It's always around Labor Day when we just kind of want the baseball season to be over with so we can focus on football. But if there's one reason to keeping watching this year, it's Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw, who is putting together one of the greatest pitching seasons of all time.

Despite missing the entire month of April due to injury, he's a lock to win the National League Cy Young award. After only giving up one run in eight innings of work last night against the Washington Nationals, he now has a legitimate shot to win the NL MVP as well.

The last time a pitcher won the NL MVP was in 1968, when Bob Gibson took it home for the St. Louis Cardinals. Five years before Gibson, in 1963, the Dodgers' Sandy Koufax won it with a record of 25-5, 306 strikeouts, and an earned run average of 1.88. And it's now clear: Koufax is Kershaw's closest analogue—a prodigious left-hander who strikes more people out per nine innings than anybody else.

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After last night, Kershaw leads baseball with a record of 17-3 and a microscopic ERA of 1.70, to go along with 202 strikeouts. With a month left to go in the season, he's still adding to his strikeout and win totals—and, again, he missed the entire month of April—but the number that stands out is Kershaw's ERA, the truest commonly known metric of a pitcher's effectiveness. If he maintains his current mark of 1.70, it will be be the lowest end-of-season ERA since Greg Maddux posted a 1.63 mark in 1995, and it will be Kershaw's fourth consecutive year to lead his league in the statistic.

The last time that happened? You guessed it: Sandy Koufax, who led the NL for five consecutive years from 1962-66. But never in his career did Koufax post a number as low as Kershaw's 1.70.

Just as remarkable as Kershaw's 2014 run, though, is the run he's been on since breaking into the league six years ago. He's currently only 26 years old, and this will already be his third Cy Young award, all of which have come in the past four years. The last pitcher to win three Cy Youngs before their 27th birthday? No, not Sandy Koufax. Kershaw will become first pitcher to ever accomplish the feat.

It'd be easy to continue throwing out numbers and comparable baseball legends in an effort to further put Kershaw's dominance into context, but all you really need to know is this: Very few—if any—pitchers have pitched as well as Clayton Kershaw is pitching right now for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And the scary thing is that none of this is surprising in the least.

Only in the league for six seasons, Kershaw is already decorated enough to qualify for the Hall of Fame, and with a long career still ahead of him, it's not a stretch to say that we could be watching the greatest pitcher of all-time, in his prime, blowing 95-mile-per-hour fastballs by bats and breaking his devastating curveball for 200-something third strikes. Maybe not, but maybe so. That's why you're still watching baseball. It's practically poetry, and it's happening right now.

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