LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt has a pretty good notion that Clayton Kershaw is about to go on the kind of roll that can make people forget about one blah month, or even two. Though Kershaw’s early-season struggles have sometimes been portrayed as something novel in a brilliant career, Honeycutt has seen this kind of thing before.

He’s been around the game for 39 years and around Kershaw for nearly nine of those.

Honeycutt thinks Kershaw is too good to go on like this and the universe is too fundamentally neutral to go on like this. The combination of Kershaw’s stuff and luck evening out should take care of things all by themselves, Honeycutt contends.

Clayton Kershaw has not been his usual dominant self so far this season. Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt expects that to change soon. AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

“He makes a mistake, it gets hit hard, obviously, but even when he makes pitches, they’re still leaking in,” Honeycutt said. “The dominance, overall, is still there. There are other factors in this game you just can’t put a handle on at times, but he’s never going to go there.”

Good as Kershaw is, it’s not as if he hasn’t dealt with stretches of a season where his ERA was out of whack. Even while winning the league MVP award last season, there was a stretch, shortly after he came back from a strained muscle in his back, when he wasn’t dominating to his usual standards. For five starts from May 11 to June 2 last season, including one ugly one in Arizona, Kershaw was 2-2 with a 4.55 ERA.

He had a rough June and July in 2012, a middling July in 2011 and stretches of each of the previous two seasons when the numbers were creeping up on him. Kershaw has found a way to keep grinding through them each time and, when the season was finished, had set a standard of consistency that has proved borderline unfair, to himself: four straight major-league ERA titles and three Cy Youngs in the last four years.

Honeycutt sees no reason why Kershaw won’t do the same things, essentially, in 2015.

“I don’t see anything where the alarms are going off. I just think he’s too good and, as long as he’s healthy, he’s going to figure things out,” Honeycutt said.

There are, after all, no smoking guns. Early on, Honeycutt acknowledges, Kershaw left more sliders up in the strike zone than he normally does, but lately he has gotten that pitch tamed to his liking. Kershaw’s average fastball velocity, 93.5 mph, is actually a half-tick up from last season. He has thrown his other two pitches in virtually identical numbers. His line-drive rate, 27 percent, is a bit elevated but nothing alarming. His FIP (or fielding-independent pitching) is 2.90, just a bit up from his career norm. The batting average on balls put in play (BABIP) against Kershaw (.342) is worse than all but six major-league pitchers with at least 50 innings.

Going into his 10th start of the season Tuesday night against the Atlanta Braves, Kershaw is second to James Shields in the National League with 73 strikeouts.

To Honeycutt, it has been mostly misfortune that has added up to keep Kershaw from winning more games (two) and the Dodgers from winning more games when he has pitched (four out of nine). Lately, the relievers who have come in behind him have taken bad situations and made them worse.

In his last two starts, Kershaw has watched relievers come in and allow five inherited runners to score -- runs that have set his ERA at an unsightly 4.32 rather than what it would have been had they gotten out of the jams: 3.54, better than the NL average.

In one of those starts, Chris Hatcher deflected a Hunter Pence bouncer up the middle that might, otherwise, have been an inning-ending double play. In the other, Kershaw was cruising until he walked pinch hitter Michael McKenry and, a few batters later, Paco Rodriguez gave up a bases-clearing double.

Honeycutt’s worry is that the compounding bad luck and the uncomfortable numbers will begin to snowball on Kershaw, which is why Honeycutt has tried to take things back to basics when he counsels his best pitcher. They talk about fastball command and the proper mixture of his pitches. Kershaw has formidable enough weapons that he should be able to finish hitters off if he gets ahead.

Then Kershaw takes the mound, dominates for large stretches and, usually, sees something go wrong at the wrong time. That has been the pattern the Dodgers are hoping to see change, and the sooner the better.

“He’s out there giving every ounce of energy that he has,” Honeycutt said.