With so much attention focused upon the Korea Baseball Organization right now, it’s helpful to find points of reference, not only players from major league organizations who have gone over to South Korea to escape the Quad A life of bouncing up and down between the minors and majors but also those who have rejoined MLB. One who has done so while upgrading the quality of his baseball life is Josh Lindblom 린드블럼. A 2008 second-round pick by the Dodgers out of Purdue University, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound righty spent parts of four seasons in the majors (2011-14) with four different teams, albeit with diminishing returns. Twice he was traded for former All-Stars, namely Shane Victorino (in a Dodgers-Phillies deal) and Michael Young (in a Phillies-Rangers swap).

After the 2014 season, Lindblom signed with the KBO’s Lotte Giants, and quickly found a level of success that had eluded him stateside. He went 13-10 with a 3.56 ERA (142 ERA+) and 6.5 WAR in 2015 (advanced stats via Statiz), and while he wasn’t as strong in ’16 (10-13, 5.29 ERA, 99 ERA+, 2.7 WAR), he returned to the States on a minor-league deal with the Pirates. Unfortunately, he scuffled during a brief major league stint, and was released in mid-July. He returned to the Lotte Giants on a midseason deal, and helped the team to its first playoff appearance since 2012 by going 5-3, with a 3.72 ERA (136 ERA+) and 2.3 WAR in 72 innings.

From there, Lindblom landed a one-year, $1.45 million deal with the Doosan Bears and emerged as one of the top pitchers in the entire KBO, going 15-4 with league bests in ERA (2.88), ERA+ (175), and WAR (6.8). After re-signing for $1.77 million for 2019, he followed that up with a similarly outstanding campaign, going 20-3, with a 2.59 ERA (164 ERA+) and 6.9 WAR. The Bears, who finished second in 2018 and lost the Korean Series to the SK Wyverns, won it all in ’19, and Lindblom was voted the league’s MVP; in both years, he won the circuit’s Choi Dong-won Award, as the KBO’s top pitcher. Now 32 years old, he parlayed his success abroad into a three-year, $9.125 million-plus-incentives deal to start for the Brewers — the kind of security he’s never had before. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people who cover Major League Baseball professionally, I am no expert when it comes to the Korea Baseball Organization. However, over the past six weeks — ever since that first flicker of hope glimpsed in the form of a Lotte Giants scrimmage streamed on YouTube, just as the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic was getting particularly heavy in New York City — I’ve learned a great deal about the league through conversations with MyKBO’s Dan Kurtz, FanGraphs alumni Josh Herzenberg and Sung Min Kim (both now Lotte Giants employees), and Samsung Lions international scout Aaron Tassano. I’ve read similar lines of inquiry from other baseball-starved scribes as well as English-speaking Korean journalists, dug through Baseball-Reference and Statiz, and delved into the work of my colleagues, particularly Ben Clemens’ two-part rundowns of the league’s foreign-born players, and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the league. Along with a similar crash course in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League, it’s been a fun project that has helped take my mind off not only the delays and uncertainty regarding the 2020 MLB season but also the grim backdrop of the pandemic in this country.

Spurred by Monday’s news that ESPN will carry English-language broadcasts of one KBO game per day, all the way through the league’s postseason, what follows here is my attempt to digest my KBO crash course into a usable guide for those who are similarly dipping their toes into the league’s waters for the first time. I can’t claim this to be comprehensive, but whether you’re looking to pick a team to root for or simply trying to find a few players to focus upon as you watch live baseball, I hope that it’s helpful.

A few reminders: this is a 10-team league whose team names carry those of the corporations that own them, not the cities they call home; the season is 144 games long; ties are called after 12 innings (15 in the postseason) and don’t count in determining winning percentage; it’s a contact-centric league with lower strikeout and home run rates than MLB, the latter after a conscious effort to de-juice the ball in 2019; and each team is allowed three foreign players. The playoff system is a “step-ladder” where the regular season winner gets a bye all the way to the Korean Series, the fifth- and fourth-place teams square off in a Wild Card round, with the winner facing the third-place team in the best-of-five Semi-Playoffs, the winner of that series playing the second-place team in the best-of-five KBO Playoffs, and that winner facing the top team in the best-of-seven Korean Series. Read the rest of this entry »

2020 hasn’t quite gone as planned for anyone or anything, including baseball, but US audiences got to taste an amuse-bouche with the start of the season for the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization). Naturally, 2020’s gonna 2020 — the NC Dinos and the Samsung Lions dealt with a rain delay early, while the Kia Tigers and Kiwoom Heroes had to wait through a fire delay. But in the end, we had five real, live baseball games go off successfully.

I’ve spent the last four days cloistered within my quarantine, running ZiPS projections for KBO players and their teams. While ZiPS has always been able to project the MLB performance of players who come over from South Korea, I’ve rarely used the feature that allows me to run KBO-specific projections. But with KBO one of the only games in town (let’s not forget the CPBL!), this was a good time to whip out something new.

Many of the typical caveats that apply to projections for MLB players apply to KBO projections. There are also a few additional issues, like the lack of some advanced data and the dude running the projections having less familiarity with team construction. Without advanced data, ZiPS defaults to a simpler model, with results it has less confidence in. I’m still not happy with anything defense-related on an individual level — the team level is easier — so no wins above replacement will be present here.

And having less familiarity with team construction means it’s harder for me to construct depth charts to run simulations, an important aspect of projecting team results. The wonderful MyKBO, run by Dan Kurtz, is an absolutely indispensable site. (My colleague Jay Jaffe has a two-part, in-depth interview with Kurtz you should be sure to read.)

The league’s own site also provides a lot of information, as do the Google gremlins. But even with these sources, it’s not as easy for me to understand the contours of, say, a third base position battle on the Kia Tigers the same way I would on the Detroit Tigers. Read the rest of this entry »

Even the first home run of the NC Dinos’ season turned out to be an exercise in waiting.

It had been more than five weeks since the Korean Baseball Organization’s regular season was originally scheduled to begin, and nearly eight weeks since sports across North America came to a near-uniform halt in response to the accelerating spread of COVID-19. Then, just as ESPN was preparing to broadcast the KBO season-opener between the Dinos and the Samsung Lions, rain intervened, delaying the game’s start by about 30 minutes.

Finally, just before 2:30 AM on the east coast of the United States, viewing audiences got their first spark — a towering fly ball down the right field line in the top of the fourth inning off the bat of Na Sung-Bum, disappearing somewhere over the foul pole. But ESPN commentators Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez, calling the game on a remote feed from their own homes, struggled to find the ball, warily calling a home run only as Na began to circle the bases. A replay review ensued and lasted for several minutes, with a tricky camera angle seeming to show the ball flying directly over the pole.

After several moments, the homer was confirmed. It was the first run scored in a nationally televised regular season baseball game this year, and it set the Dinos on a path to their 4-0 victory over the Lions.

Na Sung-bum provided us with an absolute BOMB for the game's first run pic.twitter.com/DPaFSIJozV

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) May 5, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Dan Kurtz, the proprietor of MyKBO.net agreed to an email interview and offered more insights into the league than could fit into a single post. In Part 1, we discussed Kurtz’s background and how he became a go-to for all things KBO. Here we discuss the competitive landscape of the league and what to expect in 2020, all the more relevant for a U.S. audience that will now be able to watch KBO action on ESPN.

This is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. For the purposes of clarity and familiarity, I have used the English naming order, placing Korean surnames last instead of first.

Jay Jaffe: What is it that has made the Doosan Bears so dominant in recent years, with five straight trips to the Korea Series and three championships in that span?

Dan Kurtz: Doosan has been the premier team of the late 2010s. I would credit that to not only the high level of play by some of their foreign players, such as Josh Lindblom, Dustin Nippert, and Jose Miguel Fernandez, but also to how few holes the team has had due to their depth at certain positions.

An example: Doosan lost the league’s best catcher to the NC Dinos prior to the 2019 season (Eui-ji Yang). How did the team respond? They plugged Se-hyuk Park in at catcher and proceeded to win another title. Their starting rotation during this time has also helped carry them to many wins, and while their foreign pitchers played a big role during their championships, their Korean counterparts also more than held their own. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a deal! By we, I mean that baseball-starved fans who live in the United States will be able to watch English-language broadcasts of regular season baseball thanks to an agreement between ESPN and the Korea Baseball Organization, whose Opening Day is Tuesday, May 5. Here’s the first-week schedule:

Yes, those hours are ungodly if you live on the East Coast, but if you have a TiVO or other DVR and can manage to avoid spoilers, it’s probably worth your trouble, assuming you’re already an ESPN subscriber. The deal covers the entire season, including the postseason and the best-of-seven Korea Series.The Worldwide Leader’s broadcasters will be coming at you remotely; they’re not in South Korea. It’s hardly a perfect set-up, but then what about this current situation in the pandemic is? Particularly with MLB’s opening a long ways off, I’ll take what I can get. Read the rest of this entry »

In the absence of Major League Baseball, the more adventurous among us have turned to the only foreign leagues able to move forward with their respective seasons, namely the Chinese Professional Baseball League, which opened on April 12, and the Korea Baseball Organization, whose Opening Day will be Tuesday. While both leagues contain a smattering of familiar names from MLB and the high minors, the language barriers for those leagues can be daunting. To appreciate those circuits’ nuances, their respective histories, and the cultural differences that separate them from MLB, it’s helpful to have a guide, or guides.

For the KBO, perhaps the best among them is Dan Kurtz, a 40-year-old stay-at-home father of three who lives in Tacoma, Washington. Born in Seoul, South Korea, but adopted as an infant and raised in the U.S., Kurtz’s interest in the KBO was kindled when he traveled to his birth country for the first time in 1999, at age 19. Three years later, he started MyKBO.net, an excellent English-language resource that was initially a message board but that now features schedules, standings, stats, and instructions on how to stream games — and even a fantasy league. As the eyes of the world have turned to the KBO, he’s emerged as an outstanding ambassador, tirelessly answering the questions of those looking to find their way to appreciating the league, this scribe included.

Last week, Kurtz agreed to an email interview and offered more insights into the league — far more than could fit into a single post! What follows here, where we discussed Kurtz’s background and how he became a go-to for all things KBO, and in Part 2, where we get into the real nitty-gritty of what to watch for in the 2020 season, is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. For the purposes of clarity and familiarity, I have used the English naming order, placing Korean surnames last instead of first.

Jay Jaffe: Were you a baseball fan before [traveling to Korea] (MLB or foreign leagues) and if so, who did you root for?

Dan Kurtz: Having grown up in Eastern Pennsylvania, I became a Philadelphia Phillies fan and like many kids in the area, I pretended to be Mike Schmidt and hit a game winning home run. Before moving to Lancaster, I lived near Reading and went to a lot of Reading Phillies games. I can remember going to some games with friends and lining up to get autographs from the likes of Pat Combs and Jason Grimsley. So despite having moved from the area and around the world the past few years, I am still a Phillies fan and am also trying to make my kids fans of the team as well. Currently, they show no affinity towards baseball; they just refer to the Phils and my other favorite sports teams as “Daddy’s team.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

One of the world’s strongest professional baseball leagues, the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) starts their 2020 on May 5, bringing us high-level baseball in a world that’s currently experiencing a shortage. If you haven’t watched a KBO game, it’s a different atmosphere than MLB, one I would love to see MLB take a few cues from. The fans are loud, the bat flips are fierce, and players have customized theme songs.

And thankfully, it’s looking like American fans will get to see more of it. The KBO and ESPN are apparently close to a broadcast deal to televise KBO games on this side of the Pacific. (A deal had previously been reported as close, but fell through when ESPN wanted to give KBO no money up-front.)

For fans, there are a lot of new names to know. But even without indepth knowledge of the KBO, some will be vaguely familiar already, as Korea is one of the frequent landing spots for Triple-A journeymen to get a real opportunity to play highly competitive baseball at considerably more enticing salaries. To acclimate ourselves to what the talent levels are like in KBO, I fired up the ZiPS supercomputer to get the 2019 MLB translations for KBO players. After all, many fans understand baseball relative to MLB. That’s not to suggest that the KBO shouldn’t be enjoyed on its own terms; many of its difference from MLB are what make it so engaging. Next week we’ll have ZiPS projected standings and player projections put in a KBO-context for the league’s Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »