Guardians bullpen weapon, Mike Clevingers return and Terry Franconas dream -

CLEVELAND — Terry Francona sometimes wakes up in a rotten mood, until he checks the contents of his mouth.

“Another tooth,” he said.

It’s his recurring dream: Francona can feel a tooth jostling loose and as he attempts to secure it in place, it escapes from his gums.

“I have the dream once a week,” he said.

As you may remember, before Game 3 of the 2016 ALCS in Toronto, Francona had a veneer pop off while he was chewing tobacco. He asked James Quinlan, Cleveland’s head athletic trainer, to find a dentist he could visit the next day. In the third inning, Quinlan approached Francona, who said, “Tell me you found a dentist.” No, Quinlan just had a player injury update for the manager.

Francona ultimately met with a dentist at 1 a.m. in downtown Toronto. The dentist shoved the tooth back in its spot in Francona’s mouth.

There are various interpretations for dreams about teeth falling out, from stress and anxiety to a lack of self-confidence or embarrassment. The latter explanation doesn’t really apply to the eternally self-deprecating Francona, who shared one other dream he routinely had during his playing career.

“It would always be I couldn’t get to first (base),” he said. “I’d hit the ball and first just kept (moving farther away).”

He paused.

“That might not have been a dream.”

A tear-inducing return

Mike Clevinger allowed three runs in 4 2/3 innings in his first outing since 2020. (Ken Blaze / USA Today)

As a small circle of reporters dispersed, Mike Clevinger stepped toward the visitors clubhouse at Progressive Field, wiped tears from his eyes with his brown sweatshirt and stood in place for several minutes to collect himself.

Clevinger hadn’t stood atop a major-league mound since October 2020. He underwent Tommy John surgery the following month — his second elbow reconstruction operation — and his long, winding path back to the big leagues ended at a familiar destination, the same mound he spent the first five seasons of his career.

So when Clevinger was asked Wednesday in the bowels of the ballpark to detail his comeback journey, he choked up, put his head down for a minute and then said: “I wasn’t sure I was going to pitch again. This is big.”

Clevinger dueled his old pal, Zach Plesac, in the first tilt of a doubleheader on a brisk, mist-filled day beside Lake Erie, conditions that prompted Clevinger to tell Cleveland pitching coach Carl Willis, “It’s like I didn’t miss a thing.” He and Plesac grabbed dinner Monday night, which would have been the eve of their battle until Mother Nature intervened, resulting in a postponement Tuesday. That left Clevinger “staring at my hotel ceiling for hours” Tuesday night, “just waiting on this day.”

‘The bottom falls out’

Bryan Shaw doesn’t want any credit for Trevor Stephan’s devastating splitter, which has vaulted the second-year reliever from roster stowaway to growingly trustworthy setup man (despite his first misstep of the season on Wednesday).

“I have no comment on Trevor Stephan’s splitter,” Shaw told The Athletic. “It’s really good. That’s all I have.”

Let’s start here: Shaw showed Stephan the grip for the pitch, the same way J.J. Putz, the former Arizona closer, taught Shaw that pitch a decade ago. Shaw tried to throw the pitch early in his career, but for every one effective splitter, he’d toss seven or eight clunkers.

“He’s been able to make it really good all the time,” Shaw said.

Stephan, plucked from the Yankees system in the Rule 5 draft before the 2021 season, ranks at or near the top of the league leaderboard in just about every noteworthy category, which explains why his ERA remained spotless until he surrendered two runs Wednesday. Entering the day, the right-hander ranked in the 89th percentile or better in opponent exit velocity, walk rate (that’ll take a hit), strikeout rate, whiff rate, fastball velocity and a slew of expected stats that are dictated by opposing hitters’ quality of contact.

It’s the splitter, a pitch he started toying with last summer, that has made the difference. Instead of twiddling his thumbs while sitting in the bullpen, he started fidgeting with his index and middle fingers until he pinpointed a comfortable placement on the baseball. The pitch has added a new dimension to his arsenal and made him exponentially more difficult for batters to conquer.

“It’s a fastball for a long time,” catcher Austin Hedges said, describing the pitch’s appearance from a hitter’s perspective. “That’s the beauty of the splitter: It comes out hard like a heater and then, obviously, there’s the speed differential and the bottom falls out.”

Stephan tossed the splitter only 8 percent of the time last season, and almost exclusively to lefties, instead using his slider as a secondary pitch. This year, he has gained so much confidence in the pitch, he’s thrown it just about equally to lefties and righties and, overall, four times as often as he did in 2021.

His average fastball clocks in at 96.2 mph. His splitter registers at 87.1 mph, and hitters whiff at it on nearly half of their attempts to make contact. Stephan tunnels the two pitches, throwing them from the same angle to trick hitters into thinking the splitter is the fastball, which might explain why Oakland’s Chad Pinder offered at one that bounced before it reached the plate last weekend.

“The only way to get better with it is to throw it,” Stephan said. “It’s a confidence thing, getting used to throwing it right-on-right or in certain counts, just trusting that you can throw a pitch around the zone to get a swing-and-miss or get weak contact.”

Nine players have swung and missed at a Stephan splitter for strike three this season. The list of casualties includes Mike Trout, Tim Anderson, José Abreu and Bobby Witt Jr.

“I think that’s opened up different avenues for him to attack different places with his fastball and not rely on his slider so much,” bullpen coach Brian Sweeney said.

Hedges thought last season that Stephan could develop into “an elite big-league reliever” with just his fastball and slider.

“I think his slider is that good,” Hedges said.

And now?

“Now, I don’t feel like calling for the slider ever because he has such an elite weapon,” Hedges said.

Only two of Stephan’s 34 pitches Wednesday were sliders.

As for the one player to “solve” Stephan’s splitter? San Diego’s Jurickson Profar, facing an 0-2 count, offered a checked swing at a splitter that missed the strike zone by a few zip codes. His unintentional contact resulted in an RBI double down the left-field line.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant

Hedges compared Stephan to Kirby Yates, the former San Diego closer who was an All-Star in 2019 with a 1.19 ERA, a league-leading 41 saves and 101 strikeouts in 60 innings. Yates spent about six weeks in Cleveland’s organization during the winter preceding the 2016 season, long before he emerged as a dominant reliever.

“He didn’t have the splitter yet,” Hedges said.

Yates added the pitch to his repertoire in 2017, and it was an instant success, as hitters went 1-for-34 with 28 strikeouts against it that season.

“That guy was one of the best relievers in baseball for a couple years,” Hedges said. “The seasons he had, some of the stuff we were able to do, it’s given me some thoughts on how I can call Stephan’s game. As long as he keeps executing like he is, I can call similar games to how I did for Kirby.”

Stephan prioritized improving his hip mobility over the winter, which has allowed him to repeat his delivery more consistently. He uses a core velocity belt each day, a contraption that holds a pitcher’s waistline in place to point out errors in the delivery and reinforce more efficient patterns, something Sweeney and former assistant pitching coach Ruben Niebla encouraged last year.

Stephan made 43 appearances for Cleveland in 2021, often in mop-up duty. At times, he went more than a week without pitching. His strikeout rate was strong, but his walk and home run rates were too high to convince the coaching staff he deserved higher-leverage opportunities.

Now, he almost exclusively pitches in the late innings, and usually when the score is close.

“There were times last year when you wondered, ‘Is this guy going to figure it out?’” Sweeney said. “But you keep teaching, keep talking to him, have the conversations, let him grow. He needed failure to understand that he had to get better. That’s the best teacher, right? Failure. He learned what it took to be a major-league reliever, and now he’s showing he’s a pretty good one.”

And that pleases Shaw, even if he’s slightly — and mostly light-heartedly — envious.

“Always the proud uncle,” Shaw said.

(Top photo of Trevor Stephan: Frank Jansky / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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