'I don't expect anything less from these guys' The Cardinals are apparently still in Clayton Kershaw's head

Over his illustrious career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Clayton Kershaw has had plenty of meaningful battles with the St. Louis Cardinals.

On Sunday at Busch Stadium, as Kershaw pitches into his 18th big-league campaign, the left-hander got the better of the Cardinals in a 7-3 win for the Dodgers. Kershaw struck out seven Cardinal hitters across five innings of one-run baseball, par for the course for how the 37-year-old has largely handled the St. Louis lineup throughout his career.

At least, during the regular season.

Kershaw sports a lifetime 12-6 record with a 2.84 ERA across 23 regular season starts against the Cardinals. But, as Cardinals fans (and Dodgers fans, I reckon) may recall, the matchups have gone decidedly differently in the postseason.

Based on Kershaw’s response to the Busch Stadium video board relishing in a bit of that past October success for the Redbirds, it seems clear that it’s those playoff moments, the moments that mattered most, that have stuck with Kershaw the longest when he thinks about the Cardinals organization.

In five postseason starts against the Cardinals, Kershaw carries a 6.14 ERA and an 0-4 record. The Dodgers beat the Cardinals with Kershaw on the mound just once in the postseason October 8, 2009, with Kershaw earning a no-decision. 

The four subsequent starts Kershaw made against St. Louis all came during his prime—and he was the losing pitcher in all four of them. Key battles against players like Matt Carpenter and Matt Adams are replayed in the minds of Cardinals fans all the time—and this weekend, they were also replayed on the Busch Stadium video board.

In particular, the video board made reference before Sunday’s game to the pivotal home run that Adams hit against Kershaw in Game 4 of the 2014 NLDS.

The three-run shot was the only blemish against Kershaw that day, and it came in the seventh inning to flip the script from a 2-0 Dodgers lead to a 3-2 Cardinals win. The clincher sent the Cardinals to the NLCS and eliminated the Dodgers from that postseason.

This writer was in the stands at Busch that day after possibly skipping a couple of classes and traveling to St. Louis from Columbia, Missouri in order to catch the day game—it was an electric moment in Cardinals history, to say the least.

Well, apparently Kershaw doesn’t recall the moment quite as fondly. When asked after the game about the Busch Stadium video board rolling the tape on that famous replay ahead of his start on Sunday, Kershaw expressed to reporters in the visitors clubhouse that he wasn’t necessarily a fan of the move.

“I think it’s a little bush league,” Kershaw reportedly said, per Jeff Jones. “But I don’t expect anything less from these guys. So, it’s no worries.”

It’s no worries. Other than the backhanded dig at an entire organization, no worries at all, gang.

I’m struggling to come up with the words to contextualize Kershaw’s displeasure with the Cardinals over this incident. On the one hand, I feel like it’s pretty common for stadiums to replay notable moments from the past for the home team when the opposing team from those old moments is in town. It’s just a way to fire up the crowd—it’s an entertainment business, after all.

On the other hand, who knows—Sunday might have been Kershaw’s last time pitching on the mound at Busch Stadium (hopefully it isn’t, ideally he’s here again in October, if you catch my drift). But for a future Hall of Fame player to feel like an entire organization was making fun of him on what may have been his final visit, well, I could see the argument that the Cardinals could’ve given him a warmer welcome—I don’t share the argument, but I have seen others make it, and I suppose I get where they’re coming from.

At the end of the day, though, this is professional sports. This is competition. On that fateful day, Kershaw came up short in the competition, and it will forever be one of the ways his named is linked in history with the Cardinals organization. That's just the way it is. It's like people complaining about bat flips; if you don't like someone's reaction after hitting a home run against you... Pitch better. That's baseball.

For Kershaw to have this reaction to a question about this moment, as mild as his reaction may have been, it certainly seems the Cardinals have struck a chord with the Dodgers legend. After all these years, the Cardinals still take up residence in some corner of Kershaw’s mind.

So, while trying to be fair to one of the all-time great pitchers of this game we all love, I’m still struggling to come up with the words to describe how I view this little narrative that popped back up on Sunday afternoon.

But the more I ponder on it, if I may be so bold, it feels a bit like Mickey Mouse stuff from Kershaw.