Corey Kluber Needs a Makeover

Maybe you've seen Corey Kluber's ERA. Given its size, it's not hard to spot. While Felix Hernandez, the runner-up for last year's AL Cy Young award, is putting up a typically great season, Kluber, last year's winner, is sporting the statistical version of a shiner. Baseball loves to hit people in the eye when they think they have it figured out; doubly so when they are incorporating too many luck dragons into their overall success strategy. When your winning formula looks like this:

1. Figure it out

2. Add luck dragons

…expect to get punched in the puss by Baseball. This is not the whole story behind Kluber's rough start, but in a broad sense it is.

Given his history of being Just Another Pitcher, it's tempting to assume that Corey Kluber's Cy Young season was heavily luck dragon-dependant, the modern equivalent of Jeff Ballard's 1989 season where by August he had sprouted wings and was spitting fire. Nope: Kluber's 2014 was legitimately damn good. For 235 innings, Kluber kept the ball on the ground better than league average, struck out a ton of hitters (28 percent) and only walked a few (5.4 percent). Lots of strikeouts, few walks, and batted balls that can't go over the outfield wall is a solid formula.

This year things look different. Kluber's ERA is 5.04 and he's 0-5. Those aren't the most important numbers, or even important numbers, but they look bad. Corey Kluber is an attractive person posted up at a bar dressed in a garbage bag with used burrito foil for a hat. Dude needs a makeover. He also needs to be in a teen movie where a makeover changes everything.

Thing is, it kind of would. A makeover, in theory, alters the appearance of something or someone without actually altering their core being. If we just looked at the right numbers we might feel different about Kluber's season. For example, Kluber's FIP and xFIP are 3.19 and 3.15, respectively. That's not at the 2.44 ERA-level he put up last season, but it's still a good two runs better than his ERA.

FIP likes Kluber because his underlying stats are good. The strikeouts are down to 24 percent from 28 but still well above the league's 19 percent average for a starter. The walks and ground balls are almost exactly where they were last season, in good territory. His velocity and ability to throw strikes are there as well.

That said, there is a bit of a difference between 2014 Kluber and 2015 Kluber, and not in an '80's Kirk Cameron vehicle kind of way where one Kluber goes back in time to inhabit the other Kluber's body giving us an ending where Kirk Cameron and Anthony Michael Hall come to realize that being themselves is actually the coolest thing of all. That would be interesting, but I'm talking about Kluber's struggles against left-handed hitters. In 2013, when Kluber was a good but hardly great pitcher, lefties put up a .751 OPS against him. In 2014 when, remember, Cy Young award, lefties had a .688 OPS against him. So far this season, it's .880.

All this time, right-handed hitters have hit Kluber very badly. From 2013-2015 righties put up OPSs of .562, .553, and .627. That's an endless parade of Mike Aviles's marching to the plate. There's two things here, and three if you wake up at 3am with the image of an endless parade of Mike Aviles's marching to the plate in your head. First is BABIP, Batting Average on Balls In Play. People often use it as a synonym for luck, and sometimes it is, but sometimes it means that batters are hitting the ball harder. In this case, given his peripheral numbers, Kluber's sky-high .424 BABIP against left-handed hitters is bad luck. It might be more than that too, but also that says .424. It's definitely a ton of bad luck and it should regress back towards his true talent level.

Second, if you dig into the data enough you can often times find some sort of something that explains away what the macro-level data says. Sometimes that's useful, but sometimes it's not. Kluber's problems against lefthanders this season have come against 101 different hitters. For context, last season Kluber faced 951 hitters. So this is fewer.

I could show you how Kluber has been throwing more pitches inside over the plate to lefthanded hitters than he did in 2014 and how it's those pitches that have been… aw, heck, here.

This is where Corey Kluber threw his pitches to left-handed hitters in 2014.

And this is where Corey Kluber has thrown his pitches to left-handed hitters this season.

In 2014 Kluber tried to stay away from lefties, but in 2015 he's come inside much more. Let's see how that's worked out. Here is the slugging percentage per pitch (i.e. not just the pitches that were hit) on Kluber's pitches to lefties in 2014.

Here's that same data but for this season.

Those pitches Kluber is throwing low middle and middle in are getting hit much harder than they did in 2014.

So Kluber needs to tighten up against lefties. In the end he hasn't pitched all that differently than he did last season. The difference has come mostly in what happened after the ball left his hand. After that, there isn't much a pitcher can do to control the result. Sometimes even the best pitches end up as hits. Even the best pitchers go through rough stretches that don't have much to do with how well they pitch. That's where Kluber is now. If he stays healthy and keeps pitching this way, he won't need luck dragons to find good results.