Clay Holmes The Starter? What The Data Tells Us About The New Mets Pitcher
Image credit: RHP Clay Holmes (Photo by Daniel Shirey/Getty Images)
The Mets have now signed a pair of Yankees away as they reload for the 2025 season. Almost all the discourse today is, understandably, focused around Juan Soto’s $765 million pact. We’re choosing instead to focus on the Mets’ other move, a three-year, $38 million deal with Clay Holmes, as first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Friday night.
Holmes was an all-star closer for the Yankees before losing his job last summer and ranked as the No. 1 free agent relief pitcher on our free agent board. However, the Mets plan to use Holmes as a starter — which we said had a good chance of happening in his writeup, even if we were wrong about his destination.
Landing a starter with Holmes’ potential upside is an incredibly savvy move. It speaks volumes on where the Mets are as an organization. If you’re a Mets fan, you should be thrilled about this signing, on many levels, but most importantly what it says about their front office.
What The Stuff Models Think
According to StuffPro from Baseball Prospectus, Holmes’ sweeper was the nastiest pitch in baseball in 2024. It was the fourth-best pitch from a stuff perspective in 2023 (minimum 20 pitches). If you’re slapping an 80 grade on a pitch, that’s what Holmes’ sweeper is, at least out of the bullpen. It was the best slider according to Stuff+ as well, even while including the gyro slider with the sweeper.
StuffPro includes a component where it models expected run values of each pitch type on balls in play. Over the past three years, Holmes’ sinker has recorded expected run values per 100 pitches that are 4.3, 3.4 and 5 runs better than average. Holmes has an incredible ability to generate ground balls by controlling the launch angles that hitters get on his pitches, regardless of the platoon split.
Negative Launch Angles On The Sinker, Righties and Lefties
The big question facing the righthanded sinker-baller is whether he can perform well against opposite-handed batters. In his case, those are lefties. Here’s what his Savant page shows:
There a lot of numbers there, so focus on the LA column, fourth from the right. You’ll see a string of negative launch angles, and a total of just four home runs allowed over the last four seasons. Sinkers are subjected to the wrath of random variation, and Holmes’ 2024 vs lefthanded batters was the prime example of that. As a starter, this should balance out over the course of a full season.
When he gets righthanded batters, here’s the same chart:
On the surface, his 2024 and 2023 numbers aren’t amazing. But they came after 2022 and 2021 which were absolutely monstrous, as he was getting even lower launch angles those seasons. These numbers suggest he’ll have a lot of outings where he’ll cruise through lineups generating ground ball after ground ball, but he’ll probably also have a few games where a lot of ground balls get through.
The biggest takeaway is how platoon-neutral the pitch is, a rare attribute for a sinker. He’ll likely lose a little bit of stuff as a starter, but the key component of his pitch is movement, not velocity, which makes him more likely to succeed.
The Four-Seam Fastball
When the playoffs rolled around, Holmes added a new weapon to his arsenal: the four-seam fastball. As a supinator,with an east-west movement profile, he’s unlikely to have a tremendous four-seam fastball from a shape perspective. However, it wasn’t a terrible pitch, grading out about average:
If we were evaluating the fastball in a vacuum, meaning we ignore the rest of the arsenal, it would grade out as roughly average, mostly due to the velocity, with the below-average ride you’d expect from a supinator. The advantage of a four-seam fastball is that it can be a more effective whiff pitch than a sinker, especially against opposite-handed batters. It will be very instructive to see what the Mets and Holmes do with this pitch as a starter.
It has very distinct shape to the sinker with identical spin direction, velocity and release points. That means a batter needs to be ready for two hard pitches, with more than 10 inches of difference in vertical break and an eight-inch difference in horizontal break.
The Gyro Slider And The Sweeper
We touched on the sweeper at the top of this piece. He throws the slider and sweeper with identical spin direction, but varies the seam orientation to get wildly different movement profiles. He gets an incredible -4 inches of IVB on the gyro version, meaning it drops more than gravity alone. It generated an 18.6% swinging strike rate per pitch against lefties the past two seasons. The sweeper clocked in at healthy 15.2% swinging strike rate per pitch against lefties. Both were even better against righthanded batters. While sweepers have a reputation as being susceptible to platoons, when you have a sweeper as good as Holmes’, it will still be very good, almost no matter what. Holmes gets about 12 inches of horizontal break differential between the two pitches.
His gyro slider averaged 87 mph out of the pen, 2 mph above the generally accepted benchmark of 85 mph needed to make a gyro slider work. If he can hold most of his velocity and keep it around 86 mph, it should still be a plus pitch, with the sweeper probably landing as plus-plus as a starter, even if we knock it down a grade going from a reliever to a starter.
Changeup To Come?
A good template for Holmes might be Michael King, who also features a very good changeup:
King has a different arm angle, so his movement plots are different than Holmes, but they share a lot of similarities in how much movement deviation they get on their sinker and sweepers. Movement deviation from the spin axis (aka seam-shifted wake) can help create a changeup with excellent depth and fade. The data strongly suggest that Holmes could have a very good changeup from a pure stuff perspective, and it might give him an out pitch against lefties.
Holmes Was Once A Starter
Holmes began his professional career as a starter, including a 3.36 ERA in 2017 in Triple-A over 112 innings. He has a starter’s frame, and given a full ramp up in spring training, looks poised to be the latest reliever-to-starter success story, which is looking like a trend across the major leagues. He already has three high quality pitches with the sinker, sweeper and slider, a potential fringe-average four-seam fastball, and a changeup just begging to be added to his arsenal.
