So Clay Holmes made his first start for the Mets on Thursday and he was more meh than masterful against the Houston Astros. His sinker blipped in and out like spotty WiFi and he was generally too wild, all while he was navigating the complexities of a new job.
Indeed, Holmes’ transition from reliever to starter is still a work in progress, even after a glossy spring camp that had blue-and-orange hopes soaring. Understatement alert: Nothing in the major leagues is easy. Maybe we should’ve expected this, even in the afterglow of his camp.
Still, there were some moments for Holmes and even those stray glimmers might offer some assurance that Holmes-to-the-rotation, one of the biggest Met pitching moves of the offseason, can work.
Here’s one of the major pluses for Holmes – the insane sweeper he threw to Jose Altuve in the first inning for strike three. Altuve, a future Hall-of-Famer, flailed wildly at the 82.4 mph pitch, which broke abruptly as if Holmes were steering it with a remote control. It wound up in the left-handed batter’s box and Altuve wound up walking back to the Astros bench.
Holmes had set up the finishing pitch with a sinker outside for a called strike and then a swinging strike off a sinker that veered in on Altuve. Altuve, a three-time batting champ, was primed for a big breaker outside and Holmes executed it perfectly.
In the second inning, with two runners on, he struck out Altuve again, battling back from being down in the count, 3-1, and putting Altuve away with a sinker in. In the third, he caught Yordan Alvarez, one of the game’s most dangerous hitters, looking at a backdoor sweeper that grabbed the outside corner for strike three.
All nifty pitches. Overall, though, Holmes, who was pitching on his 32nd birthday, allowed three runs (two earned) and five hits in just 4.2 innings. He struck out four and walked four – too many – and hit a batter. He threw a career-high 89 pitches (53 strikes). If you think this matters this early, his ERA stands at 3.86.
All the hits he allowed were singles, though there was some hard contact. Holmes knows he succeeds, as most pitchers, by limiting an opponent’s slugging. Thursday, that advantage was torpedoed by his walks. “Walks that didn’t need to happen,” as he put it to reporters in Houston.
Maybe, he noted, there were times he was thinking too much.
And over-relying on an old friend – his sinker. The plunging pitch helped him bloom into one of MLB’s true ground-ball monsters as a reliever. It’s a big reason he was a two-time All-Star relief pitcher for the Yankees. Maybe it was the familiar weapon he counted on too much on a day it wasn’t working.
Experience should help him streamline his work as a starter. After all, now he has real-time competition data to take into his five-day break in between starts.
Not that spring training or his relief experience has no application, but now that Holmes has banked his first start since his rookie year (2018) with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he’s got more of a sense of how a starter must attack a lineup and what pitches from his arsenal to use and when. He’ll continue to learn about the intricacies of preparing for a start while sorting through days of waiting for another chance.
The Astros used a righty-heavy lineup against Holmes, which made him think he should perhaps shy away from the kick-change that became such a buzz pitch in camp. He only threw four and only one of those was a strike. But his sinker wasn’t cooking enough to be a weapon against all those righties. In some cases, Holmes said, the sinker was the right pitch to throw in a situation, but they ended up too plump, up high in the strike zone.
Does that fit with his self-evaluation that he, at times, might’ve been thinking too much? Perhaps. Maybe that’s something he can learn from. And he knows, despite his 0.93 ERA in spring, that he’s got plenty to figure out about his new gig. That’s another reason to think he can succeed at this.
“It’s different than spring training,” Holmes said of his first real start in years. “It’s definitely a learning process.”
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