How The Indians Corey Kluber And Carlos Carrasco Are Dominating With The Slider

How They Threw Them (Velocity and Movement)

Click the grey boxes to switch between highlighting Carrasco and Kluber’s pitches.

Kluber’s slider stands out as having the largest average horizontal movement (10.3 in) of any slider thrown by a starter in the Pitch F/x era. Only

‘s slider can challenge his overall movement, which gives you a sense of how nasty his is. He throws the pitch 82 mph on average, making it the slowest pitch in his arsenal. We’ll see in the later sections how his sweeping break affects when and where he throws the pitch.

Carrasco, on the other hand, throws his slider significantly harder (87 mph) with a much tighter break. This allows him to control the pitch quite well and while the break may not be large, it’s sharp enough to keep hitters off-balance. The pitch fits well within his arsenal due to a

similar vertical drop to his filthy 90+mph changeup

, except without the tail towards right-handed batters.

In fact, Carrasco’s slider is closer in movement and velocity to Kluber’s cutter, as you can see in the pitch path graphics below. I could write a whole article about Kluber’s cutter, so it’s safe to say that it’s a comparison that Carrasco shouldn’t be afraid of.

When They Threw Them (Usage)

As you can see in the tables above, Carrasco distributed his slider very close to the league average, throwing the pitch more often on 0-2 counts (13% to 9%) but staying within two percentage points of the league average on all other counts. Kluber, on the other hand, threw a majority of his sliders with two strikes (60% compared to league average of 37%), favoring the pitch in particular on 0-2 and 1-2 counts. This means that batters were especially off-guard when Kluber threw his slider. He can set batters up with his two seam and four seam fastballs and has a devastatingly sharp cutter that he can get loads of swings and misses on, so Kluber has the luxury of keeping the slider in his back pocket and using it only when the hitter is defending the plate. Carrasco managed to get his average four seam fastball speed as high as 97.7 mph and has a truly unique changeup that dives out of the strike zone, so he too has a great ability to set batters up and save his slider for two strikes. This difference in approach is not surprising considering the difference in movement between the two pitches. Since Kluber’s slider has such drastic horizontal break, it’s harder to keep the pitch in the zone. It’s also easier to get hitters to swing and miss at pitches that aren’t even close. This means it makes more sense to throw the pitch on 0-2 and 1-2 counts when there is little cost of throwing a ball.

Who They Threw Them To (Platoon Split)

When looking at how the two pitchers distributed their sliders among same handed hitters and opposite handed hitters, you can notice a big difference. Carrasco relied heavily on his slider when facing righties, while Kluber threw more sliders to lefties. Some of this has to do with Kluber facing more lefties (54% of batters faced compared to Carrasco’s 48%), but it also has to do with the rest of the pitches the two starters throw. Carrasco’s deadly changeup is a very effective pitch against lefties so he prefers to use that as his strikeout pitch. Changeups tend to not have a large platoon split, so it makes sense that Carrasco likes to throw his to get lefties out. Kluber has a decent changeup, but he doesn’t use it very often, and while his cutter is very good against lefties, it doesn’t have a large velocity differential from his sinker and four seam fastball, so if he wants to change speeds he’s probably going to end up throwing his slider.  

Where They Threw Them (Location)

The heat maps above show that Carrasco likes to throw his slider in the zone relatively often while trying to get hitters to chase pitches on that are outside to right handed hitters. As mentioned before, Carrasco’s can command his slider well due to the sharper break, which is why you see more yellow and a little orange in the middle of the zone. He can get hitters expecting a tailing changeup to reach out for a slider that darts outside at the last second. Kluber, on the other hand, tends to work below the zone when trying to get hitters to chase. While Kluber’s slider’s horizontal break was historic, its vertical break is also impressive, so it’s not surprising that he likes to throw the pitch below the batter’s knees. It also makes more sense to throw his slider below the zone against lefties to avoid hitting them. When we look at the difference between how Kluber throws the pitch against lefties and righties, you can see that Kluber gets more of those swings at outside pitches when throwing to righties while he aims for the dirt when facing lefties.

What Happened When They Threw Them (Results)

Let’s start by looking at how hitters reacted to the two pitches when they were thrown out of the zone. Out of Zone Swing Rate gives us a sense of how often the batter was fooled into chasing, and Out of Zone Contact Rate shows how tough the pitch is to hit once the batter has decided to swing. As with the other charts in this article, this shows all pitches thrown at least 300 times with at least 60% of those pitches coming as a starter.

This is where the dominance begins. Carrasco induced the second highest Out of Zone Swing Rate in the dataset while getting loads of whiffs on those pitches. Kluber didn’t batters to chase quite as often, but made up for that with a very low contact rate on those pitches.

Since Carrasco got so many hitters to chase his slider out of the zone while still being able to command it in the zone, he very rarely threw it for a ball. In fact, he had the lowest balls per pitch rate of any pitch in the sample, a remarkable 21%. Combined with his excellent whiff rate, this was easily the most dominant pitch when it wasn’t put into play. Kluber also had an excellent whiff to ball ratio, but it’s hard to match up to what Carrasco did in 2014 with his slider.

Even when batters managed to put the ball into play, they did not have much success. Both pitchers went the entire season without giving up a home run, which shows how difficult it is to square those pitches up. Their batted ball profiles were pretty different though.Carrasco induced a ton of ground balls (60% of balls in play) whileKluber induced some ground balls and tons of harmless infieldpopups (46% of all fly balls in play).

Not only did they manage to give up zero home runs all year, but they limited hard contact enough to post very impressive slugging percentages on contact. Carrasco in particular did a great job of this, giving up just four extra base hits (all doubles) and allowing a .250 slugging percentage (10th best in the sample) when batters hit the ball fair.

When you add it all up, you get two incredibly dominant pitches that hitters were pretty much unable to handle. It will be very exciting to watch Carrasco and Kluber in 2015 as they continue to develop their repertoires and learn to fool hitters. They may never be able to replicate the results on one pitch that they did in 2014, but I’m sure they’ll get some awkward swings and misses from hitters who simply have no chance.