'Who is this guy?' The first time the world saw Kersh's curve

A version of this story ran in 2016.

The kid was tall, he was well-built, and he was warming for his second outing of his first Major League camp. Vero Beach, Fla. Dodgertown. March 9, 2008.

Sean Casey watched. On the cusp of his first season with the defending world champion Red Sox -- his 12th and final season in the bigs -- he knew the league inside and out. But 19-year-olds wearing jersey No. 96 don’t qualify as known quantities, even to a wily vet.

“Mags,” Casey said to hitting coach Dave Magadan, “do you know this guy?”

A purse of the lips and a shake of the head.

“Tito,” he said to manager Terry Francona, “you know him?”

Nope.

Casey came up with two outs. The first pitch was a rocket. Ninety-seven on the black. Strike one.

“That was legit,” Casey thought to himself. “That was different.”

He looked over to the open-air visiting dugout. Magadan shrugged. Francona shrugged.

Next pitch, curveball. A big old hammer. At the face one moment, at the knees the next. Casey buckled. Strike two.

This time, he looked over to the home dugout. Dodgers manager Joe Torre and third-base coach Larry Bowa were giggling.

Now Casey knew. The joke was on him.

“Who is this guy?”

Third pitch, another heater on the edge of the zone. Casey couldn’t even muster the momentum to pull the trigger. The umpire generously called it a ball. The ump probably figured he was giving the established and notoriously scrupulous hitter the benefit of the doubt, when in fact he was only prolonging the nightmare.

Finally, mercifully, memorably, the finisher. The curve again. You don’t go through your career striking out in only 10 percent of your plate appearances without the ability to read pitches, to wait on breaking balls. But Casey had never seen anything like this. He surrendered to Uncle Charlie, emphasis on the “uncle.” The rotation, the depth, the freefall like an elevator with a snapped cable. This embarrassing at-bat was as lost at the plate as Casey had ever felt in his professional career. And when the umpire rung him up after four pitches, during which the bat never left his shoulder, with Torre and Bowa still laughing in the other dugout, Casey retreated in utter confusion.

“What the hell just happened?”

* * * * *

Clayton Kershaw is hanging ‘em up at the end of the season, and he’s going out on top.

Not at the peak of his three-time Cy Young powers, of course, but at the top of the Live Ball Era ERA+ (154) and WHIP (1.02) leaderboards (minimum 2,000 innings).

To be as good as Kershaw has been for as long as he has requires constant work, constant tinkering, constant reinvention as the league evolves. But the great constant in Kershaw’s career has been that old-school curveball, which, here in his 18th and final season, is still baffling batters to the tune of a .163 average.

Kershaw has thrown the curve around 6,600 times in his career, counting the postseason. The first one many of us saw was that killer to Casey.

• Top moments from Kershaw's career

Even as recently as 2008, prospect hype hadn’t hit the heights we’re so well-accustomed to now. Kershaw was the seventh overall pick in the Draft two summers earlier, so a fair number of Dodger fans knew his name and were probably excited to see him for his first appearances in a televised tilt.

But to the opposition -- to the casual fan in the Vero Beach stands -- he was just some kid off the back fields.

That 1-2 curveball changed everything. It inspired a “holy mackerel” out of Vin Scully, who instantly dubbed it “Public Enemy No. 1.”

If the baseball world at large didn’t know Kershaw before he struck out Casey, it did now.

But of course, a curveball is only as good as the pitches that set it up. And that’s where Kershaw had to grow. The Casey at-bat featured the full extent of his offerings in 2008, a year in which he would make his official debut and log a 4.26 ERA in 22 appearances.

Kershaw, back then, was a two-pitch pitcher, which means his occasional brilliance was ultimately unsustainable. Midway through 2009, he learned a slider, which sounds harmless enough. Except that as quickly as the next season, it rated as one of the most effective pitches in all of baseball, per the advanced metrics available at the time at FanGraphs.

Raw talent is one thing, but the aptitude to pick up a new pitch and make it arguably as good as your best pitch almost overnight is what makes the good ones great. And over the last two decades, no one has been better than Clayton Edward Kershaw.

The curve, though, is still Kershaw’s breathtaking beauty, a bread-and-butter pitch that, through the years, has made batters toast. To this day, it still generates 67 inches (with gravity) of vertical drop, 1.4 inches more than the average curve in MLB. Kershaw has used his curve to freeze more people than Queen Elsa of Arendelle.

“It’s an awesome weapon,” Kershaw’s longtime personal catcher A.J. Ellis told us back in 2016, “that’s unique in all of baseball.”

Ellis caught more Kershaw curves than anybody, which means he’s uniquely qualified to assess them.

“Clayton’s curveball usage is always dependent on his ability to get in favorable counts,” Ellis added. “When you’re in those situations, you can use your curveball more, and hitters have to protect against it more. When he throws it right and he gets that good 12-to-6, top-to-bottom spin, it’s an unhittable pitch.

“Clayton has very repeatable mechanics and a good understanding of what he needs to do on each throw to execute it, and that’s a testament to his concentration and his discipline. All that factoring together created a spot where he could really dominate with that pitch.”

As for the opinion of the man himself?

“I think just the biggest thing is throwing it where I want to more often,” Kershaw said. “I’ve been able to spin it the same since I came up. But knowing when to throw it in the dirt and when to throw it for a strike and being able to do it more consistently is the difference.”

* * * * *

So here we are, nearing the end of the 37-year-old Kershaw’s legendary career. In a sport in which so many prime pitching prospects blow out and flame out, a survivor like Kershaw, with more than 3,000 innings (including the postseason) and 3,000 strikeouts, is a marvel.

After Casey took that called third strike in ’08, he couldn’t get No. 96 and that confounding curveball out of his head. So he watched with great interest when the kid made his proper debut two months later, and he’s of course been as engrossed as anybody with all that’s transpired since.

It’s funny. In 11 seasons, Casey made more than 5,600 plate appearances. He had 1,531 hits, played on a pair of playoff teams and went to three All-Star teams. He had a great career.

And yet it’s a four-pitch strikeout in a meaningless March exhibition that he calls “the most memorable at-bat of my career.”

At least Casey can find solace in the fact that while he might have been the first public victim of Public Enemy No. 1, he was far from the last.

“Now,” he said, “I don’t feel so bad. Now he’s doing it to everybody.”