Clayton Kershaw's performance on Monday was one for the ages. We can do away with all this talk about "potential". he is entering his prime, and has one scary ceiling. Barring injury, he will go up with in the pantheon with guys like Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser, if not surpassing them. We can be happy that Stan Kasten, Magic Johnson and crew are actually trying to put a team around him that is worthy.
Do not be fooled though. It is still about the pitching. Matt Kemp can have a crazy year a la 2011. Adrian Gonzales, Hanley Ramirez and Carl Crawford can have years like they did in the hopefully not too distant past. You can figure once and hopefully future mainstay Andre Ethier, with all those other guys around him can maintain his decent power and high OBP, but it is still about the pitching. How Kershaw, Zack Grienke, Josh Beckett, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Chad Billingsley and whoever fills the fifth spot hold up in consistency and health over the season will determine whether the Dodgers are a playoff team or better, or watching the World Series at home like everyone else in L.A. has been doing since 1988.
The fact that Kershaw had to fuel the Opening Day rally with his bat says all you need. Yes- the bats will certainly have their moments, even if all of our wishes do ot come true, but Kershaw will have to be the horse of the rotation, the guy who gives the other teams an uneasy pause when they know they will face him in an upcoming series. Grienke should be a fine #2, despite the fact he doesn't seem to be profusely bleeding blue (He said he took the Dodger job for the money, and while that is the truth for more ballplayers than we would care to admit, he could at least throw a half-assed bone toward the Great Blue Legacy). I figure if he goes out there 32 times and keeps his ERA in the low 3's, he can say what he wants.
It is the middle guys that have you wondering. I'm not worried about Ryu's so-so performance on Tuesday- he had lots of ground balls and kept the Dodgers in the game, and was not helped by Justin Seller's errors. You have to be encouraged by Josh Beckett- lousy final spring start aside, he looked sharp in Arizona, and was a pleasant surprise last year down the stretch. You have to like a guy like Beckett pitching half his games in Dodger Stadium, still a pitcher's park like no other. These four guys should also take some of the heat off Billingsley, who actually started to resemble his good self last season before injury. If these guys get hurt, Aaron Harang and Chris Capuano are more-than capable fill-ins.
All this sounds great on April 3, but what about September? Kershaw began to break down last year, Grienke stayed pretty consistent, but Ryu is still untested, Beckett is a wild-card, and we're not sure we want Capuano or Harang as our lean-to guys in the dog days. You know the Giants will be there like they always will, and the Diamondbacks are always a pain in the neck, and while the prognosticators doubt the Rockies and Padres, they have snuck up on us before, so who knows? They need to be consistent and durable. The organization has shown it is not afraid to make a trade to make things happen, but do we want it to come to that?
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