In case you weren’t aware already, the best pitcher in Major League Baseball, Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is from Dallas. The left-handed ace was drafted out of Highland Park High School, where he was a classmate of Matthew Stafford of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. He’s already got two Cy Young Awards in his trophy case.
Well, last night he did something truly magnificent, pitching a no-hitter with 15 strikeouts and zero walks. If it weren’t for an error for Dodgers shortstop Hanley Ramirez, it’s likely that no opposing hitters at all would have reached base. It should have been a perfect game (something that’s only been done 23 times.)
There’s a metric called Game Score that was devised to make for a simple gauge of a pitcher’s performance. (Here’s the details of how it’s calculated, if you care.) The maximum possible score is 114. The highest score ever achieved was by another pitcher who hailed from North Texas, Kerry Wood of the Chicago Cubs, who in 1998 struck out 20 Houston Astros in his own near-miss perfect game (a one-questionable-hitter).
Kershaw’s Game Score from last night against the Colorado Rockies was 102. That’s the second-best in history. So, he’s pretty awesome, in case you didn’t know.
