Los Angeles Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw reiterates it was the 'right call' to remove him from perfect game

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw woke up on Thursday morning and did what baseball fans throughout the country did when they watched him get pulled from a perfect game the previous afternoon — he wondered what could have been.

«But at the end of the day, in the moment, it felt like the right decision,» Kershaw said. «I can't go back now.»

Kershaw was pulled with only six outs remaining in what was trending towards the first perfect game of his illustrious career. He had thrown only 80 pitches, and had recorded 13 strikeouts, by the time he made quick work of the Minnesota Twins in the bottom of the seventh.

But he was also making his season debut — after an abbreviated spring training, on the heels of a winter when he didn't pick up a baseball until January and a season that saw him miss October because of an elbow injury.

Kershaw publicly defended the decision after Wednesday's road trip finale and struck a similar tone before the Dodgers' home opener on Thursday, but he also acknowledged that a younger version of himself might have handled it differently.

His manager agreed.

«Absolutely,» Dave Roberts said. «Clayton has grown immensely, as a ballplayer, as a man. His life has completely changed. That's an easy yes — he would've reacted differently.»

Kershaw, now 34, became the second player in major league history to complete at least seven innings and get removed with a perfect game still intact. The other was his former teammate, Rich Hill, who suffered the same fate after throwing 89 pitches through seven innings against the Miami Marlins on Sept. 10, 2016. Roberts was the man who removed Hill, too. He was protecting him from ongoing blister issues, but later said he felt «stick to my stomach»