In the midst of his successful first season in South Korea last summer, LG Twins right-hander Adam Plutko somehow found ways to get better.
It didn't seem as though Plutko had much to improve: after all, he finished second in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) with 15 wins and third with a 2.39 ERA.
While going a perfect 4-0 in five starts with a sparkling 1.71 ERA in June last year, Plutko began trying to give his slider more horizontal movement.
In an interview with Yonhap News Agency on Tuesday, Plutko said the light bulb went off after his start against the Giants on the road on June 1, 2022. He'd only given up one earned run in five innings for a win, but he wasn't entirely pleased with his own performance.
"I had looked at my overall numbers. I just felt like I wasn't getting much out of my slider," he said at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul. "I felt like right-handed hitters were doing a good job against me much better than left-handers were. And I felt like I was lacking there. So I really started to go after it and then really understood what it could be this offseason."
The work has paid off this season for Plukto, who has gone a perfect 7-0 in 10 starts. The Twins are 9-0-1 when Plutko toes the rubber.
"I started going for more sweep action movement in June of last season and was pretty successful in doing so," Plutko said. "And I knew that there was going to be an increase going into this season because of the strides I had made with it."
The word "sweep" does a lot of heavy lifting there. Several KBO pitchers have been throwing or have tried to throw the "sweeper," a variation of the conventional slider with more horizontal movement.
NC Dinos ace Erick Fedde owns a league-best 1.47 ERA this season thanks mostly to his sweeper. An Woo-jin of the Kiwoom Heroes, who sits behind Fedde in ERA at 1.87 and leads the KBO with 87 strikeouts, has been trying to add that pitch to his arsenal.
Plutko, whose sweeper averages about 30 centimeters of horizontal movement, said An even asked him to teach him how to throw it when the Heroes visited the Twins in the second week of May. Incidentally, Plukto is third in ERA behind Fedde and An with 2.10.
The sweeper fever picked up steam in March after Los Angeles Angels star Shohei Ohtani threw that pitch to strike out his teammate Mike Trout to help Japan clinch its third World Baseball Classic title over the United States. Statcast, which provides real-time information to Major League Baseball's website and television broadcasts, has started identifying the sweeper as a pitch type this season.
Plutko said his slider is "definitely in that (sweeper) category" based on its movement profile.
"A sweeper is a one-seam slider and that's literally how it comes out," he said. "It spins on its one-seam axis and because of that, it creates a lot of horizontal movement. It's kind of gotten this mystique behind it, but it's just a one-seam slider."
According to the South Korean baseball statistics site Statiz, Plutko is throwing his slider 38.4 percent of the time, up from 24.4 percent last season. His fastball usage rate, meanwhile, has fallen from 51 percent to 40.9 percent. The right-hander also mixes in the curveball, changeup and cutter. This means Plutko doesn't throw anything straight more than half the time.
As for featuring his cutter more often than last year, Plutko said it was part of an adjustment he made with the Twins' new catcher, Park Dong-won, who signed on as a free agent after veteran backstop Yoo Kang-nam joined the Giants in free agency himself.
"Working with Dong-won for the first time, it is something that he really liked," Plutko said. "I bet my cutter percentage versus lefties is much higher than last year, and I bet my cutter percentage versus righties is about the same."
Plutko said he and Park are trying not to lean on the cutter too much against the left-handed batters, after noticing that some lefties in recent games made some hard contact on that pitch.
"I could tell the last two or three starts they started to game-plan for it a little bit more than they had in the past," the pitcher said, referring in particular to a game on May 20 against the Hanwha Eagles. "A couple of lefties for Hanwha had hit some cutters hard on the line. That stuck out in my mind. Maybe we're doing it a little bit too much."
As fate would have it, Plutko will face the Giants on Thursday -- the one-year anniversary of the start that sparked the change with his pitching repertoire. It will be the final game of a highly anticipated three-game series between two of the hottest and two of the best teams in the KBO this year.
The Twins entered the week in first place at 30-16-1, while the better-than-expected Giants were in third place at 26-16, two games back.
The Twins took the first game on Tuesday 3-1 before 20,330 fans, the largest crowd for a Tuesday game this season. The Giants responded with a 7-1 victory Wednesday, with Plutko getting ready to start in the rubber match Thursday night.
"I am excited because, for us, it's another series to get better, another series to continue what we're doing," Plutko said. "It definitely feels like they have a lot of energy coming into the series, trying to really stick it to us and maybe make a statement. But for us, we're just going to play our game and do what we do. We have about 100 games left so there's plenty of season to go, and we need to keep getting better every day."
Source: Yonhap News Agency