Corey Kluber's performance in Yankees debut worth smiling about, even if he won't
Corey Kluber of the Yankees pitches during the first inning against the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Before Saturday's game against the Blue Jays, Aaron Boone wanted people to know that Corey Kluber actually does smile. That he’s a nice guy and very pleasant to be around.
Yes, there’s part of him that’s the so-called "Klubot" — the pitcher with steely reserve who rarely shows emotion on the mound — but that’s not the entire story.
So though Kluber wasn’t all that evocative about his first start of 2021 — one that came after missing nearly all of two years with various ailments, including a broken forearm — it doesn’t mean it wasn’t special.
He missed competing. He missed fans. He missed actually spending time with teammates instead of rehabbing in isolation.
He missed winning, too.
So all in all, Saturday’s 5-3 win was successful, if imperfect.
"Just competing with your teammates" is the thing he enjoyed the most, he said. "You spend a lot of time by yourself rehabbing . . . you kind of miss that team aspect of it. That was probably the most fun part of it for me . . . It was fun to go out there and compete."
And compete he did. Kluber’s performance wasn’t a neat one, but it was heartening nonetheless. He maintained elements of wildness that pockmarked his Grapefruit League starts, but he also masterfully showcased that breaking ball — the slider/curve hybrid that he says isn’t a slurve but something in and of itself — and was able to get out of a number of jams.
After pitching only 35 2/3 innings in 2019 and throwing only 18 pitches in 2020, Kluber went four innings plus one batter, allowing two runs (one earned), five hits and three walks with five strikeouts.
He was helped by double-play balls in the first two innings. In the third, he walked two batters, threw a wild pitch and was hurt by a throwing error by Gary Sanchez that allowed a run to score, but he struck out three to get out of further trouble. In the fourth, he got into a first-and-third, one-out jam but wound up stranding three runners.
"I thought Corey threw the ball well," Boone said. "He had a pretty easy first couple innings there . . . [and had] a little stretch there where he lost the zone a little bit. But just the movement on his pitches, the ability moving in and out, I thought was pretty good."
Kluber is a few days shy of 35, but he’s still a former two-time Cy Young Award winner. When things got rough, he could lean on experience. He did that, too, whenever he felt the emotion of exactly what he was doing: reclaiming his career after two years battling a broken forearm, a torn muscle in his pitching shoulder and a strained oblique.
"I think that’s one of the aspects of missing time is that you can’t account for is that emotional side of it, the ups and downs of getting ready for a game, [battling] throughout a game and things like that," he said. "I think you just have to rely on experience. Keep reminding yourself that you’ve done it before and go back to the things that worked for you in the past."
Kluber handled the emotional side just fine, it seemed. No surprise there.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
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