Anthony Swarzak: “I Would Love to Be a Starter”

Written by Tom Schreier

Nothing’s promised; nothing’s guaranteed to anybody. I wish I could go back and sit myself down in 2004-05 and slap myself in the face and kind of shed some light on this situation and how the world really works. — Anthony Swarzak, July 24, 2014

 

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it

Anthony Swarzak’s biggest regret as a baseball player is that he was not more professional earlier in his career with the Minnesota Twins. He’s a good pitcher now, owning a 3-2 record last season with a 2.91 ERA, but he is a long reliever — a position he adopted at age 26, midway through the 2012 season.

The Twins were in need of a good long reliever, of course, with all the poor starts that came as a result of a busted rotation the year before. Not only did his core numbers improve when he became a full-time reliever — he was 3-6 with a 5.03 ERA in 2012, the last season he was a starter — but his peripherals were off the charts. His ERA+, which adjusts for each ballpark, jumped from 82 to 139. His fielding independent pitching (FIP), which is a predictor for standard ERA, went from 4.79 to 3.28. And his walks and hits per innings pitched (WHIP) decreased from 1.417 to 1.156.

Not only did he improve his personal stats, but he also filled a need with the Twins and secured a roster spot for himself in his mid-20s, a time that’s usually do-or-die for a player at any position.

Swarzak says that he is happy so long as he has a jersey next to his locker each morning and insists that he’ll do whatever it takes to stay in the major leagues. He also backs it up with his work ethic and willingness to play — and succeed — in just about any circumstance. He comes in with runners on and a close lead on one day and then pitches in a blowout the next, he’ll pitch 10 or 40 pitches depending on how long he’s needed and he’ll make a spot start if he has to. But no matter how much success he’s had as a long reliever, he desperately wants to be a starter again.

And everyone in the Twins organization knows it.

“Swarzak, he wants to start,” says fellow reliever Brian Duensing, who was drafted in 2005, a year after Swarzak. “He always talks about how he thinks he can start, so we always give him a hard time about it.”

“He’s always talked about wanting to start,” says general manager Terry Ryan. “He’s talked about it for the better part of the last couple years.”

“He still wants to give it a shot and see if he can do it,” says closer Glen Perkins, a converted starter who was drafted the same year as Swarzak. “But at the same time, he had a really good year last year, and he’s been really good this year.”

Management’s thinking in this situation is: if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. It’s a good philosophy to have, and the Twins appear to be sticking with it. Swarzak wasn’t good as a starter earlier in his career, he has a crucial role out of the bullpen and there’s no sense in changing a good thing. Even after a solid spot start on July 23 when he threw over 70 pitches in five innings, allowing only two hits and one run, he was given no indication that he would get another opportunity to join the rotation, even with Ricky Nolasco on the disabled list, Kyle Gibson questionable for his upcoming start and Kevin Correia struggling.

It is also a unique Catch-22: With the current starters banged up or struggling, the team needs new starters, but because they are struggling, the team also needs good long relievers.

The other aspect of this is that removing Swarzak shakes things up in the bullpen — the Twins’ only strength this year. For the most part, the core has been there for a while: Perkins as the closer, Casey Fien or Jared Burton as the set-up man and then Duensing and Caleb Thielbar rounding this off. Many of the relievers say that their success over the past few seasons has been because they have the same cast of characters.

“We’ve had a pretty consistent group of guys,” says Perkins, “so you don’t like to see guys leave. We like to have our guys stay, and we’ve had our success out there.”

“He’s a good guy to have out there,” says Duensing of Swarzak. “He’s always laid back and always joking around, which is like all of us, but he just fits in. The whole bullpen, as a whole, really jells well.”

And, from the looks of it, that’s where Swarzak will stay.

Learning to be a professional

Swarzak dominated hitters in high school and says that he was not very coachable when he was starting out, believing that he could get by on his stuff alone. “Ignorance,” he says when asked what held him back as a starter. “I’m not joking, man. I got drafted out of high school, second round, and pretty much had my way with guys in the first few levels in the minor leagues.”

He says he floated through the organization, just going through the motions while continuing to get starts and progress towards the next level. “I never really tried to” — he pauses, trying to find the right way to put it — “I never really tried to take that next step as a professional.”

He pitched well in the lower leagues in his first year and a half and wasn’t challenged until he reached High-A. It was during his second go-round with the Fort Myers Miracle that he realized he was no longer the best pitcher in the league — or even on his own team. Matt Garza and Kevin Slowey, two future major leaguers that were drafted out of college, were ahead of him in the rotation, and as a 20 year old, he tried to emulate their style in order to share in their success.

“I’m watching these guys pitch, college guys, and they were so good, and they made that league look so easy,” says Swarzak. “I tried to do what they were doing, and I kind of fell behind a little bit, trying to do things I wasn’t supposed to be doing.” He wanted to throw 97 mph with a hard slider like Garza and fill up the strike zone with dynamic pitches like Slowey. “Both of those guys are college guys, so I think being a high school kid coming into professional baseball and then having a couple college kids (Garza went to Fresno State, Slowey went to Winthrop University) that may have had a little more experience pitching is a good thing,” says Duensing. “He’s still got that picture in his mind of how he wants to be and that’s good. As long as he has that thought process and that drive in his head of where he wants to be and what he wants to do, he’ll be successful.”

On the other hand, the ambition to play like the two guys ahead of him in the rotation put Swarzak out of his element. “Early in my career I’d grab a four-seamer and grip the ball as hard as I could and try and throw it as hard as I could,” he says. “I’d fly out of my delivery and yeah, it might say 94-95 mph, but the ball is playing different from a hitter’s standpoint.”

“You never want to be a clone of anybody else, and everyone throws differently — whether they have the same mechanics or not, they’re going to throw differently — and everyone’s stuff is different,” says Duensing. “With Swarzy, I think he’s really finding out what kind of pitcher he is and what his stuff is really capable of and so when you kind of have that balance of, ‘This is who I am, this is who I look up to and want to be,’ you’ve got to kind of pick and choose what you want to take with you from a certain player and he’s doing that.”

“It’s a maturity thing for sure,” admits Swarzak, who was suspended for marijuana use in the minor leagues and fractured two ribs on his left side while engaging in “horseplay” at a party during a TwinsFest in 2013. “As a young guy, you try and be the ace, and at some point in your career you realize that everybody’s an ace, you know what I mean? Everybody’s an ace.”

What he means is that everyone needs to find a niche. Casey Fien uses location and forces contact; Caleb Thielbar uses deception in his delivery; Glen Perkins pounds the zone with his fastball and slider. “Everybody is good in their own way, and you’ve got to be able to harness it and repeat it.”

During Spring Training in 2011 pitching coach Rick Anderson introduced him to the sinker-slider, which has been the key to his success. Anderson noticed the ball wasn’t moving as much as it was before and told him to loosen his grip a little bit and just throw, rather than squeezing the hell out of the ball and trying to control it. “First time I did it, the ball moved like crazy and the velocity jumped up, and I guess, long story short, I was trying too hard in the wrong way,” he says. “And now I know what I need to do to be successful, and I try hard at that.”

 

Nothing is promised

Swarzak has had many influences in his career — he’s learned from starters Francisco Liriano and Carl Pavano, in addition to Anderson — but perhaps the most unexpected is Kevin Correia.

A veteran starter that signed a two-year deal a year ago, Correia has been in the big leagues since 2003 as a member of the San Francisco Giants, San Diego Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates. He was an All-Star with Pittsburgh in 2011, but there is nothing about his game that is flashy, and he owns a career .448 win-loss percentage. He manages to eat innings and get through games, however, and has made more than 25 starts every year since joining his hometown Padres in 2009.

“I learned from watching Kevin Correia over the last couple years,” he says. “His stuff is not overpowering by any means, but the man’s been in the big leagues 10 years now, and he’s been successful, and it’s because he rolls with the punches.” Correia makes adjustments on the fly and is able to figure out what is working for him that day quickly and uses that to his advantage. “And that next time out there, it might not be that same pitch, it might be something else that’s going to work that day,” continues Swarzak. “It’s really a professional approach that I’m trying to take from him.”

When Swarzak first came up in 2009, he was reluctant to change, and it resulted in a demotion to Triple-A, where he spent the entire 2010 season. He says it took a whole team of people to try and figure him out, but what it came down to is Swarzak needed to make adjustments quicker on the fly — a difficult thing to do if he was resistant to change.

“When I first got called up, I was a little overweight. I threw a lot of 4-seam fastballs and didn’t worry about sinking the ball too much,” he says, shaking his head. “I was stubborn and just thought my stuff was going to be good enough. Well, it wasn’t, and then I had to spend a whole other year in Triple-A in 2010.”

It took getting beat up in the minors for him to realize that he had to make an adjustment. He came to Spring Training in 2011 knowing he had to show improvement, and that’s when Anderson introduced him to the sinker-slider. He also says that it was Bobby Cuellar, currently Minnesota’s bullpen coach, who helped him while he was in the minor leagues.

“I’ve known Bobby maybe five or six years now in this organization and he lost sleep over me, many times, especially in 2010 when I was down in Triple-A and couldn’t get anybody out,” says Swarzak. “He racked his brain and we worked on a million different things to try and get me right again, and I owe a lot of it to him and Andy and anybody else who’s come my way.”

Cuellar, who taught Johan Santana his changeup and has served as the pitching coach for Minnesota’s Triple-A affiliate (2003-05, 2009) as well as managing the Double-A club (2008), refused to discuss Swarzak’s possibilities as a starter or his relationship with him for this story. Both Gardenhire and Ryan dismissed any notion that Swarzak would get a regular spot in the rotation and Swarzak acknowledged that he has been given no indication that he would get an extended opportunity to start even after his success as a spot starter on July 23. Still, he holds out hope that he will be a starter again one day.

“I know I can do it; I just know I have it in me to be able to pitch every five days and give the team a chance to win,” he says. “That’s why I keep chugging along every day in the role that I’m in because I know that if you stay positive and get outs, good things happen.”

Time will tell if the Twins give him a second chance, but right now all he can do is wonder about what could have been. “I wish,” he says, “I would have been more of a professional early in my career.”