Cleveland Indians starter Corey Kluber has multiple ways to beat you. He triumphed in different fashions in Games 1 and 4 of the World Series.
Game 1 was a bit unusual for him. Kluber's fastball was his out pitch, even though Eno Sarris wrote that the Cubs' best strategy was to hunt his fastball. But in Game 1, Kluber recorded a dozen outs with it.
In Game 4, the great Kluber curveball was on display. He threw 35 of them on 81 pitches, a 43 percent rate that marked a career high for his curveball usage.
Kluber got 11 outs with his curve, nearly twice as many as he recorded in Game 1 (6).
Fangraphs.com has a stat that rates the number of runs a pitcher saves for every 100 times he throws a pitch. The most valuable pitches in baseball this season by that measure were John Lackey’s slider, Clayton Kershaw’s slider and Kluber’s curve.
The Chicago Cubs went 2-for-12 against Kluber's curve in Game 4, and that’s a good day. During the regular season, opponents hit .099 in at-bats ending with a Kluber curveball. That’s 19-for-191 with 103 strikeouts. The latter statistic ranked third in MLB behind Jerad Eickhoff (106) and Dellin Betances (104).
Neither Kluber's miss rate nor his called-strike rate was impressive Saturday, but he netted foul balls on 44 percent of swings against him.
In Game 1, the Cubs swung 40 percent of the time against Kluber, the second-lowest swing rate against him in 2016. In Game 4, they swung 59 percent of the time, the second-highest swing rate against him this season. His 49 percent "chase rate" was by far his season high.
Per Elias Sports Bureau research, Kluber’s 0.89 ERA this postseason is the second best for a pitcher through his first five starts in postseason history. Only baseball legend Christy Mathewson (0.38) is better.
