*This article was originally published here on Medium.com*
Aaron Brooks has been one of the best and most consistent pitchers in the KBO this season, posting a 3.13 FIP and 2.42 ERA, marks that rank 3rd and 5th-best in the league respectively. I’ve written about him before and I find his pitch arsenal fascinating: his sinker and changeup have so much side-to-side break on them that it feels like he has them tied to the end of the string. On top of that, he’s got a power slider, a 4-Seam fastball around 94 mph, and a curveball. He throws a ton of pitches in the zone and gets a phenomenal amount of ground balls and weak contact.
In Brooks’ start today, he continued his dominance, throwing just 95 pitches over eight innings, allowing one run and striking out six LG Twins batters. Roberto Ramos was K’ed by Brooks twice and grounded out weakly in his third at-bat. That’s a fascinating matchup; Ramos ranks 14th in the KBO with a wRC+ of 140 and 3rd in the league with 19 HRs in addition to his AAA success with the Rockies in 2019, hitting 30 HRs and slashing 0.309/0.400/0.580, albeit with the Albuquerque Isotopes at altitude. Regardless, Ramos is a remarkable power hitter (a prolific K-guy, with a K% of 25.4% that is the 5th-worst in the KBO) and I was extremely interested to see how the matchup between these two turned out.
Needless to say, with 2 K’s and a groundout, Brooks won. But how did he do it? Basically, he threw heaters high and offspeed pitches low, getting a mix of swings and misses and calls on the edge.
Ramos’ first at-bat came with one-out in the second inning and no one on-base. Brooks starter him off with a 12–6 curveball that starter at Ramos’s letters and ended in the dirt, coming in at 80 mph. Ramos swung over it and came nowhere near to getting the barrel on the ball.
It might sound hyperbolic, but the second that Ramos swung and missed on that pitch, there was no way he was winning that at-bat. Brooks’ curveball serves as a change of pace pitch/chase pitch that he throws about 6% of the time. Getting a swing and miss on that as his first pitch is the best-case scenario for Brooks, freeing him up to use his full arsenal of sinker, slider, 4-seam, and changeup against Ramos the rest of the at-bat.
Next, Brooks clipped the edge of the zone with a sinker that darted back, getting him a called strike from the umpire and putting him up on Ramos 0–2. At that point, Brooks could throw any pitch he wanted with Ramos on the defensive. He chose to throw another high sinker, up and in around 93 mph which set up his swing and miss attack.
Brooks’ fourth offering to Ramos was a tight slider that came in at 88 mph, starting at the belt and dropping to almost the same exact point at his previous whiff on the curveball. After serving Ramos two straight sinkers up in the zone and being ahead in the count 1–2, Ramos looked completely unprepared for a slider down. Brooks elevated Ramos’ focus and sped his bat up so he couldn’t slow down to hit the breaking pitch down.
During Ramos’ second trip to the plate, Brooks went right at him again, this time not bothering with any offspeed pitches. The first pitch is a belt-high sinker that Ramos takes for a called strike. Brooks comes back with another sinker up and in that’s off the plate and gets called a ball.
At this point, tied in the count at 1–1, Ramos surely knows a couple of things: A) Brooks got him with two offspeed pitches earlier and B) Brooks loves his changeup against LHH with its 31% Whiff rate against LHH and C) he hasn’t seen a single changeup in two at-bats. Ramos is almost certainly thinking that Brooks is throwing an offspeed or breaking pitch on pitch three.
Brooks doesn’t.
Instead, Brooks maybe gets away with one, throwing a belt-high 94 mph 4-seam fastball that ends up over the middle of the plate. But Ramos doesn’t even swing, putting Brooks ahead in the count 1–2.
If you’re keeping count, Brooks has now thrown Ramos seven pitches in this game, five fastballs up in the zone and two breaking pitches for whiffs. And there’s been no hint of Brooks’ changeup yet. I expected to see a changeup that broke down and away from Ramos and I think Ramos did too.
Brooks took advantage of that expectation and threw one more 4-seamer on the upper inside corner of the plate to Ramos, blowing it by him at 94 mph. Ramos’ swing was late and went over the top of the ball and he headed back to the dugout following his second K of the evening.
That’s how Brooks got one of the most dangerous hitters in the KBO to strike out twice on just eight total pitches, all without throwing his best pitch against LHH. Of course, when Ramos came back up in the eighth-inning, Brooks threw him a first-pitch changeup and Ramos grounded out softly to second base.
Sometimes just the threat of a wipeout pitch is just as effective as the pitch itself. Brooks proved that against Ramos, mixing his approach from at-bat one to at-bat two to get three whiffs and two strikeouts against Roberto Ramos.