“The history, it has no bearing on anything,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “This is a new year, and he’s shown what he can do in the postseason. So I don’t think anybody in the clubhouse cares about that narrative.”
This was 2016—Roberts’ first year with the Dodgers—after a brilliant playoff start by Clayton Kershaw. The ace had pitched seven shutout innings for a 1-0 win over the Cubs in the NLCS, and Roberts, though he surely didn’t realize it at the time, had entered a new line onto the record: He’d issued one of the first quotes ever to explicitly tie the idea of “narrative” to Kershaw in October.