Fame 43: Clayton Kershaw
OK, it has been 77 days since we had our last entry in the Fame 50 series—where I count down the 50 most famous baseball players of the last 50 years. During that time, I’ve done 60 JoeBlogs posts, including one season preview post for each big-league club, and I’ve been on the road for the WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL book tour and I’ve done like 17,000 things with WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL and there has been all sorts of family stuff (good stuff, for the most part, or at least as good as stuff gets with two daughters in college) and I took on a new project I can’t wait to tell you about and, hey, the PosCast is back… so it’s not like I haven’t been busy.
Still, I feel bad for letting the Fame Series fall off for a bit. I really like this series a lot. So let’s pick it up again today with No. 43.
First, yeah, there are a few announcements:
I will be with my pal Tommy Tomlinson at Park Road Books in Charlotte tonight, Thursday, May 23, at 7 p.m., to discuss why his Atlanta Braves are not quite firing and that time he watched me win a poker tournament at a Mississippi casino. We might also get to his fantastic new book, Dogland, assuming my poker story doesn’t go long.
I will be in Cooperstown on Friday and Saturday to celebrate the unveiling of the new exhibit, The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball, and to watch a modern East-West All-Star Classic. It should be an amazing weekend.
If you’re looking for a Father’s Day gift—and I know you are, I mean, you’re not the kind to shop early for such things—I have two suggestions. One, if you order WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL from the good folks at Porchlight Books by June 1—25% off the sticker price!—you’ll get a signed bookplate to put in there and it will arrive by Father’s Day. So that’s kind of cool.
Two, if you preorder WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL from the equally good folks at Quail Ridge Books by Father’s Day, well, you won’t actually get the book until after publication day on Sept. 17 (we’re working on a special certificate you can give Dad for Father’s Day). But the book will be signed and I’ll inscribe it any way you like. It looks like you’re going to have to order the book by Father’s Day to get the inscription.
Our London get-together leading into the London Series is set! On June 7—that’s the Friday before the series begins—I’ll sign some books at the Waterstones London in Trafalgar Square at 5 p.m. Then, we’ll head to the Theodore Bullfrog at 6 for merriment and probably the first extended bit of baseball talk they’ve ever had at the Theodore Bullfrog. By the way, the UK edition of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL comes out next Tuesday, May 28, and it has a new UK introduction (featuring my tribute to
!) along with a special UK five—the five greatest baseball moments in UK history!*
*Not to give too much away, but I just did the Bat Flips and Nerds podcast, which was great fun, and we discussed whether Bobby Thomson is actually the most underappreciated athlete ever to come out of the UK.
No. 43: Clayton Kershaw
Where you voted him: 35th overall.
The 300-win pitcher has died many deaths through the years. After Warren Spahn and Early Wynn won 300 in the early 1960s, there was a sense that the game had changed and 300 would never happen again.
That proved super-premature. From 1902 to 1981, there had been six pitchers win their 300th game.
Then from 1982 to 1990, SIX MORE won 300.* What a wild time. But after Nolan Ryan got to 300 and Bert Blyleven fell short, there was again this overriding feeling that the game had changed too much and nobody would win 300 again.
*The six pitchers who won 300: Gaylord Perry (1982), Steve Carlton (1983), Tom Seaver (1985), Phil Niekro (1985), Don Sutton (1986) and Nolan Ryan (1990). And even this doesn’t fully describe just how wild this time was, when you consider that Tommy John won 289 (1989), Bert Blyleven won 287 (1992), Fergie Jenkins won 284 (1984) and Jim Kaat won 283 (1983).
Again: This was premature. There was another 300-win bonanza in the first decade of the century—from 2003 to 2009, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson all won their 300th games.
In my memory, nobody really talked too much about the possibility that Big Unit would be the last to ever win 300 games.
In part, that’s because a 20-year-old Clayton Kershaw came on the scene right at the end of that last run.