Still improving, Kershaw remains baseball’s best pitcher

Clayton Kershaw shouldn’t be able to get better. It shouldn’t be possible that a pitcher already riding a five-year streak of top-three finishes in the National League Cy Young Award voting (winning three of them, as well as the 2014 NL MVP Award) actually still had room to improve. Yet here we are, watching him get off to a start in 2016 that would put him on track for the best season of a historic career.

That’s how it looks from this view after Thursday’s three-hit shutout in a 5-0 dismantling of the Mets, anyway. Kershaw’s fifth consecutive start of 10 strikeouts with no more than one walk set a new Major League record, topping the four straight times Stephen Strasburg did it last year and 19 occurrences of three straight starts, including three Kershaw streaks. His strikeout-to-walk ratio has been so insane that whiffing 13 and walking one on Thursday actually represented a step back, dropping his K/BB from 21.3 to 19.3 — which in itself would shatter Phil Hughes’ modern record of 11.6 strikeouts per walk, set in 2014.

Kershaw’s greatness is about more than just strikeouts and walks, obviously, but what he’s doing with that 77/4 K/BB rate is so unprecedented that it’s difficult to devote an undue amount of attention to it. Consider this: Every single year, Kershaw strikes out more hitters. Every single year, he combines that with fewer walks:

“OK,” you’re maybe saying. “He’s great, but it’s just eight starts. Lots of things can happen over eight starts.” Fair enough, although it’s more than obvious that Kershaw is hardly a small-sample fluke at this point. Let’s instead look at Kershaw’s past 32 starts, a number that may seem somewhat arbitrary but is generally accepted as “a full season of starts” for pitchers in the era of the five-man rotation. In 236 1/3 innings, Kershaw has struck out 305 against 30 walks, and has posted a 1.49 ERA and a 1.63 Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) mark.

Now let’s take that hidden “season” and compare it to the best pitching seasons of all time. Since the live-ball era began in 1920, there have been 4,019 seasons of at least 200 innings.

Best seasons, 1920-2016, Fielding Independent Pitching 1. Pedro Martinez, 1999 — 1.39 2. Kershaw, 2015-16 (last 32 starts) — 1.63 3. Dwight Gooden, 1984 — 1.69 4. Bob Gibson, 1968 — 1.85 5. Sandy Koufax, 1963 — 1.88

Even when using a league-adjusted version that accounts for the changing run environments in …

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