How Yankees’ Clarke Schmidt emerged as trusted starter: Fingernail length, pitch grips and analytics

NEW YORK — Ask anyone around the New York Yankees’ clubhouse who the most confident player is and they’ll all likely have the same answer: Clarke Schmidt.

“Clarke’s not human,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said in spring training. “Clarke’s the most confident person in the world.”

Schmidt agrees with his manager’s assessment. His confidence comes from his upbringing, he says. If he told his parents he wanted to quit baseball and work for NASA, they’d support his decision with no questions asked. He was led to believe he could accomplish anything he wanted. But Schmidt won’t be working for NASA any time soon. Since the start of 2023, Schmidt’s 32 starts with three runs allowed or fewer is the second-most in MLB behind St. Louis Cardinals starter Sonny Gray’s 33.

Schmidt has developed into one of baseball’s most consistent starters. The Yankees know Schmidt will likely last around five innings, give up three or fewer runs and provide them an opportunity to win in every game he pitches by limiting damage. “That’s the most prideful part of my game,” he says. Turning into a trusted starter for the Yankees required him to trust the analytics with every decision he makes.

“Everything I do in my life from nutrition to sleep revolves around baseball,” Schmidt said. “I make sure that everything has to benefit my baseball career. That’s where I’m at in my life.”

Everything includes the length he clips his fingernails. Schmidt throws a spiked curveball that requires him to dig his index finger into the seam. If his nail is too short on the day he starts, he won’t be able to dig into the ball the way he wants. With a longer nail, he risks breaking it given how much force is required to grip the ball. The slightest adjustment of how a pitcher grips the ball can drastically change results on any given day.

Another Filthy Knuckle Curve from Clarke Schmidt. 😷

7th K pic.twitter.com/P3f3W0dBji

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 13, 2024

Schmidt underwent a grip change this offseason with his sweeper and curveball after consulting with pitching coach Matt Blake, assistant pitching coach Desi Druschel, director of pitching Sam Briend and director of quantitative analytics David Grabiner. The organization felt like Schmidt wasn’t maximizing his production on those two pitches, specifically with where his fingers were placed on the baseball. With his sweeper, he now grips the ball deeper into the horseshoe of the seams. His curveball underwent the biggest change; he now throws a four-seam curve instead of the two-seam curve he threw last season. The reason for the change on both pitches is to get more movement — the sweeper now breaks more horizontally and the curve has more drop.

Clarke Schmidt, Nasty 86mph Sweeper. 😨 pic.twitter.com/ENSpqZlV6S

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 4, 2024

The changes have led to Schmidt seeing a 5.8 percentage-point increase in strikeout rate and a 5.7-point increase in whiff percentage this year. Out of all MLB pitchers, both increases rank in the top 25.

“We know a lot about the interaction between the ball and the bat and how important every millimeter and every half inch are,” Blake said. “We had information that he could clip it at a better rate and could get more of his better sweepers to show up consistently with just the way he oriented the ball in his hand. That and the curveball, being able to pull those apart a little bit more so that to the lefties there’s more depth to the curveball to get below the zone and the sweeper to get further away from the righties. It just gives him more margin for error in those situations and to avoid hard contact. That was an important piece that he did really well already but he could improve.”

The sweeper in particular has gotten encouraging results so far. It’s graded out as the fifth-best sweeper in Statcast’s Run Value metric. Last season, Schmidt said he had trouble throwing his sweeper consistently for strikes and couldn’t get much chase against right-handed hitters because it didn’t have the big sweeping break that it now has. His sweeper now stays in the strike zone longer than last season before it tails off the plate.

“It’s really helped play up a little bit more when I have advantage counts,” Schmidt said. “My command of it has gotten so much better for me to throw a strike and a chase pitch. I had problems in the past where I would throw it for a strike and when I would try to throw it with two strikes, I’d throw it right down the middle instead of making them chase.”

There have been mixed results on the effectiveness of his curveball so far. It’s his best strikeout pitch but it’s getting hit harder than it was last season. A mistake with the curveball in the zone has a higher chance of getting crushed. This home run to Baltimore Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson came on a missed location. He usually tries to throw it low and out of the zone to left-handed batters to get them to chase.

Schmidt is seeing three more inches of drop on his curveball this year compared to last year but opposing hitters are barreling it up at a 10 percent rate this season compared to 4.5 percent in 2023. Schmidt is spinning his curveball 110 RPMs more on average this season, which could mean that as the sample size increases, the contact quality will drop because there’s a high correlation between higher spin rates and lower contact rates.

“That’s kind of my feedback I’ve gotten from hitters when I ask them what they’re seeing visually on my breaking ball and they tell me it looks like it’s spinning really hard,” Schmidt said. “Hitters don’t really respond to it as well versus the slower breaking balls where you can see the spin. If something is spinning harder, it’s hard for you to pick up the spin.”

In the near term, one of the areas where the Yankees have identified a problem for Schmidt is his reliance on his sinker in two-strike counts against right-handed hitters. The stats would suggest it’s a poor go-to option for him over his sweeper.

“On the whole, the sinker is not a great two-strike pitch to righties just from the lack of miss you get,” Blake said. “It’s going to be put in play more otherwise you’re looking for a called strike. You’re rarely going to get a swing-and-miss in that spot compared to your other pitches. Sometimes, it’s a result of getting yourself backed into throwing the sinker with two strikes because you’ve thrown everything else to get to that point. Sometimes, the scouting report says you’re going to throw a lot of breaking balls and you try not to do that. Situationally, he’s gone to that pitch a few times just because of the way the sequencing has worked out. I think knowing what your best whiff pitches are and going to those in two-strike counts is probably the way to go more often than not.”

The long-term goal for the Yankees and Schmidt is to have him go deeper in games. When Schmidt reaches at least 76 pitches in his career, opposing hitters have a .987 OPS against him. Last season, the narrative around Schmidt was he couldn’t get left-handed hitters out. Opposing teams would stack lefties high in their lineups, daring him to get them out. To his credit, Schmidt has erased any doubt of his ability to get lefties out because of his improved cutter that moves inside on their hands. This year, righties have a better OPS against him than lefties.

“I think we trust him more and more every time we get there,” Blake said of Schmidt working deep into games. “There’s some sense of not overthinking that part of the game, either. What you’ve done well the first two times through it doesn’t mean you automatically have to change the third time. I think sometimes we can overthink the sequences in that part of the game where we’re trying to be tricky and you make mistakes when you try to do something different.”

(Photo of Clarke Schmidt: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)