Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — It was a scene that we Dodger fans know all too well. Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher of his generation, hunched over on the mound in disbelief as yet another postseason start spirals out of control. The contrast between “Playoff Clayton” and the dominant regular season version of Kershaw is at the crux of Andy McCullough’s new book from Hachette Press, Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness. It is an engaging and often eye-opening account of the man who’s given half his life to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
There are details aplenty in this book, many of them new to me as a reader and Dodger fan. His upbringing on the outskirts of wealth growing up in the sheltered Dallas suburb of Highland Park, Texas gets put under McCullough’s microscope here, as is his sometimes fraught relationship with his divorced parents, now both deceased. Kershaw didn’t have a lot of money growing up. His dad was a musician and jingle writer who played a less and less active part of his life as he came into his teenage years. McCullough recounts incidents of the the young Kershaw slowly coming more into the orbit of the Melson family as Clayton’s relationship with his high school sweetheart Ellen blossomed throughout their teenage years. And in fact, if there is anyone who could be called the “hero” of this book it would be the eternally optimistic and compassionate Ellen, who has stood by her husband through thick and thin in the last twenty years.
In many ways, in the loving Melson family, Kershaw saw all that was lacking in his own home life, and became bound and determined to replicate that warmth and love once he became a father himself. It is this evolution of Kershaw from gruff and laser-focused athlete to loving goofball of a family man that is the sweetest part of the tale.
But there is plenty of baseball talk too in this book, which clocks in at a healthy 400 pages. And, there is plenty of “behind the scenes” stuff about the operation of the Dodgers. From Clayton’s relentless adherence to routine, the “five-day cycle”, to his sometimes strained relations with the press, to his often wary attitude toward manager Dave Roberts and the new Guggenheim brass led by Andrew Friedman that both wanted to respect Kershaw’s position in the team hierarchy, and to move toward a inevitably Kershaw-less future on the horizon.
Kershaw participated in the writing of the book by giving McCullough his perspective on various aspects of his life and career, and the writer’s thorough and clear-eyed take of his subject is sometimes a little shocking. This is not some airbrushed biography put out by a publicist to make the subject always look good. There are moments in this book which made me rethink a bit of my admiration for Kershaw, and a few that just made me sad. The excruciating detail of Kershaw’s string of playoff failures was almost too much to bear, and I was half tempted to skip over that part of the book and get to the part where Kershaw emerges from the bullpen at Globe Life Field, arms outstretched to the heavens, to finally collect the “piece of metal” that had eluded him for so long.
In the end, it is a bittersweet book, one whose final chapter has not yet been written. Every Dodger fan is just aching for the team to bring home one more title before Clayton retires, and aching even more for it to be Kershaw who leads the way.
We’re still a couple of months away from that moment when once again the greatest lefthander of the 21st century takes to the mound at Chavez Ravine. In the meantime, this book will make for a fascinating summer read for diehard and casual fans alike.
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