Anyone fortunate enough to have watched Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw pitch on Thursday afternoon against the Texas Rangers at Surprise Stadium indeed got a surprise. All the three-time National League Cy Young award winner and 2014 NL MVP did was strike out 11 of the 21 batters he faced – including striking out the side in his first and his last inning of work.

The plan for the just-turned 29-year-old Dallas, Texas native was to go six innings, which he did and, quite frankly, he made look like a walk in the park – even if Kershaw himself wasn’t completely satisfied with his six shutout innings of two-hit ball.

“Better [than last time], definitely. Fastball command wasn’t quite as good as I would need it for the [regular] season,” Kershaw said. “I fell behind a lot of guys, just long at-bats that gets your pitch count up there and makes it hard to go seven or eight innings.”

“Kershaw was lights out!”
(Photo credit – Ron Cervenka)

As every Dodger fan knows, Kershaw is his own toughest critic, to the point of being ridiculous. I mean what major league pitcher wouldn’t absolutely kill to throw six shutout innings and allow only two hits with 11 strike outs? And even though he walked two batters, 62 of his 92 pitches were strikes. That’s nearly 70 percent of them.

“The goal is probably 15 [pitches] an inning, so 90 through six would be good to get you ready for 100-plus pitches for Opening Day,” Kershaw said. “It’s probably more than I would want to throw through six innings in a real game but definitely okay for this one, for sure.”

Wait, what? You mean I actually got a “definitely okay” out of Kershaw’s toughest critic? Whoda thunk it, although understandably so. He was absolutely brilliant in his six scoreless innings of work and undoubtedly could have gone the entire nine in what ended up being an eventual 10-2 shellacking of the Rangers.

All kidding aside, if Kershaw remains healthy – and he most certainly appears to be so right now – there is little doubt that he will make every start this coming season, which is exactly what he plans on doing.

“I want to make every start and I’ll do whatever I have to do to make the next start,” Kershaw said earlier this spring “I’ll worry about the next years when I need to. If it costs me somewhere down the road, it does. But I’m here to make every start this year. I feel that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

I wouldn’t bet against him if I were you.