Casey Kelly Gets Outdueled by Park Jong-gi
While negotiations between the MLB Player’s Union and the owners of the big-league clubs drag on, the Korean Baseball Organization has begun its season, with a game per day broadcasted on ESPN, helping to fill our need for baseball.
The Doosan Bears defeated the LG Twins 8–2 to pull within a game of the 2nd-place Twins with their series finale coming up tonight. Casey Kelly, a former MLBer with the Padres, Braves, and Giants, pitched 7 strong innings for the Twins, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Park Jong-gi’s scoreless 6 IP gem. The two pitchers are at very different points in their careers, but for both, their start against the other had many good signs that are a step in the right direction for continued success this season and beyond.
Casey Kelly, a 6’3”, 30-year-old RHP, has been up and down for the LG Twins all season, resulting in a 5.21 ERA and 4.08 FIP (making him one of the unluckiest pitchers in the KBO) a year after posting marks of a 2.55 ERA and 3.42 FIP back in 2019. But his 7 innings against the Bears were nearly spotless, save for a 3-run 2nd innings where he gave up a single, double, and HR to set the Twins in a hole that they would not climb out of. Allowing HRs hasn’t been a huge problem this season for Kelly, only allowing 0.71 HR/9 which is slightly better than the KBO average, although he does have a hard-hit rate allowed of 22% that was the 13th-worst in the KBO as of June 17th, according to Sports Info Solutions, and he did allow a hard contact rate of 27% against Doosan, so it’s definitely not helping him.
The problem has been that those HRs and hard hits come with runners on base; Kelly entered the game against the Bears with a BABIP of 0.339 and allowed a BABIP of 0.333 to the Bears’ hitters. And when those hitters get on-base, he’s had trouble keeping them from scoring, with his 63.7% LOB% ranking as the 7th-worst in the KBO. Despite that, I think there’s definitely room for improvement for Kelly and I expect him to have more successful outings in the future.
Kelly has never been much of a strikeout pitcher, with a K/9 of 5.88 in MLB and entering the game against the Bears with a 6.63 K/9 yet he managed to get 7 Ks and induce 13 Whiffs (a 24% Whiff rate). Those marks are pretty good and I think it’s more in line with what the rest of Kelly’s season will look like.
Kelly throws 4 pitches, having done away with his sinker in the last few years. He sports a 4-seam fastball around 90 mph, a slider around 84 mph that does not have much side-to-side movement, and looks similar to a cutter-type profile, a changeup around 84 mph, and his curveball that comes in around 80 mph, with more vertical and horizontal movement than his slider.
His primary pitch was his fastball, which he tended to throw in the zone or just above to induce swinging strikes. Playing off of that, with the similar shapes of his slider and curveball, he threw both low and in the dirt. Kelly started many of his at-bats with an offspeed pitch, ending up with a first-strike pitch rate of 63%, which really helped him get ahead of hitters, paving the way for his 7 Ks.
The 2B and HR that Kelly allowed in the 2nd inning came against LHH when he left a changeup and a slider up in the zone. Along with his fastball up in the zone, that’s where a lot of the damage can be done against Kelly; the only problem is distinguishing between his fastball and slider/curveball combo. He threw his slider/curveball down in the zone against LHH, particularly throwing a few back-foot sliders that wiped out a couple of hitters, while his changeup was primarily reserved up and in for RHH. LHH can sit fastball up or wait and see if Kelly hangs a breaking ball over the inside half of the plate. RHH should be eyeing that 4-seamer while also taking advantage of the changeup when it doesn’t run inside the way it necessarily should.
Beyond a rocky second inning, Kelly was efficient and controlled all game. This was a step in the right direction and I think he’s getting his season back on track after some ups and downs early on. His counterpart, Park Jong-gi on the other hand, is just getting started, having entered this game with 7 IP of KBO over the last 2 seasons.
Park, a 25-year-old RHP, had a phenomenal start against the Twins in just his 2nd career start, going six innings and holding the Twins scoreless. He’s more of a contact guy who tries to induce weak contact and did so successfully against LG, allowing contact of 89% of opponents’ swings, resulting in18 balls in play, with just 4 going for hits. Almost 40% of the balls in play that he allowed were hit softly and he primarily kept the ball on the ground, inducing 8 groundouts and allowing no extra-base hits.
Park only struck out 3 batters and induced 4 Whiffs for a 10% Whiff rate, which is pretty low, despite his fastball that averaged around 88 mph, above average for the KBO. I think that part of the struggle on that end is the distinctiveness and separation between all of his pitches. His fastball comes in around 88 mph, with his slider averaging around 82 mph, and his big, looping curveball is his 3rd pitch, averaging around 69 mph, a whopping 19 mph separation between his fastball and curveball. That makes it tough to really fool hitters, but I get the impression that Park was never trying to blow it by anyone.
Park was fairly accurate against the Twins, throwing a strike 63% of the time and really peppering the strike zone with his fastball and ended up allowing 0 walks. He used his slider down in the dirt a lot where it acted as his swing and miss pitch. His curveball usage was rather interesting. Looking at his location plot, he threw a lot of curveballs in the zone and a lot of those were the first pitch he threw to a hitter. It’s pretty unexpected to see a looping 70 mph curveball on the first pitch and no one swung at it to try and take advantage of the pitch.
His curveball did serve to induce a lot of the weak contact and groundballs that Park induced and helped Park “steal” the first-pitch for a strike multiple times throughout the game. However, the drastic drop off between his fastball/slider and his curveball makes me uncertain about his long-term prospects. As hitters begin to anticipate that curveball in the zone, they’ll be able to take advantage of it. Park really has 2 main pitches and probably needs something else to bridge the gap between his slider & curveball. Of course, given his ability to pepper the zone and locate, he could render that suggestion null, but we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out. For now, 6 scoreless innings against one of the top lineups in the KBO was a phenomenal outing for the young RHP.
