Corey Kluber Rides Historic Pitch to Second Cy Young Award

What’s so remarkable about Corey Kluber’s second Cy Young Award, the receipt of which was announced Wednesday evening, is he won it despite missing a month of the season. At the All-Star break, it looked like Sale in a runaway, but Kluber found another level and produced one of the great Cy Young comebacks of all-time. That’s how dominant he was from the point at which he returned in June through the end of September following a trip to the DL with a back strain.

How good was Kluber?

Starting with that appearance against Oakland on June 1, Kluber struck out 224 batters (!). That’s 224 strikeouts in two-thirds of a season. That’s 224 strikeouts against 619 batters faced, good for an astounding 36.2% rate. He walked only 3.7% of those same batters.

The difference between Kluber’s strikeout and walk rate (K-BB%) from June to September was 32.5 points. To put that mark in context, consider: among all pitchers, only elite bullpen arms recorded Craig Kimbrel, Kenley Jansen and Chad Green better marks for the season. (It should be noted that Chris Sale led MLB starters over the whole season with a 31.1-point differential. Kluber finished second to Sale among starters, with a 29.5-point mark.)

Kluber was excellent over that four-month span by traditional measures, as well, going 15-2 with a 1.62 ERA in his final 23 starts. So he pleased traditionally and analytically minded voters en route to securing 27 of 30 first-place votes.

How did Kluber get better? How did an already elite pitcher, one with his own appreciation society, become even more elite?

Whatever you want to label it, curveball or slider, Kluber’s breaking ball was responsible for much of Kluber’s success — basically as much as any single pitch from the 21st century.

Jeff Sullivan argued on Sept. 7 that Kluber’s breaker was the best pitch in baseball — and, by linear weights among pitchers who threw at least 60 innings, it finished as the best in the sport.

Here are the pitches worth 30-plus runs above average in 2017:

Kluber’s curveball: +37.3 runs
Justin Verlander’s fastball: +33.6 runs
Max Scherzer’s slider: +30.6 runs

Since 2007, only Clayton Kershaw’s fastball in 2013 (39.1 runs) was more valuable in a single season.

Of course, Kluber’s breaking pitch has been excellent for some time. The difference this year is that he began to throw it at a career-high rate. Kluber threw the breaking ball 19.8% of the time in 2016. In 2017? He upped the rate to 27.1%. During the last four months, he threw it at a 29.2% of the time.

See chart:

There appears to be some relationships tied to the pitch’s usage.

I wrote about the trend earlier this year in a feature for The Athletic in the midst of Kluber’s remarkable strikeout run. He’d struck out at least eight opponents in 14 consecutive starts, falling one outing short of Randy Johnson’s MLB record set between the 1999-2000 seasons.

Kluber didn’t believe his stuff was playing any differently when I explored his strikeout surge, and his breaking-ball movement was about the same as it had been in 2016 and 2015.

“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.”

So Kluber turned batters’ aggressiveness against them. It will be interesting to see if batters adjust to Kluber in 2018, to see if he continues to increase his breaking-ball usage.

But there’s perhaps a dark side to his Cy Young chase and breaking-ball usage.

No one threw more pitches between June 1 and the close of the season than Klubot. And remember: this was a pitcher who threw 249 innings in 2016 between the regular season and postseason.

Despite missing a month, Kluber finished with 203 innings pitched. And who can blame him for wanting to be out there for 166 innings from June 1-Oct. 1: he helped his team to a historic winning streak, 102 wins, and the game’s top run differential. He also won the Cy Young Award, raising his 2021 and 2022 club options by $2 million each year.

Some of you have asked how the Cy Young vote affects Corey Kluber's contract with the @Indians. Here you go… pic.twitter.com/3wPSAgTXFC

— Anthony Castrovince (@castrovince) October 11, 2017

But did Kluber wear down because of the chase? Was there something off with Kluber at the end of the season? Or did he simply prove he’s human? Did his unenviable lull in production came at the most inopportune of times?

Kluber suggested there was something wrong after his Game 5 ALDS loss against the Yankees.

“I don’t feel like I need to get into details right now,” Kluber told reporters — including this author — after Game 5. “I was healthy enough to go out there and try to pitch.”

Later, the Indians offered more specifics, saying it wasn’t his back that had cost him a month on the DL but rather an issue finding his release point. And Kluber’s release point had changed at the end of the season:

Was the release-point issue just one of those things? Or was it tied to fatigue?

It would have probably been difficult for the club to rest Kluber as he efficiently and historically buzz-sawed his way through opposing lineups. Then again, we live in an age where workload is monitored closely — and, as noted above, no pitcher threw more pitches after June 1.

What we do know for certain is this: Kluber rode one of the great pitches we’ve ever seen for four remarkable months and was deserving of a second Cy Young Award. But Kluber was already looking ahead on Wednesday night.

“All we can do is look forward to next year,” he said to MLB.com after winning, “and try to have a better finish.”