A Deep Dive into Clay Holmes

On the heels of an unexpected postseason berth in 2024, the New York Mets entered the 2025 offseason with clear needs. Chief among them: 60% of their 2024 rotation entered free agency and the playoffs exposed clear holes in their bridge to Edwin Diaz.

David Stearns and his group aimed to kill two birds with one stone with their signing Friday night, swiping RHP Clay Holmes from the New York Yankees and inking the hurler to a three-year, $38 million contract.

One of baseball’s best firemen is a fascinating addition to the Mets’ staff. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Holmes will be signed as a starting pitcher, despite being primarily utilized out of the bullpen in his career. Passan also reported that Holmes will receive an opt-out after the second year.

Holmes finished 2024 on a sour note, losing his late-inning job to Luke Weaver, amidst 13 blown regular season saves. That’s not to discredit his dominant four-year stretch where he established himself as one of the game’s best set-up men.

Holmes represents a different project for the Mets’ pitching development group after they signed Frankie Montas earlier in the week. Holmes is in familiar company in the Mets organization, due to Eric Jagers and Co. recently poaching highly-regarded pitching coach Desi Druschel from the Yankees. Druschel overlapped with Holmes for years in New York.

Unlike Montas, Holmes enjoyed recent excellence, employing a nasty sinker/sweeper combo en route to a 3.71 ERA/3.44 FIP in 2024.

However, like Montas, Holmes’ success depended on another team optimizing his arsenal. In 2019, the Pirates sent the struggling reliever packing to the Yankees in exchange for two minor leaguers. Pittsburgh attributed his command issues to the wild movement his pitches produced.

A decade ago, Holmes would have floundered in the 40-man bubble, with his command serving as the main detriment to a stable roster spot.

A decade ago, the idea of seam-shifted wake only existed in theory. However, around the time, Holmes was sent to New York, the idea of seam-shifted wake (SSW) had made its way into the public domain, thanks to ground-breaking work from Utah Professor Barton Smith.

Smith concluded that certain pitches move more unexpectedly through their path to the plate, a byproduct of the ball’s seams interacting in a certain way with air molecules.

The Yankees incorporated Smith’s research into their reasoning for Holmes’ acquisition. Baseball Savant proves this theory; Holmes’ pitches move vertically more than any other comparable offerings. 

Coupled with Dreschel’s specialty in pitch tunneling, Holmes broke out in a big way upon landing in the Bronx. Dreschel took advantage of Holmes’s perceived weakness – his movement – and turned it into his greatest strength.

In shorter stints, his new repertoire shone.

As a reliever, his sinker emerged as his bread-and-butter, inducing hellacious swings year over year. Coupled with his high release point, his seam-shifted wake and -7.2 VAA gave batters fits. The Seam Shifted Wake phoneme can be observed via the 75-degree difference between the pitch’s spin-based movement and the observed movement indicating a degree of a seam-shifted wake.

Max Bay, currently a quantitative analyst for the World Champions Los Angeles Dodgers, recently released a publicly accessible app that calculates a pitch’s effectiveness by visualizing its expected shape, with respect to a pitcher’s arm angle. Given his 49-degree arm angle, Holmes’ sinker moves six inches more than expected. This unexpected movement leads to more whiffs and poorly-topped ground balls.

Holmes paired his outstanding sinker with a pair of excellent breaking balls. In 2024, his slider performed as one of the best in the business, finishing with a +6 Run Value. Meanwhile, his sweeper induced a 40% putaway rate. This duo helped his Breaking Ball Run Value finish in the 86th percentile in Run Value in 2024

Savant Pitch Mix Analysis visualized Holmes’s plan of action in 2024. He threw his sinker most often when even and behind in the count, and utilized his sweeper and slider mix to finish his opponents off.

Holmes quickly emerged as one of skipper Aaron Boone‘s most trusted arms upon joining the club, stabilizing the late innings in the Bronx. Holmes ditched his slider and change-up, focusing on the pitches that produced the most hectic movement profiles. His whiff rate rose 20% from his time with Pittsburgh while his strong ground ball remained among the league leaders. In his four seasons in the pinstripes, the 31-year-old right-hander pitched to a 2.69 ERA/2.74 FIP, racking up 74 saves and 19 holds.

Clay Holmes, Vicious 98mph Sinker. ???? pic.twitter.com/WdE0pl3nBt

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 16, 2024

Technically speaking, Holmes routinely finished among the best in the league in xwOBA, wOBA, xSLG, Barrel %, and xERA over the last four seasons. If it wasn’t for Edwin Díaz locking down the 9th inning across the river, Holmes would have gotten more notice as a household name in New York City.

And yet, despite predictions at the offseason’s outset that he would pitch in tandem with a closer in the same ilk as Díaz in 2025, Holmes will instead slot into the Mets’ rotation to kick off the campaign. While his offerings worked very well out of the bullpen, he should look for an additional weapon to counter the third-time-through-the-order penalty. Although his wOBA in 2024 was similar against both sides of the plate, he should permanently incorporate a change-up into his arsenal, a pitch he’s only tinkered with in games.

A change-up could be a perfect addition to Holmes’ arsenal, given Holmes’ native tendency as a supinator and his work with Tread Athletics. Multiple Mets pitchers, including Jose Quintana, have trained with Tread to improve their pitch design.

In an October 2024 article, Bryan Hoch of MLB.com noted that Holmes recently reincorporated his four-seam fastball late in the season. This fastball, and proposed change-up, could be the key to Holmes’ success as a starter in 2024.

Overall, this is a big swing by the Mets’ front office. Seth Lugo and Jordan Hicks serve as recent examples of relievers that have made the pen-to-rotation shift. Lugo just finished among the AL Cy Young finishers while the jury’s still out on Hicks. Holmes is in the mold of Hicks; a pitcher with a limited arsenal with historical command concerns. Given the Mets’ recent pitching development wins, David Stearns deserves the benefit of the doubt with his plan to mold Clay into a starter.

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