Top 10 starting pitchers in MLB right now

1. Clayton Kershaw

Injuries have slowed left-hander Clayton Kershaw the past two seasons, but the Los Angeles Dodgers ace is still the undisputed top starting pitcher in Major League Baseball. It will be his name at the top of the list until he gives us a real reason for a change. Nagging back injuries have limited Kershaw to only 48 starts over the past two years, but he has still dominated when on the mound.

It’s going on six years that Kershaw has carried a sub-2.00 ERA. Over his past 991 innings since the beginning of the 2013 season, he is 83-27 with a 1.95 ERA and 1,146 strikeouts against only 166 walks.

Kershaw was not unaffected by the dramatic rise in home runs across the league last year. He allowed 1.2 per nine, more than doubling the rate from his first nine years at the MLB level. If nothing changes, Kershaw’s run of sub-2.00 ERA seasons could be coming to an end. As it is, he still led baseball with a 2.31 ERA in 2017.

The postseason demons that have haunted Kershaw his entire career come closer to being fully exorcised every year. He was dominant in the NLCS and pitched the Dodgers to two wins and the World Series. Kershaw also won Game 1 of the Fall Classic with a dominant 11-strikeout performance. The longball came back to haunt him in Game 5, but he was far from the only pitcher noticing difficulty with the special playoff baseballs used by the league.

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With an opt-out date on the horizon at the end of the year, expect Kershaw to come out guns blazing in 2018 and set himself up to become the most expensive pitcher in baseball history.