Cleveland Baseball Countdown, No. 5: Corey Kluber, the poker-faced ace

Editor’s note: This story is part of the Cleveland Baseball Countdown, a series of 30 features on the club’s 30 best players of the past 30 years.

You could never tell if Corey Kluber had just spun a complete-game shutout, if he had captured a Cy Young Award, or if he had just slammed his pinky toe on a coffee table. Centuries from now, art connoisseurs will examine a depiction of Kluber’s patented stoic expression — on a plaque in Heritage Park, let’s say — the same way they dissect every brushstroke of the Mona Lisa.

OK, maybe not, but Kluber was a master at concealing his emotions during his nine years in Cleveland, with no better example than when he joined an in-game broadcast for an interview. As he sat at the end of the dugout, teammates would shower him with seeds, water, baby powder — any solid or liquid handy that might cause the ace to crack a smile.

Nothing.

He remained unfazed, unwavering, even when walking off the mound after manager Terry Francona lifted him from a start worthy of a standing ovation. He’d always say he wasn’t giving the fans a cold shoulder as they rose to their feet to demonstrate their appreciation. He just needed more time to escape the zone he entered for each outing, to find that portal back from pitcher Narnia, to switch out of tunnel vision and back into his contact lenses.

The irony of Kluber’s character — and perhaps this is what made him the perfect candidate — is he was the clubhouse’s chief prankster. One of his better operations: supplying the team with orange T-shirts that read JK Construction Co.: I break it. You fix it. Those spread from one locker to another after a Jason Kipnis slump-induced episode of destruction.

Mired in the throes of a rebuild in 2010, the Indians attempted to salvage something for the final couple months of Jake Westbrook’s contract. They concocted a three-team trade with the Cardinals and Padres, and in exchange for the soon-to-be 33-year-old Westbrook, Cleveland’s front office tabbed a kid whose strikeout rate caught their eye, even though they couldn’t locate his name as they shuffled through one top prospect list after another. He was 24 and still pitching in Double A, but a lottery ticket was better than nothing.

Kluber, meanwhile, dialed his parents when he learned about the trade. He delivered the news in his typical cadence, monotone and unmoved.

His dad, Jim, laughed and said, “You’re kidding.” And then, Jim, a Cleveland native who attended Mayfield High, celebrated. The rest of Cleveland would celebrate the trade before long, too.

Kluber’s decorated near-decade with the franchise was defined by awards, October appearances and gaudy workloads. For five consecutive seasons (2014-18), he topped both the 200-inning and 200-strikeout marks. Eleven Cleveland pitchers have recorded those numbers in one season (amounting to 27 instances in all). Only Kluber, Bob Feller and Sam McDowell have done it more than three times. Only Kluber has done it for five consecutive seasons.

That’s the sort of statistic that guarantees he’ll have a spot in the team’s Hall of Fame one day. It’s the sort of stat that might compel him to offer a split-second smirk.

In that five-year stretch, he ranked second in the majors (behind only Max Scherzer) with 1,091 innings pitched, fourth in the majors (behind Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Clayton Kershaw) with a 2.85 ERA, third in the majors (behind Scherzer and Chris Sale) with 1,228 strikeouts, and third in the majors (behind Scherzer and Kershaw) with 30.3 fWAR.

He ranks third in team history in strikeouts, behind Feller and McDowell, and not being higher is more a product of his shorter tenure than his effectiveness. He sits atop the franchise leaderboard for strikeouts per nine innings and strikeout-to-walk ratio (that one by a massive margin).

Kluber uncorked cutter after cutter and two-seamer after two-seamer and wicked-curveball-slider-thing after wicked-curveball-slider-thing until his right arm tapped out. During Cleveland’s desperate dash to Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Kluber never hesitated when asked to pitch on short rest to rescue the club’s reeling rotation. Until the last gasp of that magical postseason run, he defied the blinking gas light perched above his right shoulder.

A few months after his December 2019 departure, as Kluber and I reflected on his tenure, he said he cherished the playoff assignments more than any regular season masterpiece he designed or the two Cy Young awards he claimed. That includes the May 2015 evening when he matched Feller’s longstanding team record of 18 strikeouts in a game, which he piled up in only eight innings … on the same day Feller’s wife visited the ballpark to snip a red ribbon to unveil a shrine full of her late husband’s keepsakes that had been relocated from the defunct Bob Feller Museum to the Progressive Field terrace club.

No, it’s the October endeavors he’ll remember most, even though they didn’t all go according to script. In Kluber’s first five playoff starts in 2016, he posted a 0.89 ERA. In four playoff starts after that — and, admittedly, it’s unfair to include Game 7 of the 2016 Series in this, given he was pitching on fumes and on repeated short rest — he posted a 10.20 ERA. Had Cleveland emerged triumphant in Game 7, Kluber’s month would have joined the collection of most epic efforts in the city’s sports history.

Track down a snapshot of Kluber immediately following any of those starts, though. Here’s betting his facial expression won’t disclose how he fared.

The Cleveland Baseball Countdown is a series of features on the club’s 30 best players of the past 30 years. There surely will be debate about the rankings. I tried to balance longevity with dominance, but this is an inexact science. Feel free to spout off in the comments with your frustrations about where I placed Albert Belle or how I omitted Ryan Garko. Just please keep it lighthearted. This isn’t a definitive ranking. It’s supposed to be fun. Throughout the series, we’ll have some bonus pieces, extra anecdotes, honorable mentions, one-year wonders and more.

• No. 30: José Mesa• No. 29: Travis Fryman• No. 28: Andrew Miller• No. 27: Shin-Soo Choo• No. 26: Asdrúbal Cabrera• No. 25: David Justice• No. 24: Shane Bieber• No. 23: Cody Allen• No. 22: Jason Kipnis• No. 21: Cliff Lee• No. 20: Carlos Carrasco• No. 19: Bartolo Colon• No. 18: Charles Nagy• No. 17: Victor Martinez• No. 16: Sandy Alomar Jr.• No. 15: Carlos Baerga• No. 14: Carlos Santana• No. 13: Travis Hafner• No. 12: Michael Brantley• No. 11: Roberto Alomar• No. 10: Grady Sizemore• No. 9: Omar Vizquel• No. 8: CC Sabathia• No. 7: Francisco Lindor• No. 6: Albert Belle

(Photo of Corey Kluber in 2017: Bill Kostroun / Associated Press)