Wondering if Clayton Kershaw will ever get World Series he deserves

Despondant Dodgers, including pitcher Clayton Kershaw, watch as the Mets celebrate their series-clinching 3-2 win in Game 5 of the NLDS.

By Steve Dilbeck

Nov. 2, 2015 11:06 PM PT

Get a special player and you want to see it come back to him. Greatness deserves to receive greatness in return.

But in sports you can reach the pinnacle individually and still not earn the ultimate goal – world champion. The greatest player in the world can’t win a team title by himself.

Which brings us to Clayton Kershaw, not just the Dodgers’ premier starting pitcher over the past five years, but all of baseball’s.

He’s put together five consecutive remarkable seasons. In the last five years, three that earned him the National League Cy Young Award and an MVP, he has gone 88-33 with a 2.11 earned-run average, 0.93 WHIP and averaged 10 strikeouts per nine innings.

In the postseason Mets Manager Terry Collins called Kershaw “that monster,” and he meant it only as the utmost compliment. He is the one guy other teams do not want to face.

Yet for all the individual awards, Kershaw has never won or even been to the World Series. He will be 28 to start next season, and though still very much in his prime, you have to wonder if the Dodgers are not going to be able to cash in on baseball’s greatest prize during the career of their greatest pitcher since Sandy Koufax.

Koufax is the legendary fellow Dodgers left-hander Kershaw is most often compared against. But at age 27, Koufax had twice been a World Series champion. He would go on to two further World Series, winning it once more before retiring at age 30.

Despite multiple owners, general managers and managers, the Dodgers have been unable to put enough of a team around Kershaw to advance to the World Series. Kershaw is keenly aware some of that burden falls to him. He is 2-6 with a 4.59 ERA in 13 postseason games; Koufax was 4-3 with a 0.95 ERA in eight games (all in the World Series).

There is always urgency for the Dodgers to advance to the World Series, despite 27 consecutive years of futility. But the Dodgers have added incentive to push to get there now. They have one of the greatest pitchers baseball has seen in years, but whose window to a championship is at least beginning to close.

Kershaw deserves to pitch on baseball’s grandest stage, and baseball deserves to see it.