Clayton Kershaw had already long since sealed his place in the pantheon of baseball's greatest pitchers. But on Wednesday night, he added the most impressive line yet on a resume full of them, becoming just the 20th pitcher in MLB history to record 3,000 career strikeouts in the Los Angeles Dodgers' game against the Chicago White Sox.
It's one of the sport's most hallowed clubs, one that looks more and more exclusive with each passing season; it's feasible that Kershaw might be the last pitcher we ever see hit that number. And yet, it might be even more impressive than it seems on the surface: Because while only 20 pitchers have reached the 3,000-K plateau, that number gets much smaller if you limit it to just lefties.
In fact, Kershaw is just the fourth left-handed pitcher to achieve that milestone, alongside Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton and CC Sabathia. Yes, the list of southpaws who have been as good for as long as the Dodgers legend can be counted on one hand, with fingers left over.
Of course, how many fingers left over is a matter for debate. So let's do just that: We know Kershaw's spot in Cooperstown is secure, but what about his spot among the lefties in the 3,000-strikeout club?
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4. CC Sabathia
If this were a competition to determine who had the biggest dog in him, Sabathia would likely win in a landslide. And to be clear, a Cy Young Award, a World Series title, six All-Star appearances and a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame are absolutely nothing to sneeze at. Unfortunately, he has the highest ERA of this group, and while his ERA+ ranks just slightly higher than the man one spot ahead of him, his peak as an ace didn't quite last long enough.
Sabathia was dominant for a stretch of seven years, and then "only" pretty good outside of that. His resume falls slightly short here, with the least amount of hardware and the fewest All-Star appearances of this quartet.
3. Steve Carlton
Carlton's career is colored by just how long he played for: 24 seasons in all, across six different teams. But he was simply sensational for most of his time with the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies, averaging around five bWAR per season for 15 years from 1969 to 1983. That's an astounding combination of consistency and excellence, and while you do need to adjust his numbers for the run-depressed environment in which he played, his resume needs no qualification.
Carlton's career 114 ERA+ is one point lower than Sabathia's, but again, his peak lasted for longer and was just as high. He also carried an almost unfathomable workload on his left shoulder, and his 10 All-Star nods, ERA title (something Sabathia never achieved) and four Cy Young Awards are testament to how great his peers thought he was.
2. Clayton Kershaw
Really, you could divided this into two tiers of two. Sabathia and Carlton are a cut below the two men above them, whom I flip-flopped several times while making this list. Heck, give me another hour to think about it, and I might flip-flop them again.
In one corner, you have Kershaw, the paragon of consistency who needed one season to get his feet wet as a rookie and then never looked back. He has the ERA advantage, and certainly had fewer valleys over the course of his career: Between 2009 and 2023, he only posted an ERA above 3.00 twice, and he earned Cy Young votes in nine of 10 seasons from 2011-2020, winning three of them (plus an NL MVP).
Kershaw arrived with massive expectations as a former first-round pick, and he met them almost instantly and beyond anyone's wildest dreams. He's always been the complete pitcher, without an obvious hole in his game, and even the (slightly overstated) struggles in the postseason were conquered with a spectacular run to the 2020 World Series.
This is the definition of splitting hairs. In the end, though, I had valued the astonishing peak of the man above him just slightly more.
1. Randy Johnson
Johnson took a little while to get going; he was just slightly above league average through his age-28 season, one of the most electric arms in the sport who'd yet to figure out how to have any idea where the ball was going when he released it. Once it clicked, though, it was unlike anything we'd ever seen: In the 12 years from 1993 through 2004, the Big Unit pitched to a 2.78 ERA while averaging 213 innings per year and striking out nearly 12 batters per nine innings.
That's a peak Kershaw can't quite match, both in terms of durability and sheer dominance. He also, along with Curt Schilling, carried the Arizona Diamondbacks to the 2001 World Series title against a New York Yankees team that had more talent overall. He won four straight Cy Young Awards, bagging a total of five in all, and he's one of just five pitchers to throw multiple no-hitters in his career. This is as close as close can get, but ultimately, I went with peak and performance on the biggest stages.