PORT ST. LUCIE — The Mets will get their first look at Clay Holmes as a starting pitcher this weekend when Grapefruit League play begins. The former Yankees reliever will start the spring opener Saturday against the Houston Astros at Clover Park.
Holmes hasn’t made a Major League start since 2018, and while a Grapefruit League game doesn’t exactly carry the same weight as a regular season game, it’s a chance for the right-hander to get back into the swing of things as a starter, going through his pregame routine, getting up three times and throwing about 40-45 pitches.
“I think the biggest thing is feeling the game speed, feeling the pitch clock, making pitches and feeling the ups,” Holmes said after Wednesday’s workout. “A big thing for me this spring is feeling the ups. I think that’s why we kind of started early.”
When Holmes and his agent made the decision to return to a starting role and sought teams that were interested in him as a starter, he restructured his offseason to move up his throwing progression. The 31-year-old didn’t need to completely overhaul his conditioning, but he did have to add pitches and stretch out, shifting his schedule to be able to come into camp ready for a heavy workload.
“I’ve always kind of prided myself on coming in and being my best self, and ready to go,” Holmes said. “I think it’s just a matter of pushing things up, as far as my throwing progression goes. I just had to start throwing lives a little earlier, mixing in two-up bullpens a little earlier, and adding some pitches and some ups earlier to put myself in the situation. As far as the type of training or conditioning, those things all, relatively, stayed pretty similar.”
His mindset on the mound will be similar to what it was when he was a reliever as well.
“I’ve kind of tried to go into a pretty simple mentality of ‘Let’s just try to throw a one-inning shutout each time,’” Holmes said. “I’ll get to throw before the game and not be so rushed getting warmed up, but I think my mentality is going to try to stay the same when I’m out there. It’s just about executing pitches, which I’ve been trying to do for the past few years.”
Holmes relied on a hard gyro slider, a sinker and a sweeper as a reliever with the Yankees. As a starter with the Pirates, he also threw a four-seam fastball, a changeup, a curveball and a cutter, relying heavily on the curveball and the cutter to get swings and misses.
After being converted to a reliever with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2018, Holmes gradually abandoned the pitches that weren’t serving him, but as a starter, he’ll add a few back into the mix. He already added the four-seam fastball in for the postseason last year, with good velocity (97.7 mph), but below-average ride. The Mets are intrigued with his changeup, which would give him a more well-rounded pitch mix.
Holmes misses a lot of bats (nearly 10 strikeouts per nine innings), but he makes his living with ground balls. With the Yankees, he didn’t exactly have elite defense behind him. Tasking a ground-ball pitcher like Holmes with protecting slim leads in high-leverage innings with poor defense behind him was a questionable choice, but the Mets think he’ll benefit from the Gold Glove-caliber defense of shortstop Francisco Lindor.
More importantly, they think he has the stuff and the build to start again. The 6-5, 245-pound righty had one of the nastiest sweepers in baseball last year and the 96-mph gyro slider is a dangerous weapon.
It’s a gamble, but if pitching coach Jeremy Hefner can work the same magic that he did with Sean Manaea and Luis Severino last season, the Mets will look smart.
Getting up to 40-45 pitches over three innings Saturday will help the Mets and Holmes get a sense of what work still needs to be done, but for now, he’s right on track.
“It does feel good, in a sense,” Holmes said. “I know I have time, I can go out there and give it all I have, and we can slowly build up, and really don’t have to worry about taking things fast and really stressing things in a way we don’t need to.”
