Corey Kluber Has Called It A Career. Let's Take A Look At His Insane 2017 Season
I have a bizarre attachment to those mid to late 2010s Cleveland Indians teams. All they did was murder my Tigers, but at the same time, they were fun teams to watch. They had a lot of good players outside of Jose Ramirez, none of them are still a part of the organization. Even great manager Terry Francona called it quits after last season. One of the main reasons for their success was always their dominant starting pitching, and there was no greater example than Corey Kluber. The Klubot officially called it quits today after a marvelous career.
It's too bad that injuries derailed them following the 2018 season because there was a brief minute there where it seemed like he was building up towards a Hall of Fame résumé. He won't get there, but he has Multiple All-Star appearances and two Cy Youngs in his back pocket. He'll go down as easily one of the best pitchers in the history of Cleveland's organization. His first Cy Young in 2014 was a close vote against Felix Hernandez, but his second one in 2017 was more dominant, which is impressive, considering that Chris had a phenomenal year for the Red Sox and would've won the Cy Young in a lot of seasons. For a few months in 2017, Corey Kluber was the best pitcher in the world. Let's take a deeper dive at that transcendent campaign.
What's crazy about Kluber's 2017 campaign is that it got off to an awful start. His first month was something about disaster. In his first six starts, he had a 3-2 record, but his ERA was 5.06. On a May 2 outing against the Tigers, he got rocked, giving up five runs over three innings until he was ultimately put on the injured list. Kluber went away for about a month, and when he returned, he stopped giving up runs. In his first start back that season, Kluber threw six shutout innings against the Oakland Athletics. He only threw 77 pitches. Twenty-four of them were swung and missed at. That means the A's whiffed at just under one-third of Kluber's pitches in that game. It wasn't just a great outing. It was a sign of things to come.
In the grand scheme of things, 2017 wasn't that long ago, but when you look at the sheer volume of innings that Kluber pitched that season, it almost feels stuck out of time—the idea of a pitcher going 200 innings nowadays is a foreign concept, but a pitcher going over 200 innings while missing a month of the season would not happen today. Over his last 2023 starts in 2017, Kluber pitched 166.1 innings. He was 15-2 with a 1.62 ERA, including four complete games. His strikeouts per nine in that period were just over 12 as well. He led the league and wins, ERA, complete games, complete game, shutouts, ERA, plus, whip, hits per nine, walks per nine, and strikeout to walk ratio.
As brilliant as Kluber was for a time there, the injuries started to pop up shortly after. He was not very good in the postseason that year, and while he had at least one more elite season, he tended to wear down by the time October rolled around. He fell off pretty fast, which is too bad because I love nothing more than a dominant starting pitcher with the ability to go deep in the games. Kluber did throw a no-hitter for the Yankees in 2021 and was relatively serviceable in the later part of his career, but he was never able to recapture the magic he captured in Cleveland. He was a dangerous man. For a while, there was no greater reflection of that than in the 2017 season.