Clayton Kershaw ‘will always have a spot’ with Los Angeles Dodgers, Andrew Friedman says

CARLSBAD, Calif. — The Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision not to tender a qualifying offer to Clayton Kershaw is not an indication that the team is predisposed to letting him leave.

Quite the opposite, it seems.

“We’ve made it very clear that if Kershaw wants to come back, he will always have a spot,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said Tuesday from the site of the general managers meetings.

The Dodgers extended qualifying offers to shortstop Corey Seager and utility man Chris Taylor on Sunday, a method that rewards teams with draft-pick compensation if those players sign elsewhere. Players have until the middle of next week to decide whether to accept the offer, which will pay them $18.4 million for the 2022 season, or reject it. Kershaw, a three-time Cy Young Award winner who is arguably the greatest player in Dodgers history, didn’t receive one, largely because of the uncertainty surrounding the health of his left arm.

Kershaw, 33, missed more than two months with elbow/forearm inflammation that popped up around the All-Star break. He returned in the middle of September, but exited his Oct. 1 start with a recurrence of the same issue and was unavailable throughout the postseason. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said then that Kershaw’s ulnar collateral ligament is structurally sound and that he does not require Tommy John surgery, but it seems as though there is still a fear that he could be dealing with a long-term injury.

“I know he wants to take a little time with Ellen [his wife] to figure out what’s best for them, and also more importantly get to a point where he feels good health-wise,” Friedman said. “We have no reason to believe that he won’t. But in his mind, he wants to get to that point, where he feels good from a health standpoint, and go from there. This [the qualifying offer] would have accelerated the timeline in a way that he wasn’t ready for, and I think just from our respect for him, and what he’s done for this…