In the KBO, the Dinos Still Dominate

It’s been a little while since we checked in on the Korean Baseball Organization. During Major League Baseball’s struggle to resume play in 2020 — both with fair compensation for players and proper health and safety precautions taken — entire seasons are well underway overseas, not only in South Korea but also in Japan and Taiwan. The KBO was the second to get started after the CPBL and thanks to an effective government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has had its teams play well over 50 games already, or about three-eights of their regular season. Back when the season was just two weeks old, my colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about a league the NC Dinos were already starting to dominate. Six weeks later, very little has changed.

After storming out of the gates with an 11-1 start, the Dinos have yet to relinquish first place, with the team still yet to hit any kind of a real rough patch. Their .685 winning percentage would set them on pace for about a 111-win season in MLB. Even if you strip away their 11-1 start — a run that even a team like, say, the early-season 2019 Mariners can approximate — their record since is still a sparkling 26-16, which equates to about 100 wins in a typical MLB season.

When the Dinos were covered here in May, they were said to be wearing teams out with power and patience. A few weeks later, the patience has diminished, but the intimidating power remains very much alive. The team leads the KBO in slugging (.487) by a good margin, and has hit the most homers in the league with 79. They’ve dropped to fifth in walks drawn, but their power has been enough to keep them the top-scoring team in the league at 6.52 runs per game.

As Jay mentioned, this kind of success for the Dinos has come as a surprise to KBO fans. They haven’t advanced to the Korean Series since 2016, and last year, they finished fifth with a record of 73-69-2; Dan Szymborski’s projections gave them just an 11.6% chance to win the league this year, forecasting them to finish fourth. They’ve surpassed those expectations, though, by having out-of-nowhere breakouts from a number of now-key players.

The Dinos’ lineup is positively relentless. Eight qualified hitters have a wRC+ of at least 110, and four of those rank in the top 10 hitters in the entire league. Jin-sung Kang 강진성 is the best of the bunch, hitting .365/.403/.623 for a 163 wRC+ that ranks third in the KBO. Hui-dong Kwon 권희동 (.312/.425/.558, 158 wRC+), Sung-bum Na 나성범 (.310/.378/.614, 154 wRC+), and Aaron Altherr 알테어 (.307/.380/.615, 154 wRC+), meanwhile, rank seventh, ninth and 10th in the KBO in wRC+, respectively. Each of these guys contributes to the team’s explosive pop — Na ranks second in the league with 15 homers, and Altherr is tied for third with 14.

That group of hitters is a great example of how the Dinos have blossomed. Of those four hitters, only Na had previously established a believable track record of success in the KBO. He entered the season coming off six consecutive seasons with a wRC+ of at least 120, and at 30 years old, he’s still in the prime of his career. It was always likely he’d mash this season — it was less clear whether he’d have much company. Kang, 26, had been a part-time player before this season, posting a wRC+ of 84 last season and 37 the year before. Kwon, 29, had already played six seasons in the KBO, and was above average at the plate in just two of them. Finally, there was Altherr, who as a foreign-born player had some expectations he would perform well, but was still new to the league.

All of those players have broken out in huge ways for the Dinos, and they aren’t alone. On the pitching side, I wrote about the brilliance of Chang-mo Koo 구창모 in the first month of the season and, well, it’s hard to say he’s gotten worse.

Both Statiz and KBO Fancy Stats give Koo the highest WAR of any player in the league this season, despite being a 23-year-old who first managed a FIP under 5.00 just last year. Alongside him in the rotation is Drew Rucinski 루친스키, another first-year KBO player from the U.S. whose 2.30 ERA ranks third in the league, and Mike Wright 라이트, who has outperformed an underwhelming FIP all season long, clocking in with a 3.63 ERA.

The rotation is brilliant at the top, but somewhat suspect at the bottom. If the Dinos have a weakness, it is that the back of their rotation has yet to really crystallize, with Jae-hak Lee 이재학, Sung-young Choi 최성영 and Young-kyu Kim 김영규 all carrying ERAs over 5.00. The story is similar in the bullpen, where Jong-hyun Won 원종현 (2.92 ERA in 24.2 innings) and Jae-whan Bae 배재환 (3.80 ERA in 23.2 innings) have been anchors, but everyone else has gotten hit very hard. It’s an unbalanced pitching staff, but because the offense is so deep — I haven’t even talked about former MVP catcher Euiji Yang 양의지 or longtime KBO stud Sok Min Park 박석민, both of whom are also in the league’s top 20 in wRC+ — that it just hasn’t mattered.

The Dinos aren’t without competition going forward, but no other team has posed a credible threat to their place at the top thus far. The second-place Heroes are sort of a portrait of dull competency — they rank fourth in scoring, on-base percentage, and slugging, and third in team ERA. Their pitching has been led more by finesse than power, as they rank first in BB/9 and eighth in K/9. The Bears, meanwhile, are more of a lesson in extremes. Their offense leads the KBO in OBP and SLG while running second in scoring, but their pitching staff is responsible for the second-highest ERA in the league. Both have had a few cracks at the Dinos this season, but so far, they’ve gone a combined 5-10. Their head-to-head matchups have only widened the gap between them.

All of this places the Dinos in a very good position to take the regular season, and if you need a reminder, that is a very big deal. The KBO playoff format rewards the regular season champion by giving it a bye directly to the Korean Series, with the next four teams having a progressively longer route to face them. The fourth and fifth seeds face each other in a best-of-five wild card round, the winner of that series faces the third seed in the quarterfinals, and so on.

Unlike the top spot, the remaining seeds ought to be highly contested all season. Part of that is due to the fact that the bottom of the league is so clearly defined — the SK Wyverns have gone through a poor enough stretch to nearly catch the Hanwha Eagles, who devoted a chunk of their season to perhaps the worst three-week run in baseball history. With a fifth of the league roughly 10 games behind everyone else, the clubs in front of them have gotten a boost.

Most of those teams have a significant enough strength that it’s easy to imagine them piecing together a hot streak that defines their season. The Kia Tigers, currently in sixth place in the standings, own the league’s best ERA. The seventh-place KT Wiz have scored the third-most runs per game. The road will be quite crowded for some time. But even with much of the season remaining, it seems clear that one team is in the fast lane.