The Cleveland Guardians scored a dramatic, season-saving walk-off victory on Thursday night in Game 3 of their American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees, cutting their deficit in the best-of-seven series to a 2-1 margin. David Fry notched the game-winning home-run in the 10th inning to send the Cleveland faithful home happy. Fry’s clutch home run was the fourth and final jaw-dropping blast against a high-leverage reliever in the game.
The previous inning, Jhonkensy Noel had delivered a game-tying home run against Yankees closer Luke Weaver. Weaver, who had a phenomenal year for the Yankees, had allowed just two home runs since the start of September, including one on Sept. 2 and the other in Game 2.
Even before Noel’s blast, the Yankees had turned a 3-1 deficit into a 4-3 victory with two outs in the top of the eighth inning, doing so in improbable fashion by homering in consecutive at-bats against Emmanuel Clase, the game’s best closer. Clase had been impregnable during the regular season, earning Cy Young Award support by amassing a 0.61 ERA and surrendering two home runs in 74 innings.
Just what was led to each of those four big home runs? Let’s break them down.
1. Aaron Judge, 8th inning off Emmanuel Clase
If you know one thing about Clase, it’s that he’s an elite pitcher. If you know two things about Clase, it’s that he also has a great cutter. Predictably, he’s fond of the pitch, using it 78% of the time during the regular season. That’s not quite Mariano Rivera levels (he was around 90% late in his career), but it does put him on equal footing with Kenley Jansen, the other contemporary cutter maestro, whose career usage rate is 79.9%.
Clase threw four pitches to Judge on Thursday night. Shocker: they were all cutters. Locational intent is tougher to discern now than in the past: some teams have taken to having their catcher always present targets over the middle of the plate as a means of improving control by giving them a greater area to target.
Even so, we know from historical data that Clase likes to throw his cutters on the inner half of the plate to right-handed batters. A lot of the time, that entails starting the ball in off the plate and allowing its natural cut to bring it back to the plate. Other times, Clase starts it within the zone and lets it track back toward the middle.
Either way, right-handed batters know they’re in for an uncomfortable at-bat. Clase’s cutter checked in at 99.5 mph during the regular season, the fastest in the majors. The movement profile on the pitch also graded as well above average: he had about a half foot more horizontal break than the average right-handed cutter, and nearly three inches more induced vertical break. Again, it’s a monster pitch.
Interestingly, Clase did not attack Judge the way you might’ve expected based on the aforementioned information. The first pitch, fouled off, was indeed located over the middle. Clase then went away on three consecutive pitches: one Judge fouled off, one he took for a ball, and then another swing — this one resulting in the game-tying homer:
That’s not a bad pitch by any measurement other than the result. It’s 99 mph. It has the same drop and cut profile as the previous offering … except this time it’s located on the outside corner. And so on. Yet Judge was able to get his barrel head to the ball, and, because he’s one of the strongest players in the sport’s history, he was able to muscle it out and over the right-field fence. That’s a good process and a bad result.
Judge, for his part, did not think it was gone off the bat.
“I thought it was too low,” Judge told reporters.
We’d write that Clase could throw that pitch another 100 times and never get burned on it. We’ll do one better and note that, during the regular season, that hypothetical was almost exactly on the nose. He threw 82 cutters to the outer third of the plate against righty batters: they resulted in four hits, with three of those being singles and one a double — that came on a defensive misplay versus Judge’s teammate Anthony Volpe.
Clase, perhaps reeling a bit from the Judge home run, did something unusual to begin the Stanton at-bat: he threw a slider.
We’ve already referenced how much Clase leans upon his cutter, but let’s put the slider into greater perspective. During the regular season, he threw 28 first-pitch sliders all year. He faced 270 batters. That works out to a first-pitch slider every, oh, time or so through the order. Yet on Thursday, he felt it was necessary against his second hitter.
Clase’s slider was fouled off by Stanton, opening things with an 0-1 count. From there, Clase would operate as he often has: spamming cutters on the inner half of the plate. Stanton would whiff on a high-and-tight cutter to put himself in an 0-2 hole. Stanton would then foul off three of the next four pitches, including a cutter that was well in, off the plate. The exception was a pitch he took for a ball: a slider down and away.
Clase couldn’t seem to retire Stanton with his cutter, so he went back to his slider for the seventh pitch of the sequence. That proved to be a mistake. Despite placing the pitch around where the target was (remember how we noted that wasn’t always a great representation of intent?), Clase lost the battle as Stanton rocked it to right-center:
Although Clase’s slider receives far less attention than his cutter, it’s worth pointing out how rare it is to see anyone sock it like that. Over the course of the regular season, Clase allowed just one extra-base hit against his slider all year. That was this play, a double off the center field wall by San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Chapman.
In other words, Judge and Stanton combined to do things in a matter of minutes that the rest of the league failed to do over the span of six months.
But the game wasn’t over. It was the Guardians’ turn to beat the odds.
3. Jhonkensy Noel, 9th inning off Luke Weaver
Weaver had faced three Guardians before Noel stepped to the plate. Against two of them, he alternated between his fastball and changeup for the first pitches of the at-bat. (The other, he doubled-up on fastballs before turning to the cambio.) That’s not normal for Weaver, who also threw a cutter 23% of the time during the season.
We can only wonder if Noel noticed the pattern and decided, after Weaver missed wide with a fastball to begin the at-bat, to look for a changeup on the next offering. That, or maybe the pitch simply caught too much of the zone. Either way, Noel gave it a jolt:
Keep in mind, Weaver’s change was highly effective during the course of the season. It generated a 48% whiff rate and held opponents to a .172 batting average. Weaver surrendered just one home run all year on the change, and that came in late May.
4. David Fry, 10th inning off Clay Holmes
And then, there was Fry’s game-winning shot off Clay Holmes in the 10th.
The whole inning unraveled quickly for Holmes. Bo Naylor hit a first-pitch single to lead things off. Three pitches later, after a sacrifice bunt and a ground out, Holmes had Fry up with two outs.
Holmes stuck to his trademark sinker against Fry. He yanked one down and away for ball one. He then threw one inside for a strike, and another down and over the plate that was fouled off for strike two. With a 1-2 count, Holmes elevated another sinker to Fry. This time, Fry took a swing at it — and boy did he connect. Fry sent the ball deep into the Cleveland crowd as a way of saying good night:
As with the other instances throughout this piece, the home run went against the pitch’s convention. Holmes — who had never allowed a run 12 postseason games before Thursday night — yielded two home runs on his sinker all season, with both of those coming on pitches located around the knees. Fry, to his credit, had mostly done his damage on elevated pitches, albeit often away.
Such is the beauty of postseason baseball. You never know what you’re going to see or how you’re going to be made to feel. You just know that it’s chaotic by design and that it always finds a way to keep you engaged.
