Every pitcher starts an at-bat with a plan of some sort. Usually, they execute the plan. But sometimes the plan goes awry. And the plan definitely went awry when Emmanuel Clase faced Kerry Carpenter in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the Tigers-Guardians ALDS.
Oh, I leave quite an impression
423 feet to be exact! #ALDS pic.twitter.com/yq6k6Fvss1
— MLB (@MLB) October 7, 2024
On the sixth pitch of the plate appearance, Carpenter uncorked a massive blast off Clase to give the Tigers a late 3-0 lead. A half-inning later, and Detroit had the series tied up at one game apiece. It was the hardest hit ball that Clase had ever given up. It was the first home run this season he’d allowed to a lefty. He allowed five earned runs the entire regular season; on that chuck alone, he gave up three.
The fun facts are plentiful, but the message behind them is basically the same: Clase is unhittable, and Carpenter hit him harder than anyone ever had. A home run like this doesn’t randomly happen. The short explanation is that Clase hung a cement mixer middle-middle, and Carpenter took advantage. But the longer version tells the real story.
Pitchers bear some amount of responsibility for most of the home runs they give up, but the reason why any specific home run is allowed is pretty context-specific. As a rule, carry fastball guys like Nick Pivetta or Shota Imanaga give up more home runs than steep vertical approach angle sinkerballers like Framber Valdez or Clay Holmes. But identifying the reason why a specific pitch was hit out of the park requires some detective work, some analysis of the preceding sequence. So that’s what I’ll try to do here, breaking down the anatomy of a home run.
Pitch 1: Cutter (Target: Outside; Actual Location: Close-ish Miss Outside)
Clase sets up on the far end of the first base side of the rubber. One advantage to that horizontal orientation: When he aims his 100 mph cutter inside to lefties, they feel incredibly crowded. The pitch starts at their hip and moves toward their body; at the speeds Clase throws his cutter, the best they can do is try not to get jammed.
But Clase’s first base side setup also opens up a super funky horizontal approach angle on the outer part of the plate. That’s what he was going for here, to Carpenter, on the first pitch of the at-bat. Check out where catcher Bo Naylor is set up on this pitch:
His center of mass is somewhere near the edge of the right-handed batter’s box. His glove is positioned off the plate outside. It’s not exactly a backdoor cutter because Clase’s approach angle is so diagonal. A backdoor cutter starts as a ball and finishes in the strike zone; Clase’s outside cutter runs through the strike zone and finishes with a sharp turn.
Clase tries throwing this outer-half dagger, but misses too far arm side, erring toward a harmless miss off the plate rather than a (relatively) dangerous miss where Carpenter might be able to put a swing on it. Carpenter’s bat wiggles a bit but otherwise stays put, taking the count to 1-0.
Pitch 2: Cutter (Target: Outside; Actual Location: Close-ish Miss Outside)
Rather than aiming to jam Carpenter with a hard cutter inside once behind in the count, Clase again opts for the outer-edge crossfire cutter. Naylor is set up in an identical location: right-handed batter’s box, glove just off the outside corner.
Clase’s seeming reticence to challenge Carpenter over the plate on these first two pitches may be related to the previous plate appearance, where Clase executed a perfect up-and-in cutter to the left-handed Trey Sweeney, and Sweeney brought his hands in and dumped it into right field. Carpenter is a much more dangerous hitter than Sweeney, with a wRC+ against righties that’s right up there with the best hitters in the game this season. Perhaps letting the Sweeney at-bat linger in his mind, perhaps fearing Carpenter’s power, Clase instead goes conservative, trying to force him to push something to the opposite field.
Same seeming intent, same result: The crossfire cutter sails outside. Carpenter, seeing nearly the same pitch on back-to-back offerings, looks even more confident taking the pitch without a swing.
Pitch 3: Cutter (Target: Middle-Outside; Actual Location: Outside Corner)
It’s 2-0 now, and Clase is no longer willing to get cute. The target is roughly the same, but Naylor is shifted subtly — but noticeably — toward the middle-outer half of the plate. (Note how Naylor’s glove overlaps with the broadcast’s strike zone.)
The more aggressive target is a success. Clase hits his spot; Carpenter puts a pretty nice opposite field swing on it but is way late. Clase is back in the count at 2-1.
Pitch 4: Slider (Target: Down; Actual Location: Weeeeee!)
So this was a bad omen. Right before Clase releases this 2-1 slider, Naylor gestures toward the ground, as to really emphasize the point: Please don’t miss up. His horizontal target appears to be in the same tunnel as the three cutters that Clase threw to Carpenter, so let’s assume Clase was aiming somewhere like the low outside corner.
The result? A slider that missed so badly that it fooled Carpenter. Completely on accident, Clase throws a cutter-ish slider. It hits the corner up-and-in, and Carpenter swings through it, mystified by what he’s just seen. This slider goes 92 mph, breaks five inches glove side, and gets nine inches of induced vertical break.
Pitch 5: Slider (Target: Down; Actual Location: Middle-Middle)
There is a new-ish concept in pitching analysis (or a new-ish attempt to quantify an old idea) called “decay,” coined on the public side by Lance Brozdowski. I’m oversimplifying, but the general idea goes like this: The more a pitcher uses a pitch within a given game, the less effective that pitch becomes. Hitters acclimate to the speed, the shape, and the angle out of the hand. Decay explains part of why Aaron Judge swung right through a middle-middle fastball from Cole Ragans in the first inning of Monday night’s Yankees-Royals game. It was the first fastball Judge saw from Ragans that night, and so it was at its maximum effectiveness.
“Decay” theory suggests that, if you’re Clase, you don’t want to necessarily throw the slider twice in a row, especially if you’ve just missed your spot on the first slider by the entirety of the strike zone. Throwing the cutter back-to-back is one thing — even if you “miss” the location or it comes out of the hand weird, it’s still moving 100 mph with some nasty glove-side movement.
But Clase wants the strikeout here. He doesn’t want to take the chance that some dinky contact finds grass, scoring a run; he wants Carpenter to swing through a nasty breaker below the zone. Unfortunately, Clase misses in the worst possible spot. It’s not exactly a hanger — it moves six inches glove side and gets just one inch of induced vertical break, so it is close to his ideal slider shape — but it is about as bad of a slider location as you can imagine. Thankfully for Clase, Carpenter is way out in front, bonking the pitch off his front foot.
Pitch 6: Slider (Target: Down!!! Extremely Down!!! DON’T Miss Up!!!; Actual Location: Oh No)
Clase has now missed twice — badly. Under no circumstances can he leave the slider up in the zone again. Naylor knows that Clase needs to bury this pitch if he wants to throw the slider three times in a row. With the count 2-2, they can afford to waste one here and go back to the cutter if it bounces. On pitch four, when Naylor first gestures towards the ground to ask for the low location, it looks more like a polite suggestion. On pitch six, he does the “point down at the ground gesture” six or seven times, pleading for Clase not to make the same mistake he’d made on the previous two pitches.
Instead, Clase throws an absolute cement mixer in a nearly identical location to the previous pitch. But unlike that previous pitch, this slider does not move. It has one inch of horizontal break, proceeding on a roughly straight line. It sits up in the zone like a bad fastball, carrying through the zone at eight inches of induced vertical break.
So there are three main problems here. The first is that Clase’s slider is actively decaying; Carpenter has just seen two hanging sliders, and is now familiar with the shape out of the hand. The second is that this pitch, metrically, is just an absolute disaster. The third is that the pitch ends up in the same location as the previous pitch.
Add it all up, mix in an elite hitter against righties, and you get liftoff, a tied series, and a fired up Detroit crowd for Game 3 of this closely matched series.
