Kershaw brilliant and abbreviated
Clayton Kershaw was typically brilliant Sunday night.
He probably feels differently about his manager.
At 114 pitches and with the tying run on second base in the eighth inning, first-year manager Dave Roberts pulled Kershaw in favor of fellow southpaw Adam Liberatore, and the lefty gave up a game-tying Curtis Granderson triple. It ended Kershaw’s winning streak at five games and was the first time in four starts he failed to pitch through the eighth.
The Dodgers rallied to win, 4-2, in the ninth against Mets closer Jeurys Familia on Adrian Gonzalez’s two-run single, but Roberts’ move marred what was otherwise another dominant evening for the three-time Cy Young award winner.
The sensational southpaw allowed just four hits, struck out 10 and walked nobody. He now has struck out 105 batters and walked five on the year, an absurd ratio. Kershaw also became the first pitcher to strike out 100 batters before he walked more than five.
On paper, it didn’t seem like a fair fight. Kershaw, facing a lineup without injured regulars Travis d’Arnaud, Lucas Duda and David Wright, barely had to break a sweat over the first five innings, facing just two over the minimum. But the Mets worked long at-bats, got his pitch count up, and scratched out runs in the sixth and eighth. Asdrubal Cabrera’s solo home run in the sixth snapped Kershaw’s scoreless streak at 20 2/3 innings pitched. He hit his fourth home run of the year into the party deck in left-center field that cut the Dodgers lead to a single run, as the steady shortstop took advantage of a rare Kershaw mistake, a 1-2 74-mph curveball that stayed up and in the middle of the plate. And they got even in the eighth, after Kevin Plawecki led off with a single. Kershaw retired Eric Campbell and pinch-hitter Michael Conforto, but was lifted before Granderson’s triple brought home the game-tying run.
The Mets had a golden opportunity to score in the first, after Granderson rocketed the first pitch he saw from Kershaw off the center field fence on a hop. But after Cabrera moved him to third with a groundout, Yoenis Cespedes and Neil Walker struck out. Walker laced a two-out double in the fourth, but Juan Lagares was caught looking at a fastball to end the abbreviated threat.