Baseball’s ‘swept’ Ohtani ball… Ahn Woo-jin and Kwak Bin-do ‘hard work’

A kind of horizontal slider with a lot of left and right movement
Included in ML official statistics this season
Ohtani, 49% use rate this year, ‘main weapon’
swing miss rate 34%… ‘Sweeper’, which means to
sweep,

is sweeping the baseball board just as the name토토사이트 suggests. The craze from the United States is now affecting the KBO league as well. Ahn Woo-jin (Kiwoom), the best pitcher in Korea, said, “Pitchers these days only talk about sweepers when they meet.” Doosan’s Younggun Kwak-bin said, “When I play catch, I practice by throwing a little bit every day.”

A sweeper is a type of horizontal slider. Throwing is a little different. An Woo-jin explained, “I hold a two-seam grip and throw it like a curve throw.” It’s slightly slower than a normal slider, but has a much bigger sideways bend. According to MLB.com, the average velocity of sweepers thrown by major leaguers from last season to this season is 132 km per hour, and the horizontal movement is 38.1 cm. Compared to the average slider, the speed is about 5 km slower, but it bends more than twice. The name “sweeper” came from the fact that it moves so much that it sweeps from one end of the home plate to the outside end.

Eric Peddy, an NC foreign starter, uses a sweeper as one of his main weapons. He learned how to throw in the United States and perfected it this spring in NC training in Arizona, USA.

Peddy calls his sweeper a slub. It is a trajectory somewhere between the slider and the curve.

There are not a few people in MLB who call a sweeper a slob just like Peddy. However, compared to the slub, the sweeper has a smaller drop and is more curved laterally. Baseball Savant, the official MLB statistics site, classifies sweepers and slubs as separate pitches from this season, which have been caught with sliders or curveballs.

The representative runner of sweepers in MLB is, of course, Shohei Ohtani (LA Angels). His sweeper usage rate is 49%, the highest in the league. In Korea, he became famous for the last ball he struck out of Mike Trout in the World Baseball Classic (WBC) final. Ohtani’s sweeper, which has an average speed of 134km and a horizontal movement of 44.45cm, has a hit rate of 0.063 and a whiff% of 34%.

The sweeper isn’t a new pitch. In the past, sidearm pitchers have often used sliders that curve wide to the side. Some of the overhand or three-quarter pitchers, like Yu Darvish and Corey Kluber, have thrown that pitch. The problem is that I didn’t know how the sidearm-like horizontal movement came out at a high arm angle.

With the development of pitch tracking equipment and technology, the secret is being unlocked. The fact that if you use stitches well, you can take a bigger ball movement, has recently been identified as a theory called ‘SSW (Seam Shifted Wake)’, and how to throw a sweeper-like movement is being sorted out. It means that the number of sweepers is greatly increasing as what used to be a vision, such as ‘Jonggatjip Jangmat’, spreads throughout the league as one recipe.

According to MLB.com, there are 99 pitchers who have thrown a sweeper at least once from last season to this season, and the number is expected to increase rapidly.

Baseball is a series of biting and biting competitions between pitchers and batters. Sweeper is its latest endpoint. As sinker bowlers prevailed in combination with highly developed infield shifts, hitters came out with powerful upper wings, and pitchers came out again with high fastballs as counter punches. While attacking the upper part of the strike zone with high-revving four-seams, he distracted hitters with sharp vertical sliders. As batters tried to get used to the high and low attack, pitchers started paying attention to the horizontal movement again. It started to cause more confusion with a ball that curves sideways like a sweeper.

If the upper swing craze fades, will the sweeper trend subside? Starting this season, the major leagues started to check the upper wing by limiting the shift. The intention is to reverse the flow of ‘home run or strikeout’ caused by the upper swing.

Kiwoom foreign pitcher Eric Yokishi said, “In the KBO league, which focuses on level swings, the sweeper will be less effective.” It remains to be seen how far the sweeper wind will lead in MLB and whether the sweeper can emerge as a new weapon in the KBO league.