Corey Kluber is Making History
Corey Kluber has been really good for a quite some time.
He’s a Cy Young Award winner and has finished in the top 10 in voting for three straight years. He trails only Clayton Kershaw and Chris Sale in wins above replacement since 2014, with 22.4 WAR.
Since returning from a back injury at the beginning of June, Kluber has struck out a ridiculous 40.7% percent of batters. He owns a sparking 36% K-BB%, 1.61 FIP and 40 ERA-. Since coming off the disabled list, Kluber has been Kenley Jansen — only Jansen as a starting pitcher.
The raw numbers since his return: 131 strikeouts in 86.1 innings against 52 hits and 15 walks.
Crazy good.
He struck out 11 Yankees on Friday to become only the fourth pitcher in baseball history to strike out at least eight batters in 12 consecutive starts, joining Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan and Pedro Martinez. Not bad company. (Johnson did it four times, Martinez twice).
Here are the strikeouts from Kluber’s last outing agianst the Yankees pushing him into elite company:
What’s propelled Kluber, who was already great, to even thinner air?
He’s 31, so we don’t expect a leap in stuff. If anything, his velocity and movement should be in some state of decline. And his velocity has declined, though not dramatically — and gradually — from an average fastball velocity of 94.6 mph in 2014 to 93.1 this season.
His breaking ball’s average horizontal movement has also slightly declined. The wipeout pitch led baseball in horizontal movement in 2015 (9.99 inches) and 2016 (8.94 inches). It has slipped to 8.31 inches this season, which still ranks third in the sport, according to Baseball Prospectus’ PITCHf/x leaderboards.
Despite no increase in underlying stuff, since Kluber has returned from the disabled list at the beginning of June he has been on a remarkable run, the most dominant run of his career.
Kluber has made one easily identifiable change. He’s throwing his breaking ball more than ever this season, at a career-high rate for 24.2%. His breaking ball career average usage is 17.3% and his previous career high was 19.8% last season. Since coming off the DL, he’s thrown the breaking pitch 26.9% of the time.
Consider the following chart which shows a striking parallel increase between Kluber’s breaking ball usage and strikeout rate:
Kluber didn’t believe his stuff is playing any differently when I explored his strikeout surge in a feature for The Athletic last month.
“I’m not sure it’s as much me doing anything differently as much as it is guys just don’t care about striking out,” Kluber said. “Batters used to believe striking out was a bad thing. They changed their approach with two-strikes, shortened up.”
“I think it goes hand-in-hand,” said Kluber of his breaking ball usage and strikeout rate. … Guys a lot of times don’t really make adjustments. They go up there swinging for the fences. More times more than not [the breaking ball] is the best pitch to take advantage of that.”
While his breaking ball is still elite but moving at a slightly less rate, he is enjoying a career best whiff rate per pitch on his breaking ball (52.5%) and swing rate. His whiff rate leads baseball.
If batters are not going to adjust, Kluber is willing to hunt for strikeouts more and more, and for swing and miss. Makes sense, right?
Against the Yankees, Kluber got eight of his 11 strikeouts on breaking balls. Against the Blue Jays on July 23, 12 of his 14 strikeouts were against the breaking ball.
We’ve seen much written at FanGraphs and elsewhere about batters being more accepting of taking on more strikeouts as a byproduct of an increased focus on creating power. And Kluber has taken advantage of this approach to a historic degree to reach this new level of excellence.
While Kluber’s velocity is not increasing, while his breaking ball is not moving more often, it’s not just that he’s changed pitch usage it’s that he’s better locating the breaking ball and getting ahead in more counts to make batters more susceptible to his breaking stuff in two-strike counts. Kluber is also enjoying a career best first-pitch strike and zone rates.
Consider his slider locations against lefties since June 1 this season.
And his slider location against righties since June 1 this season:
Then consider his slider location against lefties from the beginning of the 2014 season to May 30 this season:
And the consider the same time period against righties:
His already excellent command seems to be sharpening further.
And while Kluber is adjusting with pitch usage and location, batters are not. It’s allowed for a historic strikeout surge, which is even eye-opening in this age of strikeouts. In a game becoming more extreme in regard to hunting power, Kluber is using that aggressiveness to his advantage.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
Take a bow, Carson.
Is it just me or is the sort by oldest comments view broken?
It’s not just you. FG blog pages are not showing all comments, even after clicking on “Show rest of comments.”
Right now, I see only these two comments, but the page lists six (now to be seven).
I think this should be fixed now. Looks like the cache got stuck.
On a tangent … The redesigned home page continues to be a major downgrade in usability, for my purposes. The decision to show fewer articles, and especially the absence of links to author archives, makes it much harder to find what I’m after.
That the home page currently has no easy path to Jeff Sullivan posts seems ridiculous. I know Jeff hasn’t posted in 5 days, but just how far do you want to go in promoting recency over quality? And accessing an author’s archive via the “Player & Blog Search” field is clunky. Typing “Jeff Sullivan [enter]” brings first a list of MLB players named “Jeff” or “Sullivan,” and then Jeff’s archive — which is sorted from oldest to newest. Really???
I don’t speak for Jeff or even know him. But when I was a main writer for a blog, I would not have accepted this state of affairs.
Space is just not being used intelligently. For instance, “Community Research” gets as much space as “Top Articles,” yet those pages draw minimal readership, at least judging by the scant few comments thereon.
Since I wandered into this thread trying to fix the comments section, I’ll take a stab at these. We haven’t seen much in the way of complaints since the first week, so it’s always good to see some feedback months later.
In response to this particular complaint, I believe you would have had the same issue on the old home page. Maybe if you scrolled through the featured box one of Jeff’s articles might have been there, but it would have taken some clicking to get to them and it wouldn’t have been a given that he had an article there.
We are currently showing 14 articles in the FanGraphs box and that is the same or more than we would have displayed on the previous home page. So, I don’t believe we are actually showing less content on the home page.
Maybe it would be helpful if we put a “featured authors” section on the home page somewhere. That is definitely something we could look into.
David, thanks for the reply. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought the home page used to have the sidebar list of authors, the same way this page does. Some form of direct access to the top authors would be helpful.
I guess there’s a couple more things behind my comment, which may be just selfish, but anyway:
1. Purely decorative images take up significant space on the home page. Two small photos appear on first page. One scroll down brings two sizable FG logos, and further down the Hardball Times section has four small images, and then there’s another big FG logo. To me, the photos are a total waste, and the logos are excessive.
2. The Hardball Times, you may know, has taken a dramatic turn towards sociopolitical advocacy, largely of the unsupported-opinion variety, which is drawing a lot of negative feedback. Linking to some of that stuff hurts FG’s credibility, I think.
(Scans homepage of Hardball Times)
12 links to THT content. Of those 12, 1 of them about how sexual assault is bad and MLB could do more to take a stand against it. 1 of them about how League of their Own had a great message that still matters today.
Yeah, this says something about credibility. But not FG’s or THT’s.
Read it for a month, smarty pants. And if all you see in the sexual assault column is “it’s bad,” try taking a critical reading course.
Editorial sections are common in news of all types. THT has been that way for a while now. The fact that this is surprising to you is… strange.
I don’t object to editorials. I object to unsupported arguments and smear jobs. Even if I agree with their aims.
Funny thing: I teach critical reading courses to History and to Ed. students. I’ve found the following resource to be especially valuable for my own needs. Would love to discuss critical literacy strategies with you further. Have a nice day.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106010.aspx
Are there any ways to search for articles that mention players? It has the most recent five on the player page but it doesn’t go further back.
I think FG just needs a functional search engine. Or if they can’t make one, just embed a Google widget or something.
@David Appelman – for me, when I use FanGraphs now, I completely ignore the “new” homepage and go to the Fangraphs page asap through the Blogs -> Fangraphs page. This shows me what I want to see, and it’s what I’d expect to see on the Fangraphs homepage, with righthand sidebars of the other areas article titles, and some sort of linking across the top that says Fangraphs – Rotographs – THT or something that lets you easily switch between the three.
However, that being said, that is MY personal preference. I can understand that others may not be the same as me, so that’s merely an opinion that you can take note of. As far as actual advice I can give, I have two comments.
To me, what’s a useless waste of space is the method in which the “Categories” column is shown. Since it’s alphabetical, the top one has been “Pitch” about the TV show since that existed and does now not exist. Since the year 2010, the 2nd one has been “2010 Trade Value”, which I can’t imagine anyone clicks on. If “Categories” were updated to reflect recency, only include posts about teams, or organized in some relevant manner, it’d be far more useful.
Secondly, right to the left of that, I see “Authors”. This is fine, but you need to organize it as well. What it SHOULD do is show an alphabetical listing of the writers currently employed by FanGraphs, a time when their last post was (maybe even a title), and then a link to a page of “Past Fangraphs Writers”. Why does a guy named Pizza Cutter who made 1 post on 3/8/2011 get a link on this page? Don’t you want to better promote your current guys, who deserve better promotion? Don’t distract people with Pizza Cutter!
Better organization of these two areas would certainly help the site become more navigable and feel a little more professional.
I keep thinking I’ll get used to it but it hasn’t happened yet. And I miss the WAR leaders on the homepage. Seeing Mike Trout there is like looking up and seeing stars at night. Let’s you know that everything is ok. Which I guess uh right now everything might not be ok.
Given the changes in approach from batters this season, is it reasonable to think that teams will start targeting and cultivating pitchers with breaking balls as opposed to velocity? Also, has there been any studies this season on increased breaking ball usage coupled with increase in K rates league wide?
The 5th strikeout in the montage, the comeback 2-seamer, is I think the key to Kluber’s next level. By now, the book is out on what Kluber does with 2 strikes: puts you away with a breakingball low and just off the plate. Maybe the batter sneaks a peak at where the catcher is set up. Then the 2-seamer completely freezes the guy.