.  I wish I could see him pitch at home more often.  The atmosphere at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day was amazing as he was dominating the Giants (which happens quite frequently by the way, he owns them).

My view of the best pitcher in baseball on the mound.

I've now seen Kershaw pitch in person five times in his career.  In those games, he's 3-0 (the Dodgers are 5-0) with a 1.06 ERA, 0.88 WHIP, and 33 strikeouts in 34 innings pitched.  In the three games that I've seen him pitch this year, he's driven in as many runs as he's given up (2).  The dude is awesome.

My only other trip to Citizens Bank Park was in June 2011, so I've said very little about it on the blog in the past.  This time I had better seats (up high behind home plate instead of up high down the right field line) thanks to the Phillies not being nearly as good now as they were then.  They have a lot of good Phillies stuff out in center field behind the batter's eye.  It's the Phillies version of what Citi Field should have been for the Mets.  There's also a really good beer selection, which is very spread out at various stands around the lower concourse so my brother and I were able to get beers at two different stands without waiting in line at either stand.  I got what might have been my last Summer Ale of the year on tap (I have plenty in reserve in cans and bottles for the fall).

Sam Adams Summer Ale at a baseball game.  I think that's what heaven is going to be like.

Mike Schmidt, John Kruk, Curt, Schilling, and Harry Kalas among others.

The Phillies do a good job of celebrating their history, even if they've lost more games than any other franchise in the history of baseball.

There are a couple of things that I would change if I could.  First, I would make the stadium a little bigger.  The capacity is fine (although it could probably be a little bigger too), but the field is too small (just a matter of personal taste as I prefer pitchers' parks to hitters' parks) and although the concourse in center is a nice little area, it's a little too narrow.  And it's not like they had to fit the stadium into a small area.  It's in the Philadelphia stadium district (like the Hammock Hut, Hammocks-R-Us, Put-Your-Butt-There, and Swing Low Sweet Chariot were all in Cypress Creek's Hammock district).  You have Citizens Bank Park, the Wells Fargo Center, and Lincoln Financial Field in the same area surrounded by parking lots.  There was room to make the stadium a little bigger, but it's not a big deal.  The other thing is I would have made either the left field or right field fence lower (probably left field because they use the right field fence as an out of town scoreboard).  The only part of the park where an outfielder can take away a home run is in center field.  Why limit the most exciting play in baseball to a very small part of the outfield (which also happens to be the part of the field farthest away from home plate)?  The Mets fixed that at Citi Field.  The Phillies should follow the Mets' lead there.

I might go to another game at Citi Field or Yankee Stadium before the season is over, but if not, this was my ninth and final game of the season.  Those nine games were at eight different stadiums (two at Dodger Stadium), including four stadiums that I hadn't been to before.  My season started and ended with Clayton Kershaw dominating (17 innings, 0 runs allowed as a pitcher and 1 home run, a double, and 2 RBIs as a batter in those two games).  Hopefully that's how the season will end for the Dodgers in October.