The Hanwha Eagles Have Made Some Unfortunate History

It fell several steps short of a rally, but it was the closest Hanwha had gotten to one in weeks. Down 5-0 against the Doosan Bears in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Eagles finally showed life with a pair of singles, the second of which resulted in an error in left that allowed the first to score. A wild pitch, a walk, and a fielder’s choice later, the Eagles had a second run. The tying run was in the on-deck circle, and one of the KBO’s most volatile bullpens was about to use its fifth reliever. Sometimes, this is how the improbable happens. But Hanwha was in the process of defying a much different set of odds — one that is far less fun than prying victory from the jaws of defeat.

The Eagles fell to Doosan 5-2 on Friday, giving them their 18th loss in a row, a stretch of futility with no end in sight and nearly no precedent. In the history of the Korean Baseball Organization, only the 1985 Sammi Superstars have lost as many games consecutively; one more loss would place Hanwha in a class by themselves. In over 150 years of Major League Baseball, an 18-game losing streak has happened just 22 times, with only two of those occurring in the last 40 seasons.

An 18-game losing streak is preposterously bad no matter how you look at it, but shockingly enough, the win-loss figures alone don’t do justice to how disastrous a stretch this has been for the Eagles. After all, streaks are flukey, with luck playing a key factor in just how long a good — or in this case, bad — thing lasts. Just as you can only learn so much about the quality of a hitter’s performance based on the number of consecutive games he’s recorded a hit in, you also need more information to learn just how poorly a team has really played over the course of a losing streak. That’s where we turn to run differential, which tells us that Hanwha’s losing streak is not only the longest in KBO history — it’s in the running for the worst three-week stretch of professional baseball to be played in decades.

Here, we see the two most recent MLB teams to endure an 18-game losing streak — the 2005 Royals, who lost 19 in a row, and the infamous 1988 Orioles, who opened their season with 21 straight defeats — but this table shows that they weren’t on an island with their actual performance. The rest of these teams — which, uh, includes the 2000 World Series champion Yankees somehow? — simply managed to stumble across a couple of wins while otherwise getting blown out by opponents for a lengthy span of games. The Eagles have gotten the worst of both sides — an unrelenting stretch of losing, combined with a worse run differential than many of us have seen in our lifetimes of watching baseball in the states.

The Eagles were hardly supposed to be a great team this year, but that isn’t to say we should have seen this collapse coming, either. At the beginning of the streak, Hanwha hovered around .500 at 7-9, and had been outscored by just six runs on the year. Their offense was lacking, but it seemed possible that their pitching staff might be able to accomplish enough to keep them afloat.

Instead, the pitching staff has disintegrated, and the offense is struggling as much as ever. They’re averaging just under 2.5 runs per game during their streak, and have allowed around eight runs per game. No team in the KBO has a lower total of home runs, extra-base hits or walks, or a worse batting average, on-base percentage, or slugging percentage. No team has allowed more runs, hits, walks, or homers, and no team has committed more errors in the field. The sky isn’t falling. It already fell. Didn’t you hear it?

Hanwha has responded with appropriately aggressive moves in its scramble, less to save its season than to simply win a few games again. Han Yong-duk, the team’s manager since 2018, resigned on Sunday, and was replaced in the interim by minor league manager Choi Won-ho. The team also demoted an astonishing 10 players off their KBO roster to the minors.

That mass jettison wasn’t just a reshuffling of the younger half of the roster — it included some of the oldest players on the team. Kwang-min Song 송광민, 37, was sent down after hitting just .217/.247/.348 over his first 98 plate appearances, as was Seong-Yeol Jeong 정성열, 35, after hitting .226/.268/.302 in 112 plate appearances. On the pitching side, Young-myung An 안영명 (35 years old, 7.59 ERA, 10.2 innings) and Si Hwan Chang 장시환 (32, 7.48 ERA, 27.2 innings) were also demoted.

Hanwha’s roster was always going to be on the older side. A total of 14 players age-32 or older have appeared in games for the Eagles this season, and the majority have struggled to contribute. Of the nine hitters in that age range, just one has an OPS above .680 (Yongkyu Lee 이용규, who’s slashing .298/.392/.357 in 94 plate appearances), and every pitcher in that age range has an ERA of 6.75 or higher. A team struggling as badly as Hanwha would typically its veterans can provide some stability to the clubhouse, but in this case, the veterans were simply performing too poorly to warrant a roster spot.

In their wake is a team with as many bright spots as one would expect from a squad that has lost 17 straight. Of the team’s three foreign-born players, just one — former Detroit Tigers right-hander Warwick Saupold 서폴드 — has lived up to the hype typically surrounding a KBO team’s foreign-born players. In his second year with the Eagles, Saupold has allowed a 4.11 ERA in seven starts this season, striking out 24 and walking 10 in 46 innings. Even he hasn’t been immune to the team’s recent struggles, however, as he’s allowed 16 runs on 34 hits over his last three starts. As for the other two foreign-born players on the roster, Chad Bell 채드벨 owns a 9.00 ERA over three starts, while outfielder Jared Hoying 호잉 has limped through a .223/.263/.383 line in 99 plate appearances, albeit with a team-high four home runs.

Better days are certainly on the horizon for Hanwha, because well, it can’t get worse than this, right? It’s just difficult to say exactly where those might come from. Any attempt to bolster the team with a major signing of a player like, say, Matt Harvey would involve a number of obstacles that would take time to hurdle. And as Patrick Dubuque pointed out at Baseball Prospectus, there is lackluster talent both in the Eagles’ minor leagues and in the region in which they are able to draft from.

What the Eagles can do right now is ensure their youngest players have every opportunity to into games and develop. The team has a already given plenty of playing time to kids like 19-year-old Si-hwan Roh 노시환, 19-year-old Yi-hwan Kim 김이환, and 20-year-old Eun-won Jung 정은원, and if the recent reorganization of the roster is any indication, more young players will be getting their chances soon. Only the 2000 Yankees have turned a historic three-week stretch of incompetence into a championship in the same season, but success eventually came for every team on that list above. Someday, somehow, it will come for Hanwha too.