At the beginning of this season, Clayton Kershaw didn’t look quite right. This was before his homer problem took hold, and his ERA still looked basically Clayton Kershaw-ish, but he was missing much fewer bats than usual and it caused people to wonder why. Chad looked at it here, and Ben Lindbergh looked at it at The Ringer. The conclusion was the same: something was wrong with Kershaw’s slider. More specifically, Kershaw was throwing his slider harder than ever, which resulted in it coming into the zone flat and in a similar plane as his fastball.
Clayton Kershaw’s flat slider is back, but there’s hope
