Let me be clear about something: Sandy Koufax was my childhood hero. Well, so were Abraham Lincoln and Jane Goodall, but those are other stories. When Koufax pitched his perfect game, my Dad and I stood by the radio in our kitchen and didn’t breathe much the entire ninth inning.

If you haven’t heard it, here is Vin Scully’s call.

My mother’s ancestors were Irish Catholics from County Wicklow, south of Dublin. But there’s nothing Mom admired more than character, especially when it was paired with faith. When Koufax refused to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series, which fell on Yom Kippur, she was a fan for life.

So Koufax was a mensch, and it broke my fourteen-year-old heart when my hero announced his retirement—his abused and overused arm was shriveling, like the Wicked Witch’s legs beneath Dorothy’s farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz. My folks and I were spending the weekend in Solvang, Calfiornia, founded as a Danish town, and there I was on the sidewalk, surrounded by bakery smells and fudge-shop smells and tik-tokking cuckoo clocks, borrowed from Bavaria, but all I could do is stare at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in its rack, with font the size of V-E Day announcing Sandy’s decision.

I stood in front of that newsrack for many minutes, too numb even to summon tears, which would’ve been appropriate.

So Sandy is enthroned in my life in a way that not even Don Sutton is, and Sutton deserves a massive throne. So does Fernando, but that’s another story.

Fernando

And now, Clayton Kershaw is retiring.

Besides his prowess on the mound, including that hands-up this is a Butch Cassidy holdup stretch, which sometimes results in that distinctive twelve-to-six-o’clock curveball, Kershaw has proved to me that a Texas Presbyterian can be a mensch, too.

Koufax was serious about his faith, and so is Kershaw and so is his wife, Ellen. But oddly, what the Kershaws are serious about is sharing their joy, which is bewildering to me and completely authentic in them. So is the joy they find in their children (four, with one warming up in the bullpen.) The family does not, as one article noted, live in a gated compound. The couple unwinds by watching The Office reruns.

Here they are, in high school, and today.

Yeah, they’re reading to children, in what any right-minded cynic would assume is a Dodgers publicity department photo op. That’s not exactly the case.

The thing I admire about the Kershaws’ faith is that it’s not condemnatory, with the one exception of the time Kershaw quietly pointed out that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence might not be appropriate for Pride Night at Dodger Stadium. Their faith, I think, is alive and unpoisoned, unlike so many smug and unexamined Christians, who are ready to send mainline believers, non-Christian believers and nonbelievers alike—and Democrats—across the River Styx in Charon’s boat, the way both the Lord and Michelangelo intended it.

This is Clayton Kershaw’s faith.

That faith is manifest in the way he and Ellen love other children—in this case, in their visits to Zambian orphans and the school they founded for them. Kersh does manual labor–laying a sidewalk, digging a well—for their Zambian family.

And then there are the Southland kids he raises money for and supports, in a variety of ways, one of them being his ping-pong tournament, in which he is just as fierce, if a little more flamboyant, as he is on the mound. (Here, he and old friend Justin Turner hand out backpacks full of school supplies to kids in L.A.)

And Kershaw’s faith must be what sustains him. He is so intense that not only do his teammates avoid talking to him in the dugout during a game, which is baseball etiquette, but you can see them take a wide path around him, as if he were a bull buffalo in the middle of the road. That intensity, in a career marked by brilliance, is manifest in his failures, too, particularly in the postseason, and they have been epic, even Shakespearean.

No one can replace Sandy. But Clayton Kershaw has every right to stand right beside him. Here the two are: They are a half-Rushmore, symbolic of integrity and faith. Baseball, as it has in the past, has the potential to cure what ails us today.