Yesterday, I went over the foreign-born players who ply their trade for five KBO teams. Today, as we continue to ramp up for Opening Day, let’s hit on the other five teams. As before, this is a mix of former 26th men and talented-but-flawed players, some of whom have unlocked new levels of their game in the KBO.

LG Twins

Casey Kelly: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Kelly was a fringy major leaguer who debuted in the majors in 2012 for the Padres and then bounced around the minors for years, sometimes making spot appearances when a team needed an extra starter or bullpen arm. A low-90s fastball and no obvious plus secondary — his closest is probably his two-plane, low-80s curve — simply don’t combine to stop major league hitters.

With the Twins, everything clicked. Kelly put up a stellar 2.55 ERA, which led to a $1.2 million contract with another $300,000 in incentives — Mel Rojas Jr. money. Under the hood, it wasn’t quite as pretty — his RA9 was 3.49 and his FIP was in the threes as well — but that’s still spectacular in a league where 4.6 runs are scored per game.

Like most pitchers in the KBO, Kelly forces opponents to beat him — he struck out 17% of the batters he faced and walked 5.5%. Between that glorious walk rate and a penchant for keeping the ball on the ground, he forced opposing hitters to play his game, and it paid off. This is what KBO teams are hoping for when they bring in a foreign-born pitcher: steady competence that adds up to ace-level numbers.

Tyler Wilson: Before Kelly, there was Wilson. After toiling in the Orioles system for six years with only 145.1 major league innings to show for it, he signed with the Twins before the 2018 season. In juiced-up 2018, he was awesome: a 3.07 ERA, a KBO-Haderesque 21.7% strikeout rate, and only 4.9% walks. He followed it up with a solid 2019, though a little worse after adjusting for the overall run-scoring environment: 18% strikeout rate, 5.6% walks, and tremendous home run suppression. Read the rest of this entry »

The Korean Baseball Organization’s May 5 Opening Day is mere days away, and with 10 teams, the league has a lot of players to learn in a short time if you want to know who you’re watching (assuming a broadcast deal gets worked out).

Luckily, knowledge of Major League Baseball will help out here. Each team is permitted two foreign-born pitchers and one foreign-born batter, and those players are almost always former prospects or fringe big leaguers. If you want to know who to watch in the KBO, players whose names you recognize from bullpen shuttles or part-time fourth outfielder roles are a good way to get started. Today and tomorrow, I’ll profile the foreign-born players on each KBO team. That’s a lot of players, so let’s get right to it, starting alphabetically and working our way through the teams.

Doosan Bears

Chris Flexen: You might know Flexen as an up-and-down Mets reliever. Over parts of three seasons, he pitched 68 not-so-great innings for the Queens club, racking up an 8.07 ERA and 6.92 FIP. That doesn’t sound inspiring, but it’s a tiny sample, and he was at times quite good in the minors. In 2017, he threw 60 innings between Hi-A and Double-A and was tremendous.

When his game was slow to translate to the majors, he revamped his fastball, and things didn’t work out. He added nearly 2 mph, but it came at the cost of sacrificing his two-seamer and losing his grasp of the strike zone; he got only 48.1% of his fastballs over the plate in 2019, which led to an 18.6% walk rate. He’ll look to get back to what worked for him in the minors, a mix of sinkers and an upper-80s slider, with the Bears.

Raúl Alcántara: Alcántara, like Flexen, had a brief cup of coffee in the majors before heading to Korea. Unlike Flexen, he went last year — he signed a one year deal with the KT Wiz. He was essentially a league average pitcher in 2019, and he did it by flooding the zone and daring batters to hit it. His 3.8% walk rate and 13.8% strikeout rate (the league averages are around 8% and 17% respectively) should tell you everything you need to know — he’s basically the KBO’s Kyle Hendricks. With a mid-90s fastball and a cutter/changeup combo to bracket it, he showed enough that the Bears signed him this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the World Series started to look more like modern baseball. The best hitters batted more, the worst pitchers threw less, and there were fewer bunts than ever. Did that modernization continue into the 2000’s? Uh, nope!

2001

Here we are, at the World Series that led me to this article series in the first place. The Diamondbacks were an oddly constructed team; stars and scrubs to an extreme degree. They didn’t help things by batting Tony Womack and his 66 wRC+ in leadoff, and Mark Grace was overqualified in the seven spot, but this team simply didn’t have much offensive firepower outside of Luis Gonzalez and Reggie Sanders, who batted third and fourth respectively. Grace over Craig Counsell in the two hole would have helped, surely, but offense wasn’t this team’s calling card.

The Yankees had the same efficient lineup as always. Jeter held down the oft-misused second spot, Chuck Knoblauch remained an underqualified leadoff hitter, and everyone else was roughly where they should be. It’s still hard to know whether they got there on purpose or by accident — Knoblauch somehow got 600 PA as a no-bat left fielder/DH — but for the most part, they had good hitters batting where they should.

In Game 1, the 90’s came back in the most predictable way. Womack led off the third inning by getting hit. Counsell followed up with a sacrifice bunt — which Luis Gonzalez followed with a homer. Nice bunt! It had been a tie game, but still: third inning, no outs. That’s a pretty bad one.

Aside from that, the 9-1 blowout was more or less uninteresting. The Yankees indulged in a few intentional walks, but they were in spots that felt somewhat do-or-die; down three and four runs, to be precise. Bob Brenly pulled Curt Schilling after 102 pitches and 7 innings, and he used back-of-the-pen relievers to protect an eight run lead. By the book, as it were. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday afternoon’s FanGraphs Live stream, starting at noon ET, will feature a discussion of the OOTP Brewers, who have some crucial decisions to make.

Who should we target as a shortstop replacement? What should we offer? Should we bench Lorenzo Cain on-stream, or re-tool our pitching rotation? If you can think of something a general manager can do, we can try it. If you can think of something a manager can do, we can adjust our in-game tactics to attempt it. The Brewers sit at 14-14 in the virtual 2020 OOTP universe, and our decisions could help get them on the right track.

Read the rest of this entry »

Things were looking up for our Out Of The Park Brewers. We’d scrapped our way back to .500 after a rough start to the season. Were there some pitching injuries? Indubitably. But they were mostly of the replaceable variety; no one’s happy that virtual Josh Lindblom is out for a few months, or that virtual Brett Anderson missed two weeks, but Eric Lauer and Corbin Burnes aren’t so different as replacements.

Likewise, no one’s overjoyed that Lorenzo Cain is hitting like Michael Caine, if he decided to switch from acting to baseball. But the team has options; outfield depth is hardly the Brewers’ problem this year. The only truly bad scenario would be for Cain to continue being awful while getting the lion’s share of the playing time; all of the backup options are interchangeable and acceptable.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case at shortstop. Orlando Arcia simply hasn’t panned out; that’s why the real-life Brewers traded for Luis Urías over the offseason. It was a buy-low trade for a touted prospect who had some growing pains last year, the kind of move that, should it work, could pay huge dividends.

Urías broke his hamate in January. The way the recovery and the timing of the regular season stacked up, that cost us roughly a month of playing time — the injury wasn’t fully healed until last week, and given his missed spring, the league decided a one week rehab assignment would be reasonable — in theory, OOTP players don’t need rehab assignments, but we’re striving for realism here.

Well, rehab just hit us in a place where we don’t have depth. While playing in Triple-A San Antonio, Urías broke his foot. That’s a complete fluke — as best as I understand it, OOTP injuries are treated independently, and a broken hand and broken foot are definitely not correlated. Regardless, though — it’s broken.

This is adding up to a lot of time without a credible shortstop on the team. The foot, if it heals well, will be fine in four or so weeks. After that, he will rehab again; his brief stint in the minors is still his only in-game baseball in 2020. Tack on 10 days or so for the rehab, which looks like a reasonable guess based on previous rehab timelines, and it could be June before Urías takes the field in a Brewers jersey. Read the rest of this entry »

In real life, when a player starts the season poorly, it’s tempting to chalk it up to variance and sample size. Through April 23 of last year, for example, Jackie Bradley Jr. was hitting .134/.203/.164, good for a -7 wRC+. The rest of the way, he hit .239/.335/.461, a 104 wRC+. Nothing was wrong!

That’s the snarky, detached analyst view. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t work that way on the actual team. It’s harder, when you’re living through the oh-fers and demoralizing strikeouts, to determine whether or not to give that player as much playing time over the rest of the year. Of the 10 players with the worst batting lines on that day, eight saw their playing time meaningfully curtailed over the remainder of the season.

And that brings us to our Out Of The Park Brewers. The FanGraphs readership’s intrepid management has led the team to a 13-12 record, which is an okay enough start all told; there have been injury issues across the pitching staff, Luis Urías is still rehabbing from his offseason injury, and there was that absolute pasting at the hands of the Mets.

But there’s one disturbing performance that stands out so far; Lorenzo Cain is hitting .136/.212/.153, good for a Bradley-Jr.-in-bad-times wRC+ of -7. It’s by far the worst line on the team; Orlando Arcia has played poorly enough that he’s lost most of his playing time to Brock Holt, and even he has a 30 wRC+.

What’s a manager to do? It’s not obvious. The team is built for Cain to be an anchor; the corner positions are a grab bag of mix-and-match players. Christian Yelich can man left or right with equal aplomb, and the other outfield slot can be filled by nearly anyone; Avisaíl García, Ryan Braun, Ben Gamel, Holt, or even Eric Sogard. But only Gamel and Yelich can even fake center, and I’m skeptical that either could do it full time. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a confession to make, one that might be uncool in the modern, hyper-optimized world of baseball analysis. I love bunts.

I know, I know. I’ve been spending most of a recent article series on old World Series tactics railing about bad bunts. I’ve read Moneyball; outs are bad and runs are good. That’s all true, but I can’t help it. I love to see a well-executed bunt for a hit. Drag bunts, sneak attacks aimed at shifts — I love them all. So today, I set out to find the best bunter.

A quick refresher of why bunting is bad: it makes outs. If you want some proof of this, look no further than a run expectancy chart from 2019:

If you haven’t read one of these before, no worries. Each number represents how many runs scored, on average, from the relevant combination of baserunners and outs until the end of the inning, across all games in 2019. The bases go down the left side, and the outs go across the top. If you have runners on first and second (120 in the table) with no outs, for example, you should expect to score 1.537 runs in the rest of the inning.

This doesn’t mean you’ll always score that many runs, obviously. But it’s a useful baseline. Unless you have some very weird batters coming up (very good or very bad would both do), you can estimate a player’s contribution to how many runs you’ll score by comparing the base/out state before and after their turn at bat. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I began looking at strange decisions made in past World Series. Partially, it’s very interesting to me, and partially, there’s no baseball happening at the moment, but we have to write about something. This week — yep, still no baseball. And so here is the next installment in Wild World Series Tactics.

1998

The one thing you definitely know about the 1998 World Series is that the Yankees swept the Padres. It wasn’t pretty — the Padres were outscored by 13 runs in four games. But the Padres had a sweet lineup, for the most part. Tony Gwynn anchored the lineup from the two hole, and even though he was nearing the end of the line, he still put up a 130 wRC+ this year. Quilvio Veras was a credible leadoff hitter, their worst hitters were at the bottom of the lineup — this batting order wouldn’t raise eyebrows today.

The Yankees were no slouches in the roster construction department either. Part of this might be due to who the number two hitters are; Gwynn and Derek Jeter were both great hitters who happened to fit the old stereotype of a bat control guy. The leadoff hitters still fit the speed mold. Whatever the case may be, however, both of these lineups looked great for the time.

For the first six innings of Game 1, if you ignore the graphics, this could almost be a recent game. There were no bunts, no intentional walks, and three home runs. Both pitchers went deep, but Kevin Brown was a 10-WAR pitcher in 1998, and David Wells was the Yankees’ ace; that’s hardly weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »