Among the many career accomplishments of Los Angeles Dodgers legend and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw , who announced his intent to retire at the end of the current season on Thursday, is a pitching benchmark that he may prove even more elusive in the future. That benchmark is 3,000 strikeouts.

In early July of this season, Kershaw became the 20th pitcher in Major League Baseball history to join that exclusive guild and just the fourth left-hander. As you can surmise, it's already a vanishingly rare feat, but will it now just vanish altogether? That's a plausible question to ask, and it has to do with how starting pitchers are used in the contemporary era.

To illustrate the point, here are the active career strikeout leaders in MLB : PITCHER CAREER STRIKEOUTS CURRENT A

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