SEOUL-- Three starts into the 2022 season, Drew Rucinski of the NC Dinos leads the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) with a miniscule 0.45 ERA. Remarkably, the right-hander has not yet walked a batter while striking out 21 in 20 innings. He has allowed just one earned run so far this year.
But Rucinski has won only one of those three outings, and suffered his first loss of the season on Thursday, despite holding the Kiwoom Heroes to a run in six innings. The Dinos dropped that game 1-0, already the fourth time that they have been shut out this year in 11 games.
With Rucinski on the mound, the Dinos have managed just 1.33 runs per game. They have only scored a grand total of 25 runs in 11 games, the fewest in the KBO, and so it's not as though their hitters have been giving other pitchers more run support.
Rucinski is one of seven pitchers with a sub-1.00 ERA through Thursday's action, and he isn't the one with the toughest luck in that group.
Rucinski's counterpart in Thursday's game, right-hander An Woo-jin, lowered his ERA to 0.90 after shutting down the Dinos over seven dominant innings. It was An's second consecutive scoreless start.
But the Heroes only gave the hard-throwing ace one run in support. Last Friday, when An pitched seven shutout innings against the Samsung Lions, the Heroes also eked out just one run.
In An's Opening Day start on April 2, the Heroes also scored once against the Lotte Giants while An was still in the game. They lost that game 7-2.
The Heroes boast two other starters with an ERA below 1.00: Eric Jokisch with 0.71 and Choi Won-tae with 0.73. Both have a 1-0 record, but have taken a vastly different path. While the Heroes have scored just 1.5 runs per Jokisch start, they have put 5.5 runs on the board with Choi on the mound, putting the right-hander tied for second place in that department.
Leading the way is Samsung Lions' starter Yang Chang-seop, who has received 6.5 runs in support across his two starts. He is a perfect 2-0 with a 0.75 ERA.
Rucinski finds himself in a familiar territory. In his first KBO season in 2019, Rucinski posted a 3.05 ERA to rank eighth in the league and led the league with two complete games. But he only had a 9-9 record in 30 starts.
The Dinos had given Rucinski only 2.63 runs in support, 22nd among 26 qualified starters. The league average was 3.35 runs.
In 2020, Rucinski had the exact same ERA of 3.05, also in 30 starts. And his win-loss record improved to 19-5. That season, the Dinos scored 4.63 runs per Rucinski start. That was the second-highest total in the KBO, nearly a full run better than the league average of 3.69.
The Dinos won the Korean Series title in 2020, but missed the postseason altogether in 2021, despite Rucinski doing his usual things: going 15-10 with a 3.17 ERA in 30 starts, once again ranking among the KBO leaders in wins, ERA, innings pitched and strikeouts.
Rucinski is up to his old tricks in 2022 as one of the KBO's most reliable and consistent starters. He just needs his teammates to step up.
Source: Yonhap News Agency