Is Clay Holmes the best closer in baseball? (2024)

When the Yankees acquired Clay Holmes in 2021, he was a 28-year-old former ninth-round draft pick with a 5.57 ERA in parts of four seasons with the Pirates. He’s had a meteoric rise from those inauspicious beginnings, first to a reliable setup man behind Aroldis Chapman and now to the short list of the game’s very best closers.

To better understand where he fits within that elite group, I wanted to compare Holmes to some of his contemporaries. While the game is flush with dynamic late-inning arms, I chose the Cardinals’ Ryan Helsley, the Astros’ Josh Hader, the Guardians’ Emmanuel Clase, the Mariners’ Andrés Muñoz, and the Athletics’ Mason Miller as points of comparison. Along with Holmes, these are the top six full-time closers in baseball by fWAR this season. And, with the exception of Miller, who has emerged in the season’s opening months as baseball’s newest phenom, all of these hurlers have been performing at a high level out of the bullpen for years, suggesting that their performance this season is not a fluke.

I’m going to highlight a few key stats and metrics and show where Holmes ranks among this group to underscore not just how well he’s performing but how his approach compares to today’s prototypical closer, delivering an assessment of whether he can truly be considered the cream of the bullpen crop.

Fastball velocity

1. Mason Miller (100.8 mph)
2. Ryan Helsley (99.5 mph)
3. Emmanuel Clase (98.7 mph)
4. Andrés Muñoz (98.2 mph)
5. Clay Holmes (96.3 mph)
6. Josh Hader (96 mph)

Holmes and Hader are a tick below the other top closers in terms of velocity. This should be no surprise — the two sinkerballers rely on a pitch that sacrifices a bit of speed for vertical movement. 96.3 mph is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a sinker; it still ranks in the 86th percentile for fastball velocity across baseball. But fireballers like Helsley and Miller rely on their other-worldly cannons to overpower hitters. Miller is a cut above, averaging over 100 mph on his four-seamer and reaching as high as 104 mph.

Strikeout rate

1. Mason Miller (51.5%)
2. Josh Hader (40.5%)
3. Andrés Muñoz (36.1%)
4. Emmanuel Clase (27.6%)
5. Ryan Helsley (25.7%)
6. Clay Holmes (24.1%)

Compared to his fellow relief aces, Holmes’ strikeout rate pulls up the rear. Miller’s ability to punch out most of the batters he faces unsurprisingly paces MLB. Interestingly, despite employing a similar sinker/slider mix to Holmes at a similar fastball velo, Hader’s sinker is a more effective finisher than Holmes’, with a putaway percentage of 19.3 percent to Holmes’ 16.7 percent. But it’s Hader’s slider, with a 38.4 percent putaway percentage, which dwarfs Holmes’ slider, which finishes off only 24.4 percent of batters.

The question remains: how is Holmes so effective without elite strikeout numbers? There’s one area where the Yankee righty reigns supreme — groundball rate. Holmes induces grounders from 69.3 percent of his opponents, in the 100th percentile in MLB.

If you’re not going to miss bats, getting the ball on the ground can be nearly as reliable a formula for getting opponents out.

Walk rate

1. Emmanuel Clase (1.9%)
2. Ryan Helsley (5.7%)
3. Clay Holmes (7.1%)
4. Andrés Muñoz (8.2%)
5. Josh Hader (9%)
6. Mason Miller (10.1%)

Another hallmark of bullpen success, especially if you’re not striking out batters at an elite clip, is limiting walks. It’s no surprise that high-strikeout guys like Miller and Hader are willing to sacrifice some free passes, though Emmanuel Clase has been astonishingly successful in this regard. After walking only one batter through his first 16 appearances, Holmes has walked seven in his past 11, including two in his four-run blowup against Seattle, dropping him closer to the middle of the pack (64th percentile) in walk rate and raising some concern about his control.

ERA

1. Emmanuel Clase (0.31)
2. Clay Holmes (1.37)
3. Andrés Muñoz (1.42)
4. Mason Miller (2.08)
5. Ryan Helsley (2.42)
6. Josh Hader (3.54)

Holmes’ implosion against the Mariners account for the only earned runs he’s allowed all year, helping him to a sterling ERA that’s second on the list only to Clase. How much stock should we put in reliever ERA, especially in a two-month sample? On the one hand, it is a direct measure of how good the pitcher’s outcomes have been; preventing runs is the name of the game of the job, after all. On the other hand, as fickle as bullpen arms can be, and with the four-run Seattle game a recent reminder of how quickly one outing can transform a reliever’s ERA, it can be helpful to look deeper.

Expected ERA

1. Mason Miller (1.28)
2. Ryan Helsley (2.15)
3. Emmanuel Clase (2.31)
4. Andrés Muñoz (2.63)
5. Clay Holmes (2.84)/Josh Hader (2.84)

Expected ERA (xERA) takes into account how often a pitcher allows batters to make contact, as well as the exit velocity and launch angle of that contact to ascertain how they could be expected to perform under normal circ*mstances, with luck removed from the equation. xERA suggests that Holmes has been roughly as effective as Hader despite having an ERA more than two runs better. If you’re a believer in xERA, Holmes is likely due for some regression, albeit to a still excellent standard of performance.

Taking the full picture into account, one pitcher stands tall above the rest in terms of 2024 performance: Emmanuel Clase. Having only allowed two walks all year, his ability to nearly eliminate bases on balls from the array of outcomes for his opponents while still striking out his fair share and allowing no home runs has made him a nearly impossible nut to crack for lineups across the league.

Clase has allowed just one earned run through 30 appearances, putting him on a historic pace and reinforcing the notion that his last three months of 2023, in which he posted a 3.97 ERA that soured his season stats, were an aberration for the 26-year-old, who pitched to a 1.33 ERA while establishing himself as one of the game’s elite relievers in 142.1 innings between 2021 and 2022.

For his part, Holmes fits comfortably within this group of exceptional arms. He will never dominate like Miller or Hader, and his recent run of walks is something to keep an eye on. But, as he’s shown while recording a 2.34 ERA in 181 innings as a Yankee, Holmes’ ability to get the ball on the ground with his bowling-ball sinker is a sustainable and reliable path to success that should be given just as much respect as the high-strikeout formula in conversations about the game’s great closers.