GET TO KNOW
Reliever Anthony Swarzak discusses the trade that brought him to the Brewers
The Journal Sentinel’s Todd Rosiak caught up with reliever Anthony Swarzak to discuss the trade that brought him to the Milwaukee Brewers, playing in the Korean Baseball Organization against Eric Thames and his late-career renaissance. Swarzak, 31, has posted a 1.42 ERA and WHIP of 0.789 with four holds and a save in seven appearances for the Brewers. In 48 total appearances including his time with the Chicago White Sox this season, Swarzak is 4-3 with a 2.14 ERA and WHIP of 1.006, with 14 holds and two saves. He was originally acquired from the White Sox on July 26 in exchange for minor-league outfielder Ryan Cordell, and is playing on a one-year deal that’s paying him $900,000.
Q. You’re with your fifth major-league team and have been playing professionally since 2004, yet the deal that brought you to Milwaukee marked the first time that you’d ever been traded. Does that make you an anomaly?
A. It was a different experience. I’ve changed teams a few times, that’s for sure, but I’d never been traded. It’s always a good thing – if you’re doing something to gain interest from other teams and they want you bad enough to make a move for you, it means you have value. That’s a pretty important thing in a career, and I’m glad I’m getting to that level now.
Q. How did the trade go down from your perspective?
A. It was a little hectic. First you see it on the internet as a rumor. I found out about it officially from the White Sox and then the Brewers, which was very professional. They handled it great. But you always see the rumors first. It seems like there’s always leaks on Twitter these days, and that’s
where I saw it first. Once I heard it from both organizations and knew it was the real deal, I started packing up my stuff, called my wife to make sure she knew what was going on. We have a 3year-old girl, so we had to pack up the car. Luckily we only had to drive an hour and a half. It was a very easy transition for me.
Q. What are your early impressions of Milwaukee – the team and the city?
A. I really like the organization a lot. Everybody works hard. I love the city. It’s smaller than Chicago, which is great because it’s a little more manageable. The fans are unbelievable. They’re so passionate about their baseball here. Everybody on the team has been so welcoming. The bullpen has a lot of guys similar to me, who like to fish and hunt and golf. We’ve been talking about all that stuff. I really like the direction this is going.
Q. This is also your first taste of the National League. How do you like it compared to the American League?
A. It is a transition. It’s a little different baseball. You’ve got to worry about that pitcher’s spot in the lineup. From a bullpen standpoint it’s not all about how many pitches does this guy have. Usually that’s all you go on in the American League – what we’re watching develop in the game and then the amount of pitches the pitcher’s getting to, you can kind of start anticipating a move at that point. In the National League there’s a few more factors involved with the pitcher hitting. Other than that, it’s been basically the same.
Q. The first 11 years of your professional career were spent with the Minnesota Twins, but you’ve bounced around quite a bit since then. How would you summarize your baseball journey to this point?
A. It’s hard to group it into one word just because it’s been such a long road. My first professional season was 2004 and you’re looking at 14 years now. It hasn’t always been smooth; there’s been some rocky parts. You’ve just got to keep trusting the process, keep working hard and keep pitching. If I’m going to look back and sum it up, I’m just glad I kept pitching. I didn’t really give up on myself or the game and now here I am, pitching toward the back end of a bullpen in the big leagues and right in the middle of a race for the NL Central. It’s pretty amazing when I look back on it, considering I was in Korea two seasons ago. It’s been a whirlwind.
Q. You spent part of 2015 in Korea, going 5-7 with a 5.26 ERA in 20 appearances (17 starts) with Doosan in the KBO. How did you wind up there?
A. I spent my first 11 years with the Minnesota Twins and once they nontendered me in the offseason (in 2014) I became a free agent for the first time. I signed with Cleveland, made their team out of camp and was pitching OK in the big leagues. A little too much contact in the first six weeks of the season; numbers were respectable. They needed a roster spot for Bruce Chen to come in and start, so I got designated (for assignment). I went to Triple-A for about a month, they made a few moves that didn’t involve me and I got an offer from the KBO to go over for a little bit of coin to finish out the year. I took it. When I look back, I don’t want to say I regret the decision, because I threw a lot of sliders in Korea and I think I might have found something there and I brought it back. So I don’t ever regret anything. But money was a big factor in me going to Korea, and it was the first time in my career I chased money. And that I regret, because coming back here was a little more difficult than I expected. Getting back into the game. I had five years of major-league service time when I came back from Korea. I sign with the New York Yankees and I go to spring training and I meet their GM in the food room one day and he goes, ‘Oh, Swarzak, you’re the guy we signed out of Korea.’ I was like, ‘All right, this is new for me. Let’s work back into this now.’ It was a little bit of a process. But it all worked out, because it made me work harder.
Q. You mentioned the slider. According to Fangraphs.com, you went from throwing them about a quarter of the time in the major leagues to more than half the time after you came back from the KBO. What happened?
A. I tried to talk to a few guys over there about a splitter, because Asia produces some of the best splitters in baseball. It just happens. That didn’t work for me. I tried and tried and tried, and it just wasn’t. I started over there for the first two months and I was two pitches – fastball, slider. Those guys over there know how to put the ball in play, no doubt about it. It’s a very offensive league. So I threw a lot of sliders. And I found something. I found a couple different breaking balls over there, a couple different slider variations, and once I came back over here I decided to go with it and see what happened with this new, developed breaking ball of mine.
Q. So you found success by adapting?
A. My first few years in the big leagues I was a starter and then a long guy. You try to pitch to contact in those situations because generally you’re already down a few runs, your team needs you to go three innings most of the time and you want to be available in the next couple days. So you don’t want to throw 60 pitches in three innings; you’re going to try to throw 30. I was pretty good at that for a few years, but I threw a lot of fastballs. Once again, my contact numbers were very high. Some were outs, some weren’t, but the game was rolling and I was getting the team through it. When I came back from Korea, I was 30 years old and I said, ‘You know what? I’m tired of contact. There’s got to be another way.’ I started looking across the league and some of the best relief pitchers in baseball, their walks are generally high. But their strikeouts are really high. So I said, ‘I know I can throw strikes. Why don’t I try to start throwing more quality balls and see what happens?’ The slider in the dirt took its place, just like that. For a long time as a starter I tried throwing a ball from out of the zone to in the zone. Catch them looking, throw a lot of strikes. As a reliever, you want to throw stuff from in the zone to out of the zone because you don’t want contact. When you start getting swings and misses, you eliminate the chance of fluky contact late in the game. That’s why bullpens are being structured the way they are right now, and I noticed that and said, ‘Maybe a walk isn’t the worst thing.’ Go to the next guy. Groundball double play, you’re out of it. That’s a zero, and your team is winning. That’s been the key to my success this year.
Q. Much has been made of Eric Thames rejuvenating his career in the KBO, and now you’re teammates with him in Milwaukee. How good was he?
A. He was something special over there. Playing against him, all the hype about him over there, it was fun to watch. He just feasted on those guys over there. It was very impressive.
Q. Did you enjoy your experience in Korea?
A. I had my wife over there for a month or so. It was an experience. We got to see Asia and all the history there. Baseball, the game, was so fun. The fans were very passionate. Once you’re in uniform, everybody’s a good guy. You’re all pulling for each other, everybody wants to win, and that was great. But the day-to-day life was just very different. Nobody speaks English. Nobody. You don’t have an interpreter with you 24 hours a day like the Japanese guys do here. When you’re at the field you have an interpreter. When you’re not, you’re on your own. So it was a little difficult.
Q. So did you pick up any of the language out of necessity?
A. I learned how to say, 'baseball,' I learned how to say, ‘thank you,’ and I learned how to say, ‘hello.’ That was it. I’d get in the taxi and I’d say ‘baseball’ in Korean and they’d take me to the stadium.
Q. You were averaging 91.8 mph on your fastball as a 23-year old and now you’re averaging a career-best 94.9 mph less than a month away from your 32nd birthday. How do you explain that?
A. Once again, I feel like something clicked when I felt like I needed to prove myself all over again. I started working out really hard. I started working out more during the season. I think I’m just maintaining my strength longer to be able to keep that average velocity up. At times in the past I’ve hit 95, 96, 97, but I wasn’t pitching at 94, 95. I was pitching at 92, 93 and out of nowhere you’d see a 96 and it’d almost be a mystery. I just felt like I had another gear in me somehow, some way. Watching guys that throw really hard like (Jacob) Barnes and Corey (Knebel) and watching (Aroldis) Chapman and Andrew Miller and (Dellin) Betances (with the Yankees last season), there was stuff they did that I thought I could kind of do with my delivery. I started working on it little by little, and now I’m throwing harder. It’s nice to know the hard work I’m putting in is helping and putting me in the right direction. I thought about going away from some things last year that I was doing with New York because my home run rates were so high (2.9 per nine innings) and my ERA ballooned (5.52). But if you look at the numbers inside of the numbers last year, it was very similar to what’s going on this year except for the homer. I knew I was kind of headed in the right direction with the strikeouts being up and my walks and hits being down. I just had to get better location, and this year I do.