He’s the Latest Pitcher to Reach 3,000 Strikeouts—and He May Be the Last

Clayton Kershaw acknowledges the crowd after striking out reaching his 3000th career strike at Dodger Stadium.

There is a bittersweet irony to the modern version of baseball, and it was on full display at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday night.

Pitchers accumulate strikeouts today more frequently than at any point in the history of the sport, and it isn’t particularly close. The average hurler in 2025 whiffs 22% of the batters they face. The overwhelming majority of all-time greats—iconic figures from Bob Gibson to Bob Feller, Steve Carlton to Tom Seaver—racked up punchouts at a lower rate.

But when Clayton Kershaw froze Vinny Capra with a perfectly painted slider on the outside corner, and tallied the 3,000th strikeout of his Hall-of-Fame career, it was impossible to ignore what the accomplishment represented. Kershaw, one of the best ever to climb atop a major-league mound, had just arrived at a hallowed milestone that might never be touched again.

Clayton Kershaw delivers the perfectly painted slider that froze Vinny Capra and brought up his 3,000th strikeout.

Kershaw is now a member of one of MLB’s most exclusive clubs. Thirty-three men have notched 3,000 hits. Twenty-eight have slammed 500 home runs. Twenty-four have won 300 games. Just 20 have managed to record 3,000 strikeouts.

It is an esteemed group that now includes Kershaw, who stands alongside the other two legends of his generation—Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer—as they finish their collective march to Cooperstown. Besides Kershaw, just three others are left-handed: Carlton, Randy Johnson and CC Sabathia. Gibson and Walter Johnson are the only other two who played exclusively for one team.

“It’s an incredible list,” Kershaw said afterward. “I’m super grateful to be a part of it.”

Kershaw ascended to the mountaintop not by overwhelming opposing hitters with the blistering heat that defines this era, but by bamboozling them with pinpoint command, a frustratingly deceptive delivery and a magical curveball unlike any other.

Even at this late stage, after persistent back and shoulder injuries have sapped him of much of his power, the 37-year-old Kershaw remains stubbornly effective. In his 18th year with the Dodgers, he has posted a 3.43 ERA through his first nine outings, as he makes his push for another World Series championship.

Baseball has changed dramatically since Kershaw debuted for the Dodgers as a fresh-faced 20-year-old in 2008, just two years after Los Angeles drafted him seventh overall out of a Dallas high school. Back then, ace starters were expected to be workhorses, tasked with carrying their teams as far as they possibly could every time they took the ball.

The job is different nowadays. Teams are fiercely protective of their young starters, keeping them on strict innings limits and pitch counts in the hope of preserving their health. They are quick to remove even established veterans after two turns through the batting order, guided by reams of data that shows that is the time when they lose their effectiveness.

Clayton Kershaw remains stubbornly effective at age 37, but baseball has changed dramatically since his MLB debut in 2008.

As a result, starters have become merely the opening act before an inevitable parade of mostly anonymous relievers start jogging in from the bullpen.

Case in point: The 17 retired pitchers who have struck out 3,000 batters averaged just shy of 213 innings per season during their tenures, according to Stats Perform. The MLB leader in innings in 2024, Logan Gilbert of the Seattle Mariners, threw 208 ⅔ innings.

In Kershaw’s case, he threw 232 ⅔ innings in 2015. Nobody in MLB has reached that total in a single season since.

So while strikeouts are more commonplace than ever before, the idea of one pitcher having the longevity to amass 3,000 of them anytime soon is difficult to fathom. That’s especially true given baseball’s inability to solve the roaring epidemic of elbow injuries caused by the seemingly unending pursuit of velocity, which routinely costs top pitchers a season or more.

Besides the trifecta of Verlander, Scherzer and Kershaw, only two active pitchers are within 750 strikeouts of 3,000. Chris Sale of the Atlanta Braves has 2,528, but he is 36-years-old, has an extensive track record of injuries and is currently sidelined with a fractured rib cage. Gerrit Cole of the New York Yankees, 34, is sitting at 2,251, but he won’t pitch again until 2026 as he recovers from Tommy John surgery.

Sale and Cole are the last holdovers who still have outside chances of matching Kershaw’s feat. After that, the landscape becomes much more dicey.

Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers, the most dominant current starter, has already had several arm surgeries. Kershaw’s teammate, Blake Snell, strikes out 11.2 per nine innings, but he has never thrown more than 180 ⅔ innings in a season during his decade in MLB. Paul Skenes might be the future of pitching, but he has averaged six innings an outing thus far in his time with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“The longevity, the consistency is something that should be valued,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.

Which brings us back to someone who did get to 3,000 strikeouts. Last year, the author Andy McCullough published a biography of Kershaw. The title turned out to be prescient:

“The Last of His Kind.”

Clayton Kershaw became the Dodgers career strikeout leader in 2022, passing Don Sutton’s total of 2,696 for the franchise.