Last week, I sat down with four of the foreign-born players in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) to discuss their experiences playing in Korea.

Right-handed pitcher Josh Lindblom of the Doosan Bears is the true veteran among all the foreign-born players in the KBO. He started his KBO career with the Lotte Giants in 2015, where he played until 2016, before taking a detour to the States to play for the Pirates in 2017; he returned to Lotte in the second half of that year. In 2018, he signed with the Bears and has been the ace of their staff. This season, Lindblom is the league’s top pitcher: he’s 13-1 with a 1.89 ERA and a 3.09 FIP in 119.0 IP with 112 strikeouts and 18 walks. His 5.38 WAR leads the KBO.

Infielder and designated hitter Jamie Romak of the SK Wyverns was acquired during the 2017 season as a replacement for Danny Worth. Since coming over to Korea, Romak has been one of the most prolific home run hitters in the league, belting 94 out of the park while boasting a career .562 slugging percentage. He’s currently tied for first in home runs (20) while hitting a healthy .276/.366/.517, good for a 136.6 wRC+ on the season.

Right-handed pitcher Tyler Wilson is a former Baltimore Oriole who signed with the LG Twins for the 2018 season and settled in nicely as their staff ace. His strong campaign that year (9-4, 3.07 ERA in 170.0 IP with a 6.33 WAR) earned him another contract with the Twins. This season, Wilson is currently fourth in ERA (2.62) and seventh in WAR (2.85) among all pitchers while headlining the LG Twins rotation that has led the team to fourth place in the 10-team league.

Left-handed pitcher Chad Bell of the Hanwha Eagles is new to the KBO this season. Bell was signed along with fellow former Detroit Tiger Warwick Saupold to be the Eagles’ new rotation arms. Through 18 starts in the KBO, Bell is 5-9 with a 4.00 ERA and 78 strikeouts to 43 walks in 108.0 IP.

What were your first impressions after arriving in Korea?

Lindblom: When I first signed here, I didn’t know what to expect. I never had any reason to come to Asia at all. My expectation, to be honest, was kind of low. Just having a western mindset, you think that America is the best and when you get here, you realize that things that are different can be good too. It was good, but in a different way. You can’t really compare Asia to America. It’s like comparing an apple to an airplane.

Romak: My exact first impression was coming across the bridge from the Incheon International Airport into the Songdo area, which is where we live. It was nighttime, all the big buildings were lit up and it was very exciting. It was very cool. And of course, I was looking forward to the opportunity.

Wilson: We play in Seoul so it’s a huge city. I grew up in a small town in Virginia. I’ve lived in Virginia my whole life, so to see a big city like Seoul and get used to living here was an adjustment. There’s a lot of people, obviously. Different language. So just getting used to things I hadn’t seen before and routines I hadn’t partaken in before, like taking the subway every day to work, there were just a lot of different adjustments to the lifestyle.

Bell: The first thing that took over for me, on the baseball side of things, was the fans’ passion for the game. You just don’t see that everywhere. In this season’s first series – versus the Doosan Bears – when you look at Jamsil Stadium, and the place is split right down the middle between Doosan and Hanwha fans, and everybody’s going insane for nine innings. It was unreal. Off the field, the main differences were cultural ones. Food, communication, etc., stuff like that. Some places it’s easier and some places it’s harder. You just have to get used to it. On the baseball field, you’re playing baseball. I have to use a translator to communicate with people, but in the end, it’s the same game but the atmosphere is electric. Read the rest of this entry »

July is upon us, and with it comes a new signing period for international amateur players. Over on THE BOARD, we’ve added rankings and reports on the players we consider to be the best in this year’s class, as well as the big league teams to which they’re tied.

We talked about the very top of the class at length back in February, headlined by Dominican CF Jasson Dominguez (expected to sign with the Yankees), who will go right onto our top 120 prospects in baseball. Other than late questions about Dominican LF Bayron Lora (a wrist injury may be the culprit, though it is unlikely to be a long term issue), and Venezuelan CF Yhoswar Garcia (who international personnel told us to remove from the list entirely due to age/identity issues that ultimately led to a year-long suspension), the top tier of players on our list hasn’t changed.

You’ll notice we don’t have projected bonuses on THE BOARD this year. We have some bonus amounts in the players’ scouting summaries, and we’ll add some only as they become official, but for player safety reasons, we decided to exclude all Venezuelan bonuses. Lots of the players from this class have already started playing baseball at their employer’s complex and are likely very safe, but any amount of risk that a teenager may be targeted because they have new money is too much.

Most of these deals were agreed to long before the players are technically eligible to sign, something that MLB seems eager to change by way of an International Draft, which we discussed at length on this podcast. Some players in this class agreed to deals two years ago and they’re so infrequently scouted or even seen once locked up, that the most up-to-date reports are often over a year old unless the signing team is our sole source. As you can surmise, lots of things can happen between ages 15 and 16, so our rankings for middle- and lower-tier players tend to be much more accurate after fall instructional leagues.

Even with early deals, there are still multiple teams with millions in uncommitted money (remember, each team’s bonus pool is now hard capped), some players who have yet to agree to deals, and perhaps even players who we don’t know about (often late-bloomers or late-defecting Cubans) and may become eligible to sign over the next 11 1/2 months. Teams can trade for additional bonus space to pursue these types of players outside of their assigned bonus pools. We anticipate some clubs will make a run at Cuban SS Yiddi Cappe, who is eligible to sign this year but has a $3.5 million deal for 2020, by trying to trade for enough pool money to make things interesting right now.

The Yankees did exactly this with Cuban SS Alexander Vargas last year. Vargas was set to sign with Cincinnati for $3 million next week, but the Yankees traded for enough pool space to lure him away with a $2.5 million deal last summer. If a team is unsuccessful in doing this (as a couple of clubs were when chasing Shohei Ohtani), they may end up spreading that money around to players in Asia (three Taiwanese players are referenced on our rankings), Mexico (a newly-opened market), or other less-scouted markets (for example, the Phillies signed Australian RHP Jake Gessner two weeks ago, before the last signing period closed).

Heo Koo-Yeon in his office

Heo Koo-Yeon is one of the biggest names in Korean baseball history. At this moment, you could say that he is the most influential figure in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO). Heo was originally an athlete. As a star high school player, he partook in international competitions in the pre-KBO era of Korean baseball. Starting 1982, the inaugural KBO season, he has been a commentator (with a brief detour to a managing job for the Chungbo Pintos in 1986). Outside of the broadcasting job, Heo’s contributed in speaking for the better overall infrastructure and facilities around KBO. He influenced the building of many of the newer KBO venues, which were built closer to the modern style rather than the old high-school style that classic venues adhered to. Most recently, he advised on the construction of the new NC Dinos venue, Changwon NC Park, which is said to be “major league quality” by many. Outside of KBO, he’s also donated close to $100,000 to build Cambodia’s first baseball stadium and helped build a ballpark in Vietman as well. As a baseball lifer who saw the growth of the sport in Korea, he has his vision set on continuing to build baseball in unfamiliar areas.

At 68 years old, Heo is still going strong as a commentator for the MBC while serving as an adviser to the commissioner for the KBO. I sat down in his office to talk about his relationship with MLB, the road to the advent of first Korean major leaguer, and the status of Korean amateur players wanting to sign with a major league club.

Beginning of the MLB – KBO relationship:

As a baseball lifer, Heo, like many others in Korea, was influenced by the Japanese idea of baseball from the time he was an athlete.

“Starting in 1968, as a high school player representing Korea, I’ve been back and forth to Japan a lot,” he recalled. “We knew that our baseball system, at the time, was quite Japan-based. Our leaders and managers were educated during the Japanese occupation era (1910-45).” In 1984, Heo had a chance to go to the United States, thanks to Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley.

“O’Malley emphasized the globalization of baseball and invited me.” Heo got to go to Vero Beach and Dodgertown for their spring training camp. It was the first time Heo got to see the major league players with his own eyes.

“That, in the big picture, changed and influenced my life,” Heo says. “It also influenced Korean baseball a lot. I would say it was the turning point of our nation’s baseball.” Read the rest of this entry »

The journey that made Takaaki Yokoyama the first Japanase player with Diablos Rojos del Mexico in 79 years of franchise history was not a planned one.

Back in 2014, when he made his debut in Japan with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, his main goal was to make a living in Japanese baseball. In order to do it, he had a what might be called a typical repertoire for a Japanese pitcher — fastball, sinker, curveball, slider, and changeup. But he struggled with home run issues and below-average velocity on his heater (138.9 kmh or 86.3 mph). He tried to improve his offspeed stuff after a rough couple of years, moving from a classic changeup to a splitter. That bumped up his velocity on offspeed pitchs almost 4 mph but did nothing to correct his main problem in NPB: his fastball was getting destroyed. According to Deltagraphs, his four-seam fastball had a -10.6 run value in less than 20 innings pitched in 2016. Two years later, he was released.

Luckily for Yokoyama, that wasn’t the end of the road. The 28-year-old right-hander teamed up with a group of international players to showcase themselves in several spring games organized by Yokoyama’s agent and translator, Toma Irokawa, in an effort to offer their services to American teams.

The plan worked for him. He signed with the New Jersey Jackals in the CanAm league and was about to get his first shot at independent baseball until things hit a snag.

“He had everything set up but problems with the immigration process delayed us. In the middle of that process, we got the call from Diablos Rojos,” remembers Toma.

Word of Yokoyama and the showcase had spread, and a team in need of bullpen help was about to get it in the form of its first Japanese pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

ESPN’s Jeff Passan was first with the full details about Eastern Florida State College RHP Carter Stewart’s (our 56th-ranked prospect for next month’s 2019 draft) shocking signing with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Japan’s Pacific League. Stewart will receive $7 million over the next six years, enabling him to qualify for MLB free agency at age 25 (through the new tiered posting process) when the deal ends, provided he plays in the Pacific League in parts of all six years.

There are a number of impactful outcomes from this deal, so I’ll take them one at a time:

1. This is surely more money than Stewart could’ve gotten through the draft and MLB path over the next six years.

Passan and J.J. Cooper took a stab at projecting Stewart’s earnings over the next six seasons in America, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. Charitably projecting roughly $2 million in a draft bonus, something like $20,000 to $30,000 in total minor league salaries (depending on how quickly he gets to the big leagues), and something between $750,000 and $1.8 million in the big leagues (again, depending on when he gets there and if he stays). The rosiest versions of those numbers doesn’t even get Stewart to $4 million, which is still about $1 million less than the slot value ($4.98 million) at the pick where he didn’t sign with the Braves last year, roughly what he could’ve expected without the dispute over his wrist.

2. This sets up an alternative path for draft prospects to gain negotiating leverage, likely starting with next month’s draft.

Going overseas for six years and then coming back to a free agent payday is only a move that an elite prospect that’s solely focused on baseball and somewhat culturally open-minded would approach, so this won’t be a negotiating tactic for the whole draft. For prep or first-year junior college prospects projected for the top two rounds, however, this could be a real bargaining tactic, even if it’s never fully explored by the player. Read the rest of this entry »

UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 15

This is the 15th episode of a sorta weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men.

This episode is the first, and possibly only, Important Episode, focusing on news of a potential international draft, as reported by our guest, ESPN’s Jeff Passan. Please support him by purchasing any Elmo products, authentic or knock-off.

0:20 – Jeff outright rejects the intro
1:22 – Kiley tries again, leaning into Jeff’s unlikability
2:09 – Jeff breaks down the news as he’s reported it
2:33 – Jeff is under attack in his own car and makes metaphorical lemonade
4:15 – They touch on the human issue of how the pro players who are discarded by clubs in developing countries are handled
6:20 – The soon-to-be-best-prospect-in-baseball instance of Wander Franco and his experience in this system
8:42 – Comparing the typical Latin prospect to a typical suburban American one, and where the MLB Players’ Association and MLB come in
11:10 – MLB’s morally-driven approach to human trafficking re: Cuba could impact how the international draft is put together
12:50 – The MLBPA’s response to Jeff’s report and does a point the MLBPA makes suggest MLB planned this whole progression out years in advance?
15:40 – Is this just step one of a few for MLB? How did the MLBPA allow us to get here?
17:50 – Why don’t the international pools track the draft pools? How close should they be?
20:45 – How to use hard slotting to solve some problems and then transition into making July 2nd into a TV event and a pilot program for doing it with the domestic draft.
24:35 – Where does this go next? What’s the timetable for making the change? Can Jeff really learn Spanish?
25:40 – Elmo makes an appearance?
26:55 – Jeff details how anti-social he is on planes and how this prepares him to be a general manager
29:30 – Eric joins the podcast for the second segment and answers Kiley’s burning question
31:00 – Eric and Kiley break down the international draft possibilities for each stakeholder, starting with the 5-10 most efficient MLB clubs in Latin America. Kiley broke down earlier this year what the ROI is on an international dollar spent and is it big.
33:30 – They break down the bottom tier of clubs, with less infrastructure and with smaller staffing budgets
36:00 – The big unanswered question: how much will MLB assert themselves in controlling the scouting environment?
40:45 – The MLB Players Association’s role in negotiations. Kiley mentioned in this year’s July 2nd preview that clubs can get steroid tests on prospects as young as age 13, which can’t possibly be the status quo for long.
42:13 – The next stakeholders: the kids that are signing an international amateurs
46:30 – What happens to a 17 year old who opted not to sign as a 16 year old? How would the structure of the draft affect this? Would it lead to trading of picks? A TV event?
51:25 – In fairness, this would also be great for us
52:27 – MLB’s role and motivations in improving this situation. Here’s the first time Kiley wrote about MLB likely using the overage money to help institute a draft.
58:30 – Eric’s experience watching fringe international prospects get released from a complex
59:55 – Could this indirectly affect the amount of minor league teams?
1:02:15 – The humanitarian element, particularly in Venezuela
1:04:00 – The last major stakeholder: the buscones
1:07:00 – The least important stakeholder: Kiley and Eric

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hour 12 min play time.)

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Attempting to discover pitching jewels — guys who may have some value in MLB — in international leagues is a relaxing hobby I recommend you try in your free time.

First, you will be doing something that forces you to watch (non-American) baseball all year long. The TV memberships you will need to start watching are really cheap. And there is something appealing about imagining yourself as the one who “discovered” a 2-WAR, 32-year-old pitcher for a major league team.

Of course, finding complete treasures shouldn’t be the main goal of this exercise unless you want to live in a constant state of frustration. Instead, as someone who has played this little game for years now, I have to advise that instead of searching for a potential major league pitcher, you keep an eye out for a particular pitch that could do some damage in the best baseball league in the world. It’s still a hard task, but at least your odds will look less like winning the lottery and more like being struck by lighting in an open field.

Take what I found in Efren Alexander Delgado’s changeup for example. This guy is a 24-year-old lefty starting pitcher for Guerreros de Oaxaca with no outstanding numbers in Mexico. Then again, if you look closely, you will see that he went full “Bumgarner Mode” on the 2018 Mexican League postseason: a 2.25 ERA, with 39 strikeouts and nine walks in 32 innings against tough teams such as Diablos Rojos Del México, Leones de Yucatan, and Sultanes de Monterrey.

He sporadically touches 90 mph with his fastball and has an average curveball, but he does have a magic changeup. Just watch this at-bat and try to identify who Delgado is striking out:

Yes, what you are seeing is rare footage of the only strikeout folk hero Willians Astudillo suffered in the Venezuelan Winter League last postseason while he was playing with Caribes de Anzoategui. This part of the game wasn’t broadcast (Nicolas Maduro was speaking and every Venezuelan network was forced to broadcast him), but thanks to my little birds in Venezuela, we manage to salvage this piece of baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »

Park Jong-Hoon is unique. If you need a quick introduction, look no further:

He is as true a submarine pitcher as one could be, which is quite rare in the current baseball landscape. Not only is he fun to watch, but he is also one of the top Korean-born pitchers in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). In 2018, he had his finest season yet, going 14-8, with a 4.18 ERA (125.8 ERA+) in 30 starts, striking out 133 in 159.1 IP. He also made the Korean national team for the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games and played a part in the Wyverns’ 2018 Korean Series championship. All in all, it was a big year. However, it seems that he has set his sights on an even bigger future.

This week, I sat down with Jong-Hoon at the Munhak Baseball Stadium, the Incheon home of the SK Wyverns, to talk about his development, his delivery, his pitches, and his desire to go to the major leagues. Originally, I intended to focus on his development as a submariner, but once he mentioned his big league ambitions, our conversation changed a bit.

On his development:

No one really starts out as a submarine pitcher. Neither did Park. When he was attending Gunsan Middle, his school’s baseball team needed a sidearm pitcher. The team’s manager asked his players to find the most flexible student they knew who was willing to throw a baseball. They recommended Park to him. “The team only had pitchers who threw with overhand or three-quarter slots,” Park said.

Once he got into the team, one of the drills he had to do required him to play catch while wearing a car tire on his back. “The training method in Korean amateur baseball is a bit old-school,” Park said. “At first, it was a small tire, but as the time went on, they gradually switched to bigger ones.” Because the tires got too heavy for his original posture, he lowered his posture while doing the drill. At some point, something clicked. “As I kept lowering my body, I felt that the arm slot started to fit me better,” he said. “We didn’t really have a pitching coach in our team, so I had to figure that all by myself.”

Unlike most other pitchers in the league, Park rose through the amateur system without any guidance of a pitching coach, which stunted his development until he went pro. In the second part of the KBO draft in 2009, Park was the ninth overall pick by the SK Wyverns. Despite his high draft slot, Park was far from feeling confident that he belonged there. “Once I got to the Wyverns, I felt that there were a lot of things I lacked,” Park said, “I soon learned that there were flaws here and there. In high school, I didn’t get to learn stuff like how to use my back leg, position my pelvis, consistently slot my arm, approach hitters mentally, etc.”

“I keep saying this over and over,” Park reiterates, “but it took so long for me to get to where I am. I wish I could get all that time back so I could have developed faster.”

Park’s rawness showed immediately. From 2011 to 2012, he appeared in just 15 games and gave up 17 walks, four hit by pitches, and 18 runs in 24.2 IP. After the 2012 season, Park opted to serve his mandatory military service and was admitted to play for the army baseball team. He returned to the Wyverns in September 2014 and started to see more action in 2015. That season, by the way, happened to be current Diamondbacks right-handed pitcher Merrill Kelly’s first year with the Wyverns. Kelly pitched for the Wyverns from 2015 to 2018, and earned a two-year major league contract with Arizona this past offseason. Park is appreciative of the four seasons he spent as Kelly’s teammate.

“I’m thankful for Kelly,” Park said, “he’s the reason why I came to appreciate and learn baseball deeper.” Through Kelly, Park learned new throwing routines, weightlifting methods, and mental approaches to hitters. He was also introduced to American baseball coaching books, which he read and studied by translating.

He has also tweaked his delivery over the years – it’s still a work in progress. When he got to the pros, he became aware of Chad Bradford and noticed a lot of similarities between them. Just like Bradford, Park threw from a very low arm angle, but Park also had a fast delivery tempo, again just like Bradford. In 2017, however, when the SK Wyverns had the former Arkansas Razorbacks coach Dave Jorn as their pitching coach, Park got a new homework assignment from him. “He told me to hold the motion momentarily before I go out to stride,” Park recalled, “once I made the adjustment, I was able to throw more accurately towards the target.” Park also mentioned that he still strives to make tweaks “here and there.”

However, Park credits something else for his improved command and overall performance. “What’s been more important is the mental side of pitching,” he said, “I’ve been really practicing my mentality: listening to good things, reading good things, if there’s a mental coaching lesson, I go out of my way to take it and I sometimes call sports psychologists for consultations. I’ve gradually improved after taking these steps.”

His efforts have shown. Here is how Park’s number progressed in the previous three years:

His strikeout and walk numbers have noticeably improved. One could say that he traded some of his groundball tendencies for being able to throw strikes. Even so, Park has managed to keep the batted balls in the yard- his 0.90 HR/9 IP rate is the ninth best among all KBO starting pitchers last year, which is no easy feat in the league and especially at the Munhak Baseball Stadium. Munhak is known to be an extreme hitter’s ballpark with 311.7/393.7/ 311.7 foot outfield dimensions, meaning the left and right field fences are closer to home plate than the Yankee Stadium short porch. It will be interesting to see how his numbers trend in the 2019 season, but the recent history is promising.

On being a rarity:

Park has, indeed, thought about how things would’ve been had he thrown with a conventional overhand or three-quarter slot. “I think my development would have been easier if I were one. I’m confident that I would survive among other KBO pitchers with traditional deliveries – right now I can throw around 90, 91 mph with an overhand delivery,” he said, “but I still would have had to go through the same process.” He adds that being a submarine pitcher helped pave his way more easily than others. “I’ve been more about finding my own uniqueness instead of going with the cookie-cutter approach.”

Back when Park was learning to pitch, there wasn’t as much baseball content readily available online. He turned to watching a copious amount of television to find inspirations. Through that, he discovered other submariners around the world, like Bradford and Shunsuke Watanabe. “But to be honest, when I tried to research on more, they were all pitchers from a long, long time ago,” Park noted, “I learned a bit from them for sure, but I used to worry whether my style of pitching would work in modern baseball.”

As for the role model, he doesn’t necessarily have one, but seeing how Bradford and Watanabe had turned in nice careers in their own respective leagues, Park gained confidence. “It was like ‘Ah, they can survive in that high-level of a league,'” he said, “That was the point where I gained more confidence and dreamed bigger in succeeding in professional baseball.”

On his wunder curve:

Park’s main strength is his curveball. According to Statiz, a KBO sabermetrics website, his curveball led the entire league in its pitch value for both 2017 and 2018 (18.8 and 12.6 runs saved, respectively). Some may see it as a slider, but Park says that it’s a curveball. Here’s the grip:

Here’s how he releases it:

Here’s how he simulates the release and spin:

And here are the results:

Park said he practiced the curveball release by throwing it as far as possible on an open field. “I did it to make it ‘float,’” he said, “I’ve been practicing it since I was younger. I think a lot of it was about having a pride in being different than everyone else. So I just kept going like ‘Let me try again, again, again, again…’ and it has ended up how it looks now.”

Park also says that he makes it move differently for different-handed hitters. “I have better stats against left-handed hitters than right-handed hitters,” he notes, and he’s not really wrong. In 2018, he allowed a .714 OPS against lefties as opposed to .723 OPS against righties. From 2015 to 2019, he’s allowed .724 OPS against LHH and .775 OPS against RHH.

“I think a lot has to do with my curveball trajectory. Against the lefties, I like to float the ball straight up [think reverse 12-6 curveball] and against the righties, I throw with a tilt [reverse 11-5] tilt to it. I’m really curious how it would work out in different leagues, like the majors.”

Here’s a Park curve against a lefty:

…and a righty (admittedly, this looks similar to how he’d throw against a lefty):

Not only he can locate it high to induce whiffs, but also he can locate the pitch low. It can be effective because the pitch, which seems like it would end up lower than the zone, “rises” towards the end to nick the edge. Here’s one from this past postseason:

And here’s a three-pitch strikeout in which he used the curveball in similar locations to get a called strike, a weak foulball, and a swinging strike.

In 2018, he used the curveball 42.6% of the time, which is a significant amount. The pitch averaged at 119.1 kmph (74.0 mph). Park also has a fastball (41.1% usage), which averaged 131.6 kmph (81.8 mph), a two-seam fastball (12.2%) that averaged 128.5 kmph (79.9 mph) and a changeup that he used very sparingly (3.7%) that averaged 123.8 kmph (76.9 mph).

On his major league dreama:

Park doesn’t keep his desire to play in the majors a secret. He has been eager to prove that his style of pitching will work at the highest level of baseball. “I don’t know when it will happen,” Park said, “but if I do go to the majors, I want people to think ‘There’s a pitcher like this and he can really pitch in the majors.’ I hope I can help bring more attention to sidearm and submarine pitchers.”

Park says he also wants to join other Korean big leaguers. “If you’re a baseball player, MLB is the final frontier,” he said, “I’d love to join Korean guys like Hyun-Jin Ryu, Ji-Man Choi and Shin-Soo Choo. And I want my name, Park Jong-Hoon, to be known to the major league fans.”

According to a person familiar to the situation, several major league scouts have periodically come to Munhak Baseball Stadium to watch his starts. If the Wyverns were to post him as soon as he is eligible, the timing could be tricky. Depends on how long he is on the active roster and avoids injuries, he would be eligible as soon as after the 2020 season. If he is not as lucky with how his service time stacks up, it would be after 2021. Because Park will turn 30 in August 2021, one would assume that he wants to head stateside as soon as possible.

At this moment, it is a bit early to speculate on his major league chances. What helps Park is that he may not have completed developing due to his unusual amateur background, which could project well by the time he’s eligible to be posted. He also has brings the benefit of giving a very, very different look to hitters, not to mention that his approach has worked well in the offense-friendly environment of the KBO. There are, of course, many question marks. Heck, there are question marks for players who are deemed to be top-notch major league prospects. His command is still work in progress, we don’t know how well his stuff would translate in the majors, and we don’t know yet how interested the teams are. 

Park wanted to be different, he learned to use his uniqueness in the KBO, and he became one of the best Korean-born starting pitchers in the league. That in itself is pretty significant.

*All KBO stats from Statiz unless specified.

FanGraphs has obtained bonus figures for over 90% of all the international signings in baseball history. We have all of the most significant bonuses, every big leaguer, notable current prospects, and everything in the mid-six figure range and above, along with many years for which we have every single signing.

This provides us with a pretty complete picture of the distribution and trends of these bonuses, also allowing us to estimate how many players we’re missing. Those players are overwhelmingly names you wouldn’t recognize, guys who played for a couple of years before being released, signing as filler for a five-figure bonus.

We’ve taken out all of the major league deals (think older, high profile Japanese and Cuban players), and we have incomplete data for all of the Mexican players, as MLB notes all of them as receiving a $0 bonus (it’s an easy workaround for a convoluted system that’s mostly cleaned up now). We’ve filled in correct bonuses for players where we have it, mostly among the high profile Mexican signings, like Luis Urias and Julio Urias (no relation).

We could do a lot of things with this data — and we will, including listing it on the player pages and THE BOARD — but the thing that interests me today is combining this bonus data with our asset value research, and the dollars-per-WAR framework to get a better idea of what a dollar invested in an international amateur player returns. We’ll start with some of the meta data:

2017 was the first season of hard-capped bonus pools, which explains why bonuses declined and also why they spiked the year prior. These figures don’t include the pool overage payments made to MLB from 2013 to 2016. We estimate those figures to add up to about $250 million over those four years, with about $100 million paid to MLB in 2016 alone. (The CBA says that this money was to be spent on international operations and initiatives.)

Since the international market changes and matures so rapidly, it makes sense to start with the early 2000s signing classes as a baseline for a similar era to today. Most of the players who signed 15 years ago are now in their early 30s and have either played out their entire careers or are into their seventh year of major league service time. We can grab the dollar-per-WAR figures from the years that spanned their controlled years and turn that historical WAR into a dollar amount of value created. I used seven seasons since we don’t have comprehensive service time data, which, from some spot-checking, appears to do the trick. We have the FV of the most recent signings that are current prospect on THE BOARD, which maps to an asset value.

The most interesting players to analyze signed in the last 5-10 years, are in the big leagues, and are in the middle of their control years, so I had to do some work to peg their value. I quantified what they’ve already produced the same way I did with the older players, then estimated or figured out by hand their current service time situation. I then used our various projections to fill in what those players are expected to produce in the rest of their controlled years.

In short, it’s not perfect, but as with filling in the holes in the bonus data, it’s fairly accurate and any mistakes appear to cancel each other out in the aggregate. There’s some noise in the data year-to-year, but it appears that right around 2004, the market improved its output and has held mostly steady to today. Here’s the production (a combination of produced WAR, projected WAR, and minor league asset values) over this period:

I included up to the 2017 class, but it would appear that we need three full seasons in the system — with players having signed on July 2, 2015, and played in 2016, 2017, 2018 — before the class as a whole has developed enough to reveal how much value it could create. As such, a dozen years (2004-2015) appears to be our usable sample.

We could use the above figures to create a simple return on investment calculation, but a true ROI would compute what a team is making on the average dollar spent, so we also have to consider the expense to operate the department that signs the players. Building or renting an academy, feeding and housing the players, running a DSL team, paying coaches, trainers, scouts, and administration and travel expenses are all facets of an international operation that are essential to signing and developing these players, so they have to be considered alongside the bonus expenditures. After consulting with some international directors, I’ve estimated those costs for all 30 teams combined and added that to the bonuses, before arriving at an ROI figure that represents something close to what MLB clubs can expect a bonus pool dollar to return. I used a rolling figure to smooth out any noise in the yearly results.

This gives us an idea of what a club’s accounting department would say their ROI was running an international operation in these years. There are a couple of other ways to look at this data. Going forward, we know that overages won’t exist. We also know the maximum that can be spent with hard caps in place. If we were to take the historic spending of 2016 and keep those signing rules, while also imagining that the talent of 2018 demanded the same outlay in bonuses and overages as the group in 2016, we could compare the two realities owners were considering in the most recent completed CBA negotiations:

You can see that there’s still a solid positive return even with historic spending levels, but owners negotiated to add a hard bonus cap to the international market, essentially doubling their ROI. The 2016 class was unique in that clubs were motivated to spend wildly in anticipation of the caps and because of that, a great class of Cuban players that couldn’t be duplicated today (four of our top 132 prospects are Cuban players from this class) drove much of that spending. That roughly $315 million expenditure may be the closest figure we’ll get to what clubs think the true value of a historically-talented class is in an open market with multiple motivated bidders. The market is now capped at half that figure.

We can also answer the question of what an international pool dollar is worth going forward. If we assume that the overhead of running a department is fixed, how should clubs think about the value of each additional dollar added to their bonus pool? We could take the table just above this one and use the projected actual 2018 row to figure out the ROI from $150 million in bonuses and the estimated $1.125 billion in value that will be created by the signees. The result is a staggering 650%. It appears that it takes about three years for the an investment in the international market to mostly mature in terms of trade value, though there’s a way to read this data where there’s further value gained in a 5-7 year horizon for full maturity.

This sort of analysis can get too close to quantifying the worth of humans in purely dollar terms, although going through the exercise in this way also helps to define what a fair market price is for someone’s service. 650% is a pretty abstract number to consider, so let’s compare it to an standard investment for wealthy individuals such as baseball club owners: investing in the stock market. An owner can invest roughly $5 million into international market each year and expect a median return of 650% after three years, while a strong 10% yearly compounded return in the stock market over that period would return a 35% return. That sort of return makes clear both the appeal for ownership of signing international players, and capping their bonuses. It also points to how wide a gap exists between the value these players generate for their clubs and their compensation relative to that value.

In the next part of this series, I’ll take a look at some of the best and worst signing classes, if we were to grade out every club’s international signing class over the last 30 years using the framework rolled out today.

Killing time used to be an art for children of my generation. We didn’t have a smartphone in our hands. The internet was still some kind of sorcery unavailable in our towns, and the TV offered just four channels, where soap operas ruled the air time. Time, as you can imagine, kept taunting us as he slowly passed by outside, while we stayed indoors.

Because of that, I personally craved my parents’ permission to go out. When I was fortunate enough to receive it, my friends and I played “Quemado” (something like Pelota Vasca but where we fielded the ball and threw it to the wall) or “Pelotica de Goma” (this Baseball5 thing is flat out plagiarism for us Venezuelans). And when we got tired or lost the ball to an unfriendly neighbor, we just went ahead and bantered.

In these exchanges full of imaginary exercises, my brain decided to create a habit that still haunts me to this day. I called it the “Voltron Game,” and, as in the famous Japanese cartoon of the 80s, it consists of assembling a perfect entity using the outstanding parts of other things that were perfectly fine separately.

I did this with dinosaurs, cities, and cars. I did this with super heroes and super villains. And, of course, I did it (and still do it) with baseball.

Omar Vizquel once helped me assemble the perfect Venezuelan shortstop. Henry Blanco once helped me assemble the perfect Venezuelan pitcher. And now, because springs training for MLB and in Mexico are awfully long, I wanted to play again with Ramón Hernández, current Diablos Rojos del Mexico bench coach, as my new partner. Read the rest of this entry »