Clayton Kershaw left to wonder

— -- LOS ANGELES -- If Clayton Kershaw's not going to do it, let's not do it for him. As soon as the St. Louis Cardinals scored all those seventh-inning runs, mostly off the best pitcher in baseball, to shock the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, conspiracy theories were flying fast and furious around Twitter and other social media.

When they finally got him in the stretch, he was tipping his pitches. The Cardinals had stolen the Dodgers' signs again, even though they changed them just a few days ago. He was tired on a hot evening, and it was Dodgers manager Don Mattingly's fault for not giving him an earlier hook, never mind that the Dodgers' bullpen is shaky, four of the next five hitters coming up were left-handed and Kershaw might be the best-conditioned pitcher in the major leagues. Or, to put it another way, never mind that he's Kershaw.

No, no and no, Kershaw said.

"That's just a cop-out," Kershaw said when one of those pet theories -- the tipped pitches -- was offered to him, postgame.

Kershaw and catcher  A.J. Ellis could have just yelled back and forth or set up a Western Union office near the mound; they could have whispered in the Cardinals' ears what they planned to throw and where they planned to throw it and, if he had executed his pitches as he has done all season -- or if Matt Carpenter wasn't, seemingly, the only hitter on the planet immune to Kershaw's weapons -- this just doesn't happen.

Kershaw had just become the first pitcher in major league history to lead baseball in ERA four straight seasons when he became the first pitcher in major league history to give up at least seven earned runs in consecutive postseason starts, both against these Cardinals. On no level does that make sense, except to say that either something changes in Kershaw in the postseason or something changes in the Cardinals in the postseason, or both.

But nobody who has been around Kershaw the past few years or even the past few innings expected this. He had, after all, retired 16 straight batters at one point Friday and struck out five in a row in the middle innings. How did that, exactly, suggest he would give up six hits in an eight-batter stretch, most of them centered squarely on the barrels of bats, line drives all over the field? He went into that inning having thrown 81 pitches. For him, that's usually about the time he bears down and looks to finish it.

"Normally when Kersh is out there, we feel like it's over with. I think I was like everybody else in the stadium: I thought the game was over with," Carl Crawford said.

Mattingly went out to talk to Kershaw after Jon Jay slapped an RBI single to left field to cut the Dodgers' lead to 6-4. Kershaw looked Mattingly in the eye and told him he had enough energy to get out of the inning.

"His look and his face and his answer were confident, and, really, that's all I needed to hear," Mattingly said.

So, Mattingly left the mound without the ball. Kershaw seemed as if he knew what to do with it at that point. He struck out pinch hitter Oscar Taveras on three pitches. He got two quick strikes on Carpenter and was that close, maybe one rotation of a slider, to having none of this narrative land on him like a ton of bricks. But just as Carpenter had done to trigger a cascade of hits in Game 6 of last season's NLCS, he fouled off Kershaw's best pitches until he got one of Kershaw's worst. In this case, it was a fastball right down the middle, and Carpenter yanked it into the gap in right-center field to clear the bases and complete one of the great comebacks in October baseball history.

The talent chasm that separates Kershaw from any of the Dodgers' relievers not named Kenley Jansen is so massive that to question Mattingly's motives for not removing him there seems the flimsiest argument of them all.

"He had everything working," Ellis said. "That was vintage Clayton."

But then, suddenly, he didn't have everything working. And the consecutive meltdowns in October, to this opponent, has to raise some measure of doubt as the Dodgers navigate the remainder of this series. Do they bring him back on three days' rest if they're able to get the series to Game 4 in St. Louis? It seems like a different question now than it did before Friday's game began. Their No. 1 asset became their No. 1 question mark, at least in this setting.

So, now, everyone is left to wonder -- until he doesn't let them wonder it anymore -- whether Kershaw is equipped to be at his best in the biggest games. His postseason ERA is now 5.20.

You have to wonder if it has affected Kershaw's confidence, at least when he sees those two little birds sitting on the bat on the front of a uniform.

"Fortunately, we've got a game tomorrow and this is an awesome clubhouse. They'll come back ready tomorrow," Kershaw said. "Me, personally, I don't know. I'll let you know. It doesn't feel good right now. I don't think it's going to feel good for the rest of the night, but, hopefully, I get another chance."

After the game, Ellis said he reminded the entire team of the circumstances three weeks earlier, when Madison Bumgarner dominated them and they lost the first game of a series in San Francisco 9-0, and what had been a 5 ½-game lead had dwindled to one. The Dodgers won the next two games of that series and clinched in front of the Giants less than two weeks later.

This series is far from over, particularly if the Dodgers' lineup stays as hot as it looked Friday and as hot as it was all of September. Kershaw's meltdown radically overshadowed the fact that the Dodgers knocked Adam Wainwright out of the game in the fifth inning.

But what the Dodgers had seen as their hammer -- Kershaw in a possible decisive game -- now seems a little less solid in the hand.