Holmes toying with idea of throwing lefties for a curve

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- Each spring, pitchers around baseball experiment with fresh grips and pitch types, adding weapons to their arsenal in hopes of keeping hitters guessing.

Add Clay Holmes to the list.

Holmes unveiled a curveball during his Grapefruit League debut outing against the Blue Jays this week, throwing that pitch for the first time since 2021 -- the year the Pirates traded him to the Yankees. It’s a pitch he’s not positive he will use in regular-season games but that he feels can potentially benefit him against left-handed hitters.

“I don’t really see it being a strikeout pitch,” Holmes said. “I think it’s more a pitch that I can throw for a strike early in counts when lefties are trying to see the ball close to them. Something that starts away could be a free strike type of thing. Maybe a little bit easier to throw for a strike than the sweeper to lefties. I could see it being useful there.”

Last year, Holmes featured neutral platoon splits overall, but left-handed batters slugged .621 off his sweeper and .688 off his traditional slider, compared with .222 and .385 for righties. As a result, Holmes did not have a pitch with glove-side break that he trusted against lefties.

Perhaps the curveball can be that pitch. When Holmes last threw it, he did not have a sweeper. He began throwing it the following year when he ditched the curveball. It became his primary breaking ball in 2025, when he joined the Mets and shifted from the bullpen to the rotation.

The curveball serves Holmes because he throws it with a similar grip to his curveball, but it features less horizontal break and much more vertical break. As a result, Holmes can potentially tunnel the two pitches, preventing lefties from tracking his breaking balls as easily. Last season, Holmes primarily attacked left-handed hitters with his sinker, changeup and sweeper, throwing that trio of pitches around three-quarters of the time.

Now he is rethinking his strategy.

“To lefties, it’s like, ‘Do I want to throw a slider? Do I want the curveball? Is the cutter going to be more of a cutter versus a slider?’” Holmes said. “It’s just kind of seeing all that, how it plays and how things are feeling. Just kind of feeling it out.”

The idea of bringing back the curveball originated with Eric Jagers, the Mets’ vice president of pitching, who asked Holmes about it early in the offseason. Holmes spent the rest of the winter tinkering before unleashing the curveball for the first time on Monday against the Blue Jays.

Although he threw just four curves in total, he opened his outing with a sharp one to strike out Andrés Giménez.

“It doesn’t feel too strange,” Holmes said. “It’s not like I’m having to learn something crazy. It’s more so just seeing what’s still there, what we got with it.”