Scott Stinson: Get ready for another chapter of Clayton Kershaw and The Playoffs, one of baseball's great mysteries

For a while the Kershaw story made for good sports-radio banter or barroom talk, back when people could go to bars. Was there an explanation for why his regular-season greatness didn’t translate to the playoffs? Was it a product of randomness and small sample sizes? Was it a flaw in Kershaw’s mental makeup, something that caused him to perform worse in high-pressure games? Was he, gasp, a choker?

As someone who does not like ascribing results to intangible factors when there might be a tangible explanation, I had a lot of time for the idea that Kershaw was sometimes a victim of his own success. He was Clayton Kershaw, and so managers left him on the mound to try to battle his way out of jams when mortal pitchers would have been hooked. But you can only watch a guy get shelled so many times before you grudgingly admit that a significant part of the problem has to do with Kershaw himself.

That doesn’t make it any easier to explain. If there was something that caused him to be less effective in the postseason — fatigue, more pressure, better opposition — then Kershaw would presumably be susceptible to it on a consistent basis. This would especially be the case if he came undone at big moments, if he lost his confidence when the stakes were highest: you’d expect some consistency in the choking.

Except Kershaw has built a postseason career with many excellent moments among the mediocre ones. In 2013, back in the playoffs for the first time in four years and in a Cy Young season, he gave up a single run over seven innings and struck out 12 to open the NLDS. He pitched 12 more innings without surrendering an earned run in those playoffs before getting drilled by St. Louis in Game 6 of the NLCS.

Whatever happens against Tampa Bay in the World Series, Kershaw has such a body of evidence by now that it won’t change the larger point: He’s a phenomenal talent who sometimes shows it in the playoffs, and often does not. Over 13 seasons in the big leagues, he has given up at least four earned runs about once in every seven regular-season starts. He’s done that at a rate of once in every 2.5 starts in the playoffs.

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