‘This is a startup’: Meet the man in charge of policing the new world of college sports
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Dan Murphy
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Dan Murphy
ESPN Staff Writer
- Covers the Big Ten
- Joined ESPN.com in 2014
- Graduate of the University of Notre Dame
Last Monday morning, Bryan Seeley began his first official day as Employee No. 1 at the College Sports Commission by doing some online shopping.
The revenue share era of college sports has arrived. Paychecks from schools will start to land in players’ bank accounts this week. The endorsement deals that the CSC will need to vet are already pouring in. As he attempts to run an organization responsible for bringing order to a chaotic industry, Seeley has a long to-do list: hire a staff, establish investigative processes, determine fair punishment standards and build relationships across hundreds of schools and dozens of sports.
Seeley finished the previous week by returning his office equipment to Major League Baseball after a decade of rebuilding and overseeing their league investigations department, which handled high-profile issues such as gambling, sexual misconduct and sign-stealing scandals on his watch. At his new job he’s back to square one, which means his top priority last Monday was scrolling through Wirecutter, a product recommendation website, for advice on buying a new laptop.
“This is a startup,” Seeley told ESPN during an interview at the end of his first day. “It’s not like I’m walking into nothing, but in many ways this is a true start-up.”
The former federal prosecutor with degrees from Princeton and Harvard estimated it would take two to three years to work through the kinks of this new system before anyone could fairly judge if the CSC was successfully fulfilling its mission. Despite the pressure to put down rails to steer a train that is already moving at full steam, Seeley is approaching the job with patience.
His job description is simple but far from easy. Seeley and the CSC must enforce a new set of rules that dictate how players can be paid. The rules are now backed by a negotiated class action settlement, which in theory should help Seeley avoid some of the legal pitfalls that made life difficult for his predecessors at the NCAA. But he and his new bosses acknowledge their high-stakes start-up works only if Seeley can earn and keep the cooperation of the coaches, administrators and players he has been asked to police.
To earn the trust of the largely skeptical group of schools he has inherited, Seeley says he will need to quickly create a justice system that is transparent and easy to understand. He plans to start by listening to their concerns rather than by flexing the substantial power of his new post. “If anybody thinks he’s going to come in guns blazing, that’s just not his style,” said Jean Afterman, a New York Yankees executive who credits Seeley with restoring “integrity” to MLB’s investigation team. “He’s going to listen to everybody.”
And that, more than his impressive résumé, is why the leaders of college sports say they believe a soft-spoken outsider who doesn’t like the limelight can be the sheriff they need to fix their broken industry.
“I don’t think what’s been going on the last few years in college sports has been good for college sports, has been good for student athletes, has been good for schools, and I think the House settlement is a vehicle to get to a better place,” Seeley said. “And I view that as part of my mission to help get us to that better place.”
In a private room at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio Riverwalk in April, Seeley took his seat for a 7 a.m. Saturday interview at a rectangular table across from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.
The three power brokers were in Texas to watch their leagues’ top basketball teams compete that evening in the NCAA men’s Final Four, but first they wanted to size up the candidate who might soon join them among the most influential leaders in their business. Seeley, who says he is awake most mornings by 5:30, was unfazed by the early interview. He joked he had only one coffee. “From the moment that he walked into the room, he gained instant control,” Phillips said. “It’s very difficult to do, with our group in particular.”
In his previous life as a federal prosecutor, Seeley shared tables with murderers, corrupt government officials and CEOs. He faced off with some of the biggest stars in professional sports during his time at MLB. He learned to control those rooms with a common sense demeanor and meticulous preparation.
“This is not the job for a thin-skinned person,” Seeley said. “Let me say that. I’ve had jobs throughout my career that required a lot of thick skin.” Before that morning, Seeley had already made a distinct impression in one-on-one Zoom interviews with all four power conference commissioners. Sankey says he was struck by the detailed questions Seeley had about the House Settlement agreement, the legal document that will form the foundation of the CSC’s authority. “A few of them were so specific — paragraph such-and-such and line whatever: ‘What’s your view of this?'” Sankey said. “He was the only individual who had that kind of clear preparation.”
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, the only power conference leader absent from the interview in San Antonio, said he knew what to expect from Seeley. They had worked together during Pettiti’s nearly six years as MLB’s chief operating officer from 2015 to 2020. Pettiti had a front-row seat as Seeley rebuilt baseball’s investigation process and installed a staff to implement it. He saw many parallels to the role as CSC’s first CEO.
“When I found out he was interested in the position, I knew he brought a very rare combination of skills,” Petitti said. “It seemed like the perfect fit. I know the work ethic and how he deals with people. I’ve seen him do it.” The commissioners all acknowledge that Seeley will need help. They’ve made emphatic public promises that coaches and school officials are eager to abide by new regulations.
Those promises, of course, are easy to make right up until the moment your school is on the wrong end of an investigation. Though schools are expected to soon sign association documents that could prevent them from challenging CSC rulings through the court system, Seeley is still stepping into an industry that has a century-old history of clamoring for stronger rules, but fighting back whenever the NCAA attempted to enforce them. “We’re going into this new age of college athletics, and we need to change behavior,” Yormark said. “We need to change mindset and approach. Bryan faces a huge role in doing that.” Seeley said any culture changes in college sports will take time and a track record that shows there are real consequences for breaking the rules in the CSC’s era of enforcement.
“This is historical, transformational change,” Sankey said. “It doesn’t mean everyone is ready or it’s easy. The middle of change is always messy. He’s stepping into that with all of us and it’s not just his responsibility.
“He’s not bearing this burden alone. This burden of making a new system work, it’s on commissioners, presidents and chancellors and on athletic directors and coaches.”
Seeley has built his career by convincing people to talk to him.
As deputy general counsel for the MLBPA players’ union, Jeff Perconte was a frequent adversary during Seeley’s time working in baseball. When Perconte was preparing players for an interview while they were under investigation, he would tell them Seeley wasn’t going to scream at them, bully them or try to lie to them. He never used his powerful position to become a crusader.
“It would’ve been easy for him to go into cases with a black-and-white view: ‘This is a bad guy. We’re going to hammer him.'” Perconte said. “Bryan was consistently able to see the gray, which I think is one of the biggest compliments I can give to a lawyer who is in that kind of a position of power.”
Perconte says Seeley built trust by skipping the table-pounding theatrics and posturing that can often surround labor disputes. Afterman, the Yankees’ assistant general manager, said Seeley was always more interested in understanding a problem than rushing to its solution.
He developed his skill for meticulous preparation while prosecuting white-collar crime as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., according to Michael Atkinson, who worked with Seeley on several cases including a crowning achievement known as “Operation Five Aces.”
Together, they unwound a complicated web of shell companies to uncover more than $30 million in bribes that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials accepted from contractors in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as “the largest domestic bribery and bid-rigging scheme in the history of federal contracting cases.” Seeley helped convince a key witness to wear a wire during the investigation and eventually obtained guilty pleas that landed several CEOs in prison.
Atkinson said he and Seeley often invited the attorneys for their targets into the office for a discussion before pressing charges in a good faith effort to make sure they understood both sides of the story. That transparency, he said, went a long way in getting high-powered, first-time offenders to cooperate.
Seeley first cut his teeth as a prosecutor in Washington D.C.’s Superior Court, where he was assigned to cover one of the city’s most violent and chaotic districts, according to former colleague Chris Kavanaugh. The Ivy Leaguer should have been out of his element, but Kavanaugh says Seeley was able to gather information and convince witnesses to testify in his cases by spending time in the neighborhood and getting to know the people who lived there.
“It takes a special person to be able to connect with everybody from the person on the street at 3 a.m. all the way to the commissioner of a professional sports league,” Kavanuagh said. “That doesn’t come quickly or easily. But what allows him to do that? He leads with empathy.”
Seeley said he views empathy as an important tool in his new role, and agreed that his early days in D.C. made that skill a cornerstone of how he approaches his work.
“I’m not a raconteur or a salesperson. I can’t slip into that skin,” he said. “But I think I can communicate authentically and honestly with people.”
Seeley’s job will also require him to navigate some substantial gray areas within the new limits on player payments.
The CSC now oversees the two main channels schools can now use to steer money to their athletes: direct revenue share payments with a clear, hard cap starting at $20.5 million, and additional name, image and likeness (NIL) deals with no true limit and an untested set of guidelines that are supposed to stop endorsements from becoming a thinly-veiled way for a team to pad its payroll.
While those additional deals will need to be funded by third parties, many of the richest schools have already established internal marketing agencies that are designed to facilitate opportunities for their players. Finding creative ways to direct “above-the-cap” third-party payments to players is the new frontier of the recruiting arms race.
The creation of the CSC alleviates a giant headache for the NCAA, which has been heavily criticized for its enforcement impotence for generations. NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN that “there will be work ahead to define each organization’s role when it comes to enforcement,” and the NCAA plans to focus on all members, regardless if they opt into the settlement, including on issues such as eligibility, sports betting and recruiting calendars.
Seeley said he has had daily phone calls in the past few weeks with the team at Deloitte that has been hired to assess those third-party NIL deals to make sure they are for a “valid business purpose” through a program called NIL Go. He plans to make his first two new hires in the coming weeks but says the ultimate size of CSC’s staff will depend on how many deals are flowing through the NIL Go system and how many allegations of wrongdoing his office receives.
He said his team will need to adapt as the new iterations of cat-and-mouse spending games become more clear, but he added they won’t be attempting to reinterpret or stretch beyond the specific rules agreed to in the House settlement.
“We’re going to look at the spirit of things in terms of interpreting what the rules are, but ultimately the settlement language is the starting place for all those interpretations,” Seeley said. “And it’s often the ending place.”
If the CSC is unable to stop third-party NIL from being used as a de facto salary addition, they risk losing the faith of the teams and coaches they police. But if they’re overly restrictive or punitive, they might invite legal challenges that could leave the organization impotent.
In the two weeks between when Seeley was announced as the CSC’s new CEO and his first official day on the job, a state lawmaker in Michigan proposed a bill that would make it illegal to punish players if they decided not to share the details of their third-party NIL deals with CSC. Elsewhere, the University of Wisconsin sued the University of Miami in a case that could set important precedent for how well the new system can root out claims of tampering.
Seeley says he thinks a new federal law that helps avoid some of these legal pitfalls is “imperative,” which is in lockstep with NCAA and other college sports leaders who have been asking Congress to help for the past several years. Seeley said he didn’t want to speculate on how well CSC might fare without any help from a new federal law.
Seeley said he would not have taken on the new role if he thought it was destined for failure. But as he wrapped up his first full day as one of the most consequential figures in shaping the future of college sports, he asked that fans and participants approach the work ahead with the same virtue he plans to employ: patience. Success, he said, will take time.
“My message to people is be skeptical, but don’t be cynical,” Seeley siad. “There’s a real difference there. Let’s root for this to work.”
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Bradford Doolittle
The 3,000-strikeout club has grown by one, with Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers whiffing the Chicago White Sox‘s Vinny Capra in the sixth inning Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, becoming the 20th pitcher in baseball history to reach that milestone.
The 3K pitching club doesn’t generate as much hullabaloo as its hitting counterpart, but it is more exclusive: Thirty-three players have reached 3,000 hits.
When you look at the list of pitchers with 3,000 strikeouts, and Kershaw’s place on it, a few things jump out.
• None of them pitched at Ebbets Field, at least not in a regular-season game. I frame it like that to illustrate that this level of whiffery is a fairly recent phenomenon. The Dodgers bolted Brooklyn after the 1957 season, and at that point, Walter Johnson was the only member of the 3,000-strikeout club. A career Washington Senator, he never pitched against the Dodgers. Every other 3K member made his big league debut in 1959 or later. Half of them debuted in 1984 or later. Three of them (Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander) are active.
• For now, Kershaw has thrown the fewest career innings of any 3K member, though he’s likely to eventually end up with more frames than Pedro Martinez.
• Kershaw has the highest winning percentage of the 20 (.697) and the best ERA+ (155), though his edges over Martinez (.685 and 154) are razor thin.
• Kershaw tops the list in average game score (61.9) and is tied for second (with Bob Gibson) for quality start percentage (68%), behind only Tom Seaver (70%).
• Kershaw lags behind in bWAR, at least among this group of current, future and should-be Hall of Famers with 77.1, ranking 16th.
So where does Kershaw really rank in the 3K club? I’m glad you asked.
First, what should be obvious from the above bullet points is that the response to the question will vary according to how you choose to answer it. The ranking below reflects not only how I chose to answer the question but how I’d like to see starting pitchers rated in general — even today, in the wildly different context from the days of Walter Johnson.
1. Roger Clemens
FWP: 568.8 | Strikeouts: 4,672 (3rd in MLB history)
Game score W-L: 477-230 (.675)
The top three pitchers on the list, including Rocket, match the modern-era top three for all pitchers, not just the 3K guys. (The string is broken by fourth-place Christy Mathewson.) Before running the numbers, I figured Walter Johnson, with his modern-era record of 417 career wins (the old-fashioned variety), would top the list. But Clemens actually started more games (relief appearances don’t factor in) and had a better game score win percentage.
2. Randy Johnson
FWP: 532.9 | Strikeouts: 4,875 (2nd)
Game score W-L: 421-182 (.698)
Since we’re lopping off pre-1901 performances, the method does Cy Young dirty. Only two pitchers — Young (511 wins) and Walter Johnson got to 400 career wins by the traditional method. By the game score method, the club grows to nine, including a bunch of players many of us actually got to see play. The Big Unit is one of the new 400-game winners, and of the nine, his game score winning percentage is the highest. The only thing keeping Johnson from No. 1 on this list is that he logged 104 fewer career starts than Clemens.
3. Walter Johnson
FWP: 494.7 | Strikeouts: 3,509 (9th)
Game score W-L: 437-229 (.656)
Don’t weep for the Big Train — even this revamping of his century-old performance record and the fixation on strikeouts can’t dim his greatness. That fact we mentioned in the introduction — that every 3K member except Walter Johnson debuted in 1959 or later — tells you a lot about just how much he was a man out of his time. Johnson retired after the 1927 season and surpassed 3,000 strikeouts by whiffing Cleveland’s Stan Coveleski on July 22, 1923. It was nearly 51 years before Gibson became 3K member No. 2 on July 17, 1974.
4. Greg Maddux
FWP: 443.3 | Strikeouts: 3,371 (12th)
Game score W-L: 453-287 (.612)
There is a stark contrast between pitcher No. 4 and pitcher No. 5 on this ranking. The wild thing about Maddux ranking above Nolan Ryan in a group selected for strikeouts is that no one thinks of Maddux as a strikeout pitcher. He never led a league in whiffs and topped 200 just once (204 in 1998). He was just an amazingly good pitcher for a really long time.
5. Nolan Ryan
FWP: 443.1 | Strikeouts: 5,714 (1st)
Game score W-L: 467-306 (.604)
Ryan is without a doubt the greatest strikeout pitcher who ever lived, and it’s really hard to imagine someone surpassing him. This is a guy who struck out his first six batters in 1966, when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, and his last 46 in 1993, when Bill Clinton was there. Ryan was often criticized during his heyday for his win-loss record, but the game score method clears that right up. Ryan’s revised winning percentage (.604) is markedly higher than his actual percentage (.526).
6. Max Scherzer
FWP: 385.7 | Strikeouts: 3,419 (11th)
Game score W-L: 315-145 (.685)
Here’s another club Mad Max is in: .680 or better game score winning percentage, minimum 100 career starts. He’s one of just eight members, along with Kershaw. The list is topped by Smoky Joe Wood, who dominated the AL during the 1910s before hurting his arm and converting into a full-time outfielder. The full list: Wood, Martinez, Randy Johnson, Lefty Grove, Mathewson, Kershaw, Stephen Strasburg and Scherzer.
7. Justin Verlander
FWP: 385.0 | Strikeouts: 3,471 (10th)
Game score W-L: 349-190 (.647)
Like Scherzer, Verlander is fresh off the injured list. Thus, the two active leaders in our version of FWP have resumed their tight battle for permanent supremacy. Both also resume their quests to become the 10th and 11th pitchers to reach 3,500 strikeouts. Verlander, who hasn’t earned a traditional win in 13 starts, is 4-9 this season by the game score method.
8. Pedro Martinez
FWP: 383.5 | Strikeouts: 3,154 (15th)
Game score W-L: 292-117 (.714)
By so many measures, Martinez is one of the greatest of all time, even if his career volume didn’t reach the same levels as those of the others on the list. His 409 career starts are easily the fewest of the 3K club. But he has the highest game score winning percentage and, likewise, the highest score for FWP per start (.938).
9. Steve Carlton
FWP: 379.8 | Strikeouts: 4,136 (4th)
Game score W-L: 420-289 (.592)
When you think of Lefty, you think of his 1972 season, when he went 27-10 (traditional method) for a Phillies team that went 59-97. What does the game score method think of that season? It hates it. Kidding! No, Carlton, as you’d expect, dominated, going 32-9. So think of it like this: There were 32 times in 1972 that Carlton outpitched his starting counterpart despite the lethargic offense behind him.
10. Tom Seaver
FWP: 371.3 | Strikeouts: 3,640 (6th)
Game score W-L: 391-256 (.604)
Perhaps no other pitcher of his time demonstrated a more lethal combination of dominance and consistency than Seaver. The consistency is his historical differentiator. As mentioned, his career quality start percentage (70%) is tops among this group. Among all pitchers with at least 100 career starts, he ranks fifth. Dead ball era pitchers get a leg up in this stat, so the leader is the fairly anonymous Jeff Tesreau (72%), a standout for John McGraw’s New York Giants during the 1910s. The others ahead of Seaver are a fascinating bunch. One is Babe Ruth, and another is Ernie Shore, who in 1917 relieved Ruth when The Babe was ejected after walking a batter to start a game. Shore replaced him, picked off the batter who walked, then went on to retire all 26 batters he faced. The other ahead of Seaver: Jacob deGrom.
11. Clayton Kershaw
FWP: 370.9 | Strikeouts: 3,000 (20th)
Game score W-L: 301-137 (.687)
And here’s the guest of honor, our reason for doing this ranking exercise. As you can see, Kershaw joined the 300-game-score win club in his last start before Wednesday’s milestone game, becoming the 38th member. In so many measures of dominance, consistency and efficiency, Kershaw ranks as one of the very best pitchers of all time. When you think that he, Verlander and Scherzer are all in the waning years of Hall of Fame careers, you can’t help but wonder who, if anyone, is going to join some of the elite starting pitching statistical clubs in the future.
12. Don Sutton
FWP: 370.6 | Strikeouts: 3,574 (7th)
Game score W-L: 437-319 (.578)
For a post-dead ball pitcher, Sutton was a model of durability. He ranks third in career starts (756) and seventh in innings (5,283⅓). During the first 15 seasons of his career, Sutton started 31 or more games 14 times and threw at least 207 innings for the Dodgers in every season.
13. Ferguson Jenkins
FWP: 353.8 | Strikeouts: 3,192 (14th)
Game score W-L: 363-231 (.611)
Jenkins is in the Hall of Fame, so we can’t exactly say he was overlooked. Still, it does feel like he’s a bit underrated on the historical scale. His FWP score ranks 17th among all pitchers, and the game score method gives him a significant win-loss boost. That .611 percentage you see here is a good bit higher than his actual .557 career winning percentage. He just didn’t play for very many good teams and, in fact, never appeared in the postseason. He’s not the only Hall of Famer associated with the Chicago Cubs who suffered that fate.
14. Gaylord Perry
FWP: 335.6 | Strikeouts: 3,534 (8th)
Game score W-L: 398-292 (.577)
Perry, famous for doing, uh, whatever it takes to win a game, famously hung around past his expiration date to get to 300 wins, and he ended up with 314. Poor Perry: If my game score method had been in effect, he’d have quit two wins shy of 400. Would someone have given him a shot at getting there in 1984, when he was 45? One of history’s great what-if questions.
15. Phil Niekro
FWP: 332.5 | Strikeouts: 3,342 (13th)
Game score W-L: 408-308 (.570)
Knucksie won 318 games, and lost 274, the type of career exemplified by his 1979 season, when he went 21-20. We aren’t likely to see anyone again pair a 20-win season with a 20-loss season. His .537 traditional winning percentage improves with the game score method, but he’s still the low man in the 3K club in that column. Niekro joins Ryan and Sutton on the list of those with 300 game score losses. Sutton, at 319, is the leader. The others: Tommy John, Tom Glavine and Jamie Moyer. Of course, they were all safely over the 300-game-score win threshold as well.
16. CC Sabathia
FWP: 323.2 | Strikeouts: 3,093 (18th)
Game score W-L: 339-221 (.605)
Sabathia will be inducted into the Hall of Fame next month, and his place in this group only underscores how deserving he is of that honor. Sabathia debuted in 2001, and to reach the 250 traditional-win level (he won 251) in this era is an amazing feat. The only pitcher in that club who debuted later is Verlander, stuck at 262 wins after debuting in 2005. Right now, it’s hard to imagine who, if anyone, will be next. Of course, if we just went with game score wins, that would be different.
17. Bob Gibson
FWP: 321.0 | Strikeouts: 3,117 (16th)
Game score W-L: 305-177 (.633)
Gibson, incidentally, also won 251 games — and also gets enough boost from the game score method to climb over 300. His revised percentage is better than his traditional mark of .591. His average game score ranks third in this group, a reflection of his steady dominance but also of the era in which he pitched. Gibson is tied for eighth in quality start percentage among all pitchers. In 1968, when Gibson owned the baseball world with a 1.12 ERA, he went 22-9 by the traditional method. The game score method: 26-8. You’d think it would be even better, but it was, after all, the Year of the Pitcher.
18. Bert Blyleven
FWP: 320.2 | Strikeouts: 3,701 (5th)
Game score W-L: 391-294 (.571)
It took a prolonged campaign by statheads to raise awareness about Blyleven’s greatness and aid his eventual Cooperstown induction. He finished with 287 traditional wins, short of the historical benchmark. Here he would fall short of the 400-win benchmark, but, nevertheless, he is tied with John and Seaver for 11th on the game score wins list. His actual winning percentage was .534.
19. Curt Schilling
FWP: 307.1 | Strikeouts: 3,116 (17th)
Game score W-L: 281-155 (.644)
There are 31 pitchers who have broken the 300 FWP level, and it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone in that group could be left out of Cooperstown. You can sort this out for yourself in terms of baseball and not baseball reasons for this, but the group not there is Clemens, Schilling, John and Andy Pettitte, plus the greats (Kershaw, Verlander, Scherzer) who are still active.
20. John Smoltz
FWP: 273.8 | Strikeouts: 3,084 (19th)
Game score W-L: 290-191 (.603)
Smoltz won 213 games the traditional way, and he falls just short of 300 by the revised method. But all of this is about starting pitching, and with Smoltz, that overlooks a lot. After missing the 2000 season because of injury, he returned as a reliever, and for four seasons he was one of the best, logging 154 saves during that time. He’s the only member of the 200-win, 100-save club.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Clayton Kershaw‘s 3,000th career strikeout was preceded by a scary, dispiriting moment, when Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy injured his left knee and had to be helped off the field Wednesday night.
Muncy is set to undergo an MRI on Thursday, but Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said initial tests have them feeling “optimistic” and that the “hope” is Muncy only sustained a sprain.
With one out in the sixth inning, Muncy jumped to catch a throw from Dodgers catcher Will Smith, then tagged out Chicago White Sox center fielder Michael A. Taylor on an attempted steal and immediately clutched his left knee, prompting a visit from Roberts and head trainer Thomas Albert.
Muncy wrapped his left arm around Albert and walked toward the third-base dugout, replaced by Enrique Hernandez. His injury, caused by Taylor’s helmet slamming into the side of his left knee on a headfirst slide, was so gruesome that the team’s broadcast opted not to show a replay.
Taylor also exited the game with what initially was diagnosed as a left trap contusion.
The Dodgers went on to win 5-4 on Freddie Freeman‘s walk-off single that scored Shohei Ohtani.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — His start prolonged, the whiffs remained elusive, and the Dodger Stadium crowd became increasingly concerned that Clayton Kershaw might not reach a hallowed milestone in front of them Wednesday. Finally, with two outs in the sixth inning, on his 100th pitch of the night, it happened — an outside-corner slider to freeze Chicago White Sox third baseman Vinny Capra and make Kershaw the 20th member of the 3,000-strikeout club.
Kershaw came off the mound and waved his cap to a sold-out crowd that had risen in appreciation. His teammates then greeted him on the field, dispersing hugs before a tribute video played on the scoreboard, after which Kershaw spilled out of the dugout to greet the fans once more.
Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ longtime ace, is just the fourth lefty to reach 3,000 strikeouts, joining Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton and CC Sabathia. He is one of just five pitchers to accumulate that many with one team, along with Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton and John Smoltz. The only other active pitchers who reached 3,000 strikeouts are the two who have often been lumped with Kershaw among the greatest pitchers of this era: Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, the latter of whom reached the milestone as a member of the Dodgers in September 2021.
Kershaw’s first strikeout accounted for the first out of the third inning — immediately after Austin Slater’s two-run homer gave the White Sox a 3-2 lead. Former Dodger Miguel Vargas fell behind in the count 0-2, becoming the ninth batter to get to two strikes against Kershaw, then swung through a curveball low and away. The next strikeout, No. 2,999 of his career, came on his season-high-tying 92nd pitch of the night, a curveball that landed well in front of home plate and induced a swing-and-miss from Lenyn Sosa to end the fifth inning.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts did not even look at Kershaw as he made his way back into the dugout, a clear sign that Kershaw would not be taken out. The crowd erupted as Kershaw took the mound for the start of the sixth inning. Mike Tauchman grounded out and Michael A. Taylor hit a double, then was caught stealing on a play that prompted Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy to come down hard on his left knee, forcing him to be helped off the field.
The mood suddenly turned somber at Dodger Stadium. Then, four pitches later, came elation.
Kershaw reached 3,000 strikeouts in 2,787⅓ innings, making him the fourth-fastest player to reach the mark, according to research from the Elias Sports Bureau. The only ones who got there with fewer innings were Johnson (2,470⅔), Scherzer (2,516) and Pedro Martinez (2,647⅔).
The Dodgers came back to win 5-4, capping their rally with three runs in the bottom of the ninth.
Before the game, Roberts called the 3,000-strikeout milestone “the last box” of a Hall of Fame career — one whose spot in Cooperstown had already been cemented by three Cy Young Awards, 10 All-Star Games, an MVP, five ERA titles and more than 200 wins.
Kershaw’s 2.51 ERA is the lowest in the Live Ball era (since 1920) among those with at least 1,500 innings, even though Kershaw has nearly doubled that. He was a force early, averaging 200 innings and 218 strikeouts per season from 2010 to 2019. And he was a wonder late, finding ways to continually keep opposing lineups in check with his body aching and his fastball down into the high 80s.
Kershaw went on the injured list at least once every year from 2016 to 2024. A foot injury made him a spectator last October, when the Dodgers claimed their second championship in five years. The following month, Kershaw underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee and a ruptured plantar plate in his left big toe, then re-signed with the Dodgers and joined the rotation in mid-May. He allowed five runs in four innings in his debut but went 4-0 with a 2.08 ERA in his next seven starts, stabilizing a shorthanded rotation that remains without Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki and Tony Gonsolin.
Since the start of 2021, Kershaw has somehow managed to put up the sixth-lowest ERA among those with at least 400 innings.
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