Clay Holmes's Cutter Might Change the Cubs Organization Forever

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As much as any one pitch can define a starting pitcher in the modern game, the sinker defines Clay Holmes. He throws from a higher arm angle than most sinkerballers, but gets even heavier action on that pitch than most guys who throw it from low slots. It's as true a bowling-ball sinker as any in the game today, and it's made him a hugely successful hurler in multiple roles over the last half-decade. He's also become moderately famous, among players and baseball people, for the genius with which he manipulates the ball. Ben Brown, who learned much about his (very different) sinker while working out with Holmes over the winter, once said Holmes can do more things with the ball than anyone else he's ever seen. Holmes has a feel for spin and deception that few can match.

Over his last two starts, though, he's gone to another level. On Monday night, that took the form of six shutout innings against one of the league's best offenses, as he held the Brewers to five hits and two walks while striking out eight. It wasn't the sinker that did the heavy lifting, though. Rather, Holmes dominated Milwaukee with a pitch he barely had when he arrived in Chicago early last month: the cutter.

Although he naturally supinates (the direction of forearm turn that should make a cutter pretty easy to learn), Holmes didn't throw a cutter at all until 2025. He's an outlier in many ways, and the same unique way of releasing the ball that allows him to throw a heavy sinker from a four-seamer slot made the cutter feel both uncomfortable and unnecessary. As he transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation after signing with the New York Mets before 2025, however, Holmes wanted to deepen his arsenal, so he mixed in the cutter—not a lot; just enough to keep hitters guessing a little. It really just replaced his slider, which had become redundant once he developed his sweeper.

It didn't become a significant part of his arsenal, though, because his sinker, sweeper and kick-change were good enough to obviate it. That remained true early this season. While with the Mets, he barely threw the cutter at all.

But the Cubs, who had serious interest in Holmes when he was a free agent, felt that pitch would play for him, and as soon as he arrived via trade on August 3, they started the conversation. It didn't immediately become an important pitch for him, but he brought it along in bullpen sessions and found ways to sneak it in during games. Then, starting with his previous outing in Arizona, the pitch moved toward the center of the stage.

Holmes's sinker is tough to hit, no matter what. If you're sitting on it, though, it can be fouled off somewhat consistently. It's also a tough pitch to command, and if hitters can reliably spot it, that can mean some hitter-friendly counts and walks, even though Holmes has good control, overall. As it turns out, the cutter is the cure to all of that.

Against the Brewers, Holmes threw 22 cutters. William Contreras managed to flare one line-drive single. Otherwise, it was a boon for the veteran righty. He induced six whiffs on 12 swings against it, and got six called strikes on the 10 cutters at which Brewers batters didn't offer. He threw it as a strike-to-ball pitch, both running away from righties (he struck out Jackson Chourio with it twice) and to the back foot of lefties (goodbye, Christian Yelich).

It remains to be seen whether Holmes will command this pitch this well on a regular basis; Monday night was an extraordinary (and, alas, probably rare) bit of mastery. But adding this to his repertoire makes him reliably better—and, specifically, less susceptible to the vagaries of variance. With the cutter playing this big a role in his arsenal, Holmes should be better able to navigate nights on which his sinker isn't behaving exactly as he'd like, and he also gains a higher ceiling. In fact, this version of Holmes—sinker, cutter, sweeper, changeup, the command and movement profiles being what they are—is the very thing the Cubs have longed for and lacked for most of the last two years: a true playoff-caliber ace.

That has a chance to radically alter the team's outlook as they head into the postseason, of course. Cutter-added Holmes can keep you in a game even against Tarik Skubal or Jacob Misiorowski, even if he won't overpower opponents in quite the same way. The Cubs need to have real success in the playoffs this time around, and this development gives them a better chance to do so. However, it could also yield longer-term rewards. The team has always liked Holmes, and they told him so when he was a free agent. After this taste of the environment around the team and the immediate success of emphasizing the altered cutter, a contract extension that keeps Holmes around beyond his opt-out at the end of this season feels eminently possible.

Chicago traded top infield prospect Jefferson Rojas for Holmes and Tyrone Taylor. That was a bold stroke, and something of an all-in gesture by the team. They lost that bet, in a sense, because they were surely making a play for the division title, and they're not going to win that. They'll have to win a Wild Card Series again, just to get to the meaty part of the postseason. However, if Holmes is as good as he's looked; if the relationship between the two sides continues to go so well; and if he sticks around past 2026, the trade to land him could look like another all-timer at the expense of the Mets. It could be the pivot point at which, finally, the Cubs caught a break and made the most of it.