Mike Clevinger’s Strikeout Drop

Mike Clevinger had plenty of proponents coming into the season and they no doubt felt that even if his ERA/WHIP combo exceeded last year’s 3.11/1.25 marks, they would at least have strikeouts to fall back on. He’s currently besting both marks with a 1.75 ERA and 1.05 WHIP, but has just a 17% strikeout rate, down 10 points from last year’s 27% mark that sat 14th among pitchers with at least 120 innings. It’s hard to be too mad at the performance with those ratios, but we also know there’s virtually no way he maintains either because he’s not Pedro Martinez. What happened to his strikeout rate?

Let’s start by looking at his performance by handedness. Last season he fanned 26% of the lefties he faced and this year it’s down to 19%. Of course, it’s been a relatively small 42-plate appearance sample against lefties so just three more strikeouts would’ve been enough to get him back to 26%. We will break things down by pitch here in a moment, but the changeup seems to be the biggest difference versus lefties thus far. Only by strikeouts, though, as the results have been impeccable: he had a .749 OPS on changeups to lefties last year (78 PA) and it’s at .220 in 14 PA so far this year.

Righties struck out at a 28% clip against Clevinger last year in 308 PA. This year, it’s down to 16% through his first four starts (57 PA). He hasn’t felt the effect of the dip as the OPS is up just 26 points (.596) thanks in part to a major dip in walk rate against them, from 12% to 5%. Each one of his secondary pitches netted a strikeout rate north of 40% against righties last year, but the 33% off the changeup (which is a whopping 1 K in 3 PA) is his highest to date.

A full look at the performance by pitch brings the differences into focus:

All four pitches are down and sample size does play a role as outlined earlier, but that sharp difference on the slider definitely stands out. The slider is a pitch for righties as he threw all of 25 to lefties last year so when I’m focusing on his slider v. righties, it’s basically the pitch as a whole. The biggest difference I see right away is his Zone rate with the pitch. He’s throwing it in the zone 64% of the time this year, up from 42% last year. It’s also in the middle of the zone a lot more often at 37%, up from 20% last year. The result has been a lot more contact as you might’ve guessed from the strikeout drop, but it hasn’t been good contact as the results are still very strong.

Righties have .278 OPS against the pitch this year in 18 PA so he’s not really feeling any negative effect from the lowered strikeout rate. He seems to be using it to “steal strikes” as Eno would say. Clevinger is throwing first-pitch sliders 35% of the time (26% in ’17). The raw count is 20 first-pitch sliders and nine were called strikes, five were whiffs, one was foul, one was in play, and four were balls.

His slider usage with two strikes is down eight points to 30%, but that’s not drastic given the sample sizes. It’d be a difference of six pitches at this point. It’s not that he’s using it so much less on two strikes, the major difference in the slider is that it’s drawing a lot more contact because he’s putting it in the zone so much more.

I thought maybe he was just being more efficient and that was cutting into the strikeout rate, but I didn’t really find anything to back that, either. His pitches per plate appearance performance is down a negligible 0.16 to 4.0, which would be a difference of 81 pitches using his 506 PA total from last year. Clevinger has had fewer PA get to two strikes, down seven points to 50%. That would be seven more plate appearances this year and if all of those were strikeouts, he’d have a 24% rate and wouldn’t really be drawing this attention.

Contact against Clevinger on any pitch has jumped from 71% to 79%, which is a big change even in the small four-start sample. His 71% mark last year was 7th-lowest among the 115 pitchers with at least 120 innings. This year, he’s 59th out of 95 qualified arms (min. 21 IP). The added contact puts a larger burden on the .247 BABIP and 86% LOB rate, both of which would be career-bests if he maintained them (.273, 80% last year; .274, 78% career). Something has to give here.

His best strikeout pitch is markedly different so far in terms of how he’s using it and I’m not sure if it’s by design as a way to curb the walks (as he has with an 8% rate, down from 12%) or if he just doesn’t have the same feel for it yet. Maybe we’ll see the strikeouts tick upward as he settles in, but I think there is at least reason to monitor this, if not have some outright concern.

It’s been a strange start because the results are excellent so he’s likely not on the radar as any kind of disappointment for those rostering him. If there was a 1 or 2 strikeout game really holding down the total, I’m not sure I’d have even written this, but he hasn’t topped five yet this year. Clevinger might be a solid sell candidate because the results are still alluring enough to net a solid return.

I don’t think he’s stuck at a six-strikeouts-per-nine guy, but his approach right now isn’t getting him back to 10-per-nine, either. I’ll continue to monitor Clevinger and perhaps do a follow up post or at least talk about him on the pod in a few weeks.