Why Emmanuel Clase’s cutter is one of MLB’s most unhittable pitches

The most dominant reliever in Major League Baseball has been waiting, and now it’s time for Emmanuel Clase to take the postseason stage.

Clase, on the back of one of the greatest reliever seasons of all time — 47 saves and a 0.61 ERA — will be looming at the back of the Guardians bullpen when Cleveland begins the American League Division Series against the Tigers on Saturday.

He’ll be armed with one of the most devastating pitches in baseball: Clase’s 100 mph cutter, the hardest cutter in history. Clase’s cutter was the most valuable cutter in the big leagues in 2024 — ahead of Corbin Burnes’ — and a top-three most valuable pitch, period, along with teammate Cade Smith’s four-seamer and Chris Sale’s slider.

Clase’s cutter makes him the definition of a “you know what’s coming, and you still can’t hit it” pitcher. He threw his cutter 78% of the time during the regular season, the heaviest single-pitch usage rate in baseball after Kenley Jansen’s cutter and Michael Kopech’s four-seamer. That’s how elite of a pitch it is.

First, Clase’s cutter has the extreme velocity and ride through the strike zone to compete with the best rising four-seamers across the Major Leagues — he averaged 99.5 mph on his cutter in 2024, threw 276 cutters 100 mph or harder and topped out at 103.0 mph.

Except it also cuts. Clase’s high over-the-top delivery gives his cutter that sharp, tight break it needs to create deception, not just power.

Clase has the highest arm slot of any closer in the 2024 postseason, with an average arm angle of 57 degrees (zero degrees would be perfectly sidearm).

Clase’s combination of velocity and break also mean Clase can throw different versions of his cutter to beat any hitter in any situation. He can throw it more like a power fastball, or more like a wipeout slider, or anywhere in between.

Let’s use MLB’s Gameday 3D tracking technology to show just what batters are dealing with when they step into the box against Clase. See for yourself why Clase’s cutter is unhittable.

Here are the five styles of Clase cutters he’s going to unleash this postseason — and what they look like to a hitter.

1) The “high heat, but it’s a cutter”

The No. 1 weapon for a prototypical power pitcher is the high fastball, the one that great aces of this generation like Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander have harnessed. Clase has the high cutter. And it comes at the hitter faster than almost every great four-seamer.

Clase can use the high cutter to overpower even the game’s best hitters, like his game-ending strikeout of Bobby Witt Jr. on June 4 on a 99.6 mph cutter at the top edge of the strike zone.

He can use it to win power vs. power matchups against dangerous home run hitters like Adolis García — Clase fanned García with a 100.3 mph elevated cutter on May 13.

Clase’s raw velocity would be enough to blow away hitters upstairs even if his cutter didn’t cut, even if it was just a true four-seamer. But it does cut. This one vs. Matt Wallner broke six inches in toward his hands … and it was 100.8 mph.

2) The front-door/backdoor dotted cutter

Clase is not just power. He can locate his cutter to both sides of the plate. And how can a hitter cover the entire breadth of the strike zone against a pitch that’s in triple digits, with movement?

Here’s one strikeout to each edge of the plate.

The first one is Clase striking out Carlos Correa with a 100.3 mph front-door cutter, with four inches of cut that brought it in right under Correa’s hands to the inside part of the zone. Correa is a great hitter, but not even his hands were quick enough to get to that pitch.

The second is Clase going to the back door against Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — spotting up a 101.1 mph cutter right on the low-outside corner even at that extreme velocity. Guerrero was frozen in the box, an easy punchout for Clase.

3) The “wipeout slider”-style cutter

Clase throws an actual slider. A good slider. A 91 mph slider that is a nasty strikeout pitch in its own right. But his cutter can also work like a slider — a slider that comes in at 100 mph instead of 90.

When Clase throws his cutter down and away to righties, off the corner of the plate, it looks a whole lot like the power sliders thrown by aces like Jacob deGrom. But it’s even harder.

Like the 100.0 mph cutter that started on the outside edge and dove below the zone to get Royce Lewis on Sept. 16. Or the 100.2 mph cutter he spun way off the plate to get a “sword” from the Angels’ Zach Neto on May 25 — the awkward half-swing a batter only produces when he’s completely fooled.

4) The lefty dead-zone cutter

Pitchers with wipeout sliders love to attack righties down and away as a chase pitch. And they can go to the same corner of the plate against lefties — the down-and-in “dead zone” beneath the danger zone of a lefty slugger’s swing — if their command is good enough and the snap on their slider is sharp enough.

Clase’s cutter lets him do that, too. He can strike out left-handed hitters just as easily with a dead-zone cutter down-and-in as he can with triple-digit heat upstairs.

He got Willi Castro on one such cutter to help him escape a bases-loaded jam on Aug. 11 — a 102.2 mph dead-zone power cutter, his fastest cutter K of the season. He got Nicky Lopez on a different type of dead-zone cutter on April 8 — “only” 97.7 mph, but with eight inches of horizontal break, his most cut on a cutter K this season.

5) The “You have no chance” bully cutter

Major League hitters are the best hitters in the world. If you throw a pitch right down the middle, they can usually hit it, even against a great pitcher.

But when you have a unique pitch like Clase’s cutter, all that goes out the window. Clase can challenge a hitter with a cutter right down Broadway, and win.

We’ll leave you with one last cutter strikeout to show you how that goes. This one was 100.7 mph from Clase vs. the Rangers’ Josh Jung on Aug. 25, an outing in which he struck out the side, all on cutters. Clase pumped in a true middle-middle cutter to Jung, right in the heart of the strike zone. And Jung wasn’t even close.

Against Clase, sometimes — well, a lot of the time — you just have no chance.