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The Dodgers Will Not Waste Clayton Kershaw's Genius

You don't have to be a Dodgers fan to want to see baseball's best pitcher on baseball's biggest stage. The good news is that the Dodgers are working on it.
Photo by Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

Last Thursday, we all officially missed out on the chance to watch the best pitcher on the damn planet pitch in the highest leverage of games, the World Series. This season has seen the rise of some great pitchers, from the comparatively out-of-nowhere upstarts like Jake Arrieta, Dallas Keuchel, and every young pitcher with the word "Mets" on the front of his jersey to the usual supernova dazzlement from Zack Greinke and Chris Sale and Max Scherzer. And yet, at the risk of excessive hot-takery, none of them are Kershaw's equal. He is the greatest pitcher in baseball, by a lot, and somehow we've only seen him pitch as far into the post-season as the stupid NLCS.

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This isn't a screed written by a despondent or hungover Dodgers fan. This is a simple request by a writer with no skin in this game. It is an offering to the baseball gods, or whatever cruel forces keep making the Cardinals good, to please put the best pitcher in baseball into the best series in baseball before too much time passes and he ceases to be what he now is. We need this. We all need this.

Read More: Watching Clayton Kershaw, Who Makes It All Work

The Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 with Pedro Martinez as their number two starter. When you think about it, that's insane. It worked out fine for them, but think about what we missed. We missed Peak Pedro pitching in the Series. Imagine if the people running the 1999 and 2000 Red Sox hadn't had the team building skills of a hungry infant with a bag of Cheerios. To see Pedro pitch is always a delight, but we never got to see apex Pedro—not the Jheri curled control artist of '04, but the guy who broke ERA+ and was pitching like it was the late '60s in the midst of the steroid era—take the mound for Game 1 of the Fall Classic. We missed it, and the Dodgers are getting close to squandering a similar if not exactly analogous opportunity with Kershaw.

But it's not quite as open-and-shut as that, because the Dodgers are positioned to get better as soon as next season, and could be better off in the near future than we might think. First off, they have a very smart front office that isn't likely to do things like bringing in Carl Crawford and his Laughable Contract (worst punk band ever) or signing Andre Ethier through Donald Trump's third term. Andrew Friedman is in charge, now, and is capable of making the tough choices required to help the team level up. It's true the Dodgers' blooming orchard of money trees allows it to avoid being financially burdened by long term deals like those, but they are burdened by the on-field production attached to those deals—it hurts the Dodgers more to play Carl Crawford than to pay him.

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So it's notable that the new front office will have a chance to remake the roster this offseason due to the imminent departures of Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Brett Anderson, Howie Kendrick, J.P. Howell, and Bronson Arroyo. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million coming off the books. You can sign some serious talent for that kind of money.

He's good as hell you guys. — Photo by Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports

Or not, if that's the way the Dodgers want to play it. The team won't have to replace each of those players with an equally expensive veteran because of the youth they have on hand. Shortstop will be taken over by Corey Seager. Joc Pederson will again be the regular center fielder. Julio Urias may be able to contribute at the major league level soon. Jose Peraza should be ready to take over at second base. He and Seager will be 22 next season. Pederson will be 24. Urias will be 19, so don't expect him to start the season in LA. That's a lot of youth, and high-ceiling youth at that.

That's not to say the Dodgers are going to let their vets walk and replace them with a bunch of recent high school graduates—they're still the Dodgers, and could still buy everyone if they wanted. But they could turn the team over to the kids, or trade some of those young guys for major league players in their prime. There are no bad options, here.

For all the holes on the Dodgers roster, they still finished eight games up on the second-place Giants, and so far ahead of Arizona, San Diego, and Colorado they may as well not have existed. By baseruns—a FanGraphs record generator that seeks to take context and luck out of team performance—the Dodgers were a 95-win team with the third best run differential in baseball. They're good, in other words. Then remember those money trees, and then add to it that the Dodgers finally have the executive smarts to go spend that money wisely. The coming youth movement, too, will both improve the team and let the front office focus money elsewhere, most notably by either re-signing or replacing probable NL Cy Young winner Zack Greinke. And also, if you're just joining us, they have Clayton Kershaw, the best starting pitcher on the planet. This is what the experts call a good start.

So, even though the Dodgers are a team in transition at the moment—and one with a number of weaknesses that were exposed in their NLDS loss to the Mets—there's a good chance they won't blow Clayton Kershaw's peak seasons. It would still be fun to watch five-year-from-now Kershaw painting corners with a jheri-curl, but with a bit of luck the Dodgers are well positioned to put the game's greatest pitcher on the game's greatest stage while he's still at his best. Dodgers fans might want this more than anyone else, but that's good news for everyone that likes watching baseball.