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April 1, 2015From the very first pitch, Corey Kluber is locked in. He looks straight into the batter’s eyes. When he’s on the mound, Kluber has lifeless, black eyes, like a doll’s. When he comes at a hitter, he does not even seem alive until the pitch bites and those black eyes roll over white. And then, fans hear the terrible high pitch scream of frustration as the grass gets covered in the wood of a bat splintered over a hitter’s knee. All the pounding and hollering does not stop Kluber from ripping those hitters to pieces.
Last Friday, Kluber went up against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Kluber threw a pitch so nasty that Paul Goldschmidt was so frozen that I thought he was asleep. The umpire yelled strike as if to wake him and all Paul could do was bob up and down. He had been bitten by the drop of that curve and was just another strikeout victim.
Kluber’s soul-shaking, knee-buckling stare has become so well-known that Popular Mechanics magazine put him on its cover, playing on his Klubot moniker. Kluber’s joyless expression worked for a mechanical magazine, but when Sports Illustrated decided to use the 2014 Cy Young winner on its MLB Preview cover, they reportedly hired 15 graphic artists from Singapore and kept them on retainer for over a month to craft a smile that would look believable on the pitcher’s face.
It is well known that Corey Kluber rarely allows himself to break into a smile. What is not known is why.
There is a certain darkness that follows Kluber, though he rarely shows it. The great Indians writer and historian Terry Pluto may have be the first to uncover the darkness in Kluber when he broke the story of Corey calling Mark Shapiro on Christmas Eve of 2014. Kluber had reportedly grown frustrated with his stalled contract negotiations, and may have had one too many egg nogs before leaving this message on Mark Shapiro’s voicemail:
Hey Mark! If you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Paul Dolan, the owner of the Cleveland Indians, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there in Hunting Valley with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, baseball-season-flushing, low-life, tiger-licking, dirty-white-sock-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, twin-dog-kissing, brainless, permanent shrinkage, hopeless, heartless, fat-bottomed, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed, yankee-loving, royal sack of monkey dung he is! Hallelujah!
Since then, many local beat reporters have attempted to uncover the answer to Kluber’s blank expression and apparently dark past. To pull the purple curtain away from the mystery, Tribe scribes had to delve deep into the conversations he has had with those who know him best.
The Plain Dealer’s Paul Hoynes talked things over with Indians manager, Terry Francona. Francona has overseen many of Kluber’s greatest professional successes, so Hoynes assumed that he must know the answer behind the pitcher’s stoic nature.
Francona told a story about when he first met Corey Kluber. Francona reportedly told Kluber that he likes to find out where all his players came from because he feels it gives him a better sense of who they really are and allows him to lead them better on the field. He was unprepared, however, for Kluber’s tales of his childhood:
Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving Cordonnerie de Sport owner from Alabama with low grade diabetes and a penchant for chocolate. My mother was a French Canadian artist whose job was to place French stickers next to any sign in English, which was considered an odd occupation in the Deep South.
My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the eephus. Sometimes he would accuse stirrups of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in the Everglades, alligator wrestling lessons. In the spring we’d make scaled versions of cities in origami. When I was insolent I was given a bag of rice wherein I had to throw each piece into a burlap bag situated 25 feet away until I got them all in, pretty standard really.
At the age of two I received my first baseball. At the age of fourteen, a Japanese acupuncturist named Saiko Yudai ritualistically inserted needles into the meridians of my back to balance the flow of energy on my curveball. There really is nothing like an eight inch drop on an 88 mile per hour curveball, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
Indian’s beat writer Jordan Bastian decided to approach Kluber’s catcher, Yan Gomes. Gomes said that the only conversation that rivals the strangeness of any conversation with Trevor Bauer was one that he had with Kluber during Spring Training in 2013.
Gomes jokingly asked Kluber, “Why so serious?” Kluber responded thusly:
ESPN took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to―to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, ESPN knew I was gonna lead the Cleveland Indians into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. They know everything I’m ever gonna do before I know it myself. How’s that?
Every report has come with conflicting answers, so WFNY decided it was best to ask the one who knows him best. His wife, Amanda Kluber, was summoned to put a rest to all of these ridiculous stories.
“You boys are so silly,” Mrs. Kluber said. “He’s just messing with his teammates. Those stories are nonsense. The truth of the matter is that a Corey Kluber smile will change your life forever. So, he saves it for three and only three specific occasions; dates with me, daddy-daughter outings, and a World Series title. Two of those happen fairly regularly, and I think we all know the third will be here soon.
“Or, at least that’s what the ESPN computer model said.”
4 Comments
You guys are really enjoying yourselves today, aren’t you?
Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, kiss my a**.
stop with the awfulness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYx5W-HLf9I