Yankees best closer is even leaving Shohei Ohtani bewildered with his pitching

The Yankees best closer, Clay Holmes, left Shohei Ohtani staring at the scoreboard in bewilderment over one of his pitches.

The New York Yankees have had a really rough go of it when it comes to closing pitchers this year. Their usual guy, Aroldis Chapman, has both stunk (career-high 4.7 ERA) and been injured for most of the year. Clay Holmes has been the guy for most of the season and has been the team’s most consistent closing pitcher (he was an All-Star!), but even he has gone through some really rough patches.

As of late, the Yankees were going with a committee-based approach to closing games that rotated the likes of Wandy Peralta, Holmes, and Scott Effross.

Holmes, until someone convinces us otherwise, is the best closer this season, though. And though he wasn’t closing the game on Wednesday night, he did put on a show that impressed Shohei Ohtani. And this guy knows good pitching!

Shohei Ohtani amazed by Clay Holmes 100 mph sinker

Shohei Ohtani is known to make batters whiff and shake their heads himself when he’s on the mound. The all-around athlete pitches but plays DH as well, and on Wednesday night he saw a pitch from Holmes that made him look at the scoreboard to check the speed:

It looks like, based on the video, after Ohtani saw the speed, he gave it a flinch and disapproving-yet-impressed look at what he just saw.

Holmes uses his sinker 83.1 percent of the time, and the average speed on it is 96.9 MPH. It has an astonishing 12.8 inches of horizontal movement on average, according to Statcast. Holmes uses his slider for putaways more (30.8% putaway on the slider) but both of these pitches that he toggles back and forth between have, overall, been quite deadly for opposing batters.

For what it’s worth, Ohtani’s pitch with the most horizontal movement is his slider, with an average of 14.1 inches.