KBO: Cha Woo-chan vs Han Hyun-hee
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.
Last night, the LG Twins defeated the Kiwoom Heroes 8–1, avoiding a sweep in the final game of the three-game series. Starter Cha Woo-chan held the Heroes scoreless over 7 innings, working his way out of multiple tight spots without a blemish. Han Hyun-hee also pitched well for the Heroes but allowed 1 run over his 5.1 innings of work leading to the bullpen letting the Twins blow things wide open.
Han Hyun-hee pitched fairly well to limit the Twins’ offense, only allowing 4 hits, 1 walk, and 1 hit-by-pitch. He wasn’t super-efficient with his pitches, throwing 98 in just over 5 innings, but he did his job.
Han’s delivery is not a typical one; he throws almost sidearm but straightens up at that last minute with an arm slot that’s barely upright. Starters rarely have such unique deliveries which could explain part of it; Han has primarily been a reliever throughout his KBO career, with 2018, and now 2020 marking the 2 seasons where’s he started a majority of his appearances.
His delivery allows him to have a sort of unique movement on his fastball with quite a bit of arm side run that breaks back towards a right-handed hitter. Combined with his above-average velocity, touching 93 mph, averaging about 91 mph, it’s a strong combination that helped lead to his 20% whiff rate on swings. He worked around the edges of the zone a lot, especially outside to RHH and inside to LHH with his fastball diving back to catch the corner of the zone. With that in mind, I was kind of surprised at how many strikes he had thrown (64, 65% strike-rate) when I put together his post-game report; it felt like he was just missing on the edge of the zone the entire game. While it’s evident that he wasn’t, he was struggling to get ahead in the count, only throwing 13 first-pitch strikes to the 23 batters that he faced.
However, going down in the count never seemed to faze him, with only 2 batters receiving free passes to first base. He’s always done a decent job limiting walks, with a 2.96 BB/9 this season and BB/9 below 3.00 every time he’s thrown 100+ innings in his career. Han managed to avoid too many walks by letting a lot of balls be put in play and letting his defense work to the tune of a 0.235 BABIP allowed. However, that hasn’t been a super successful strategy for Han this season with a BABIP allowed of 0.382, inflating his ERA to 5.60. It helps that, to date, Han has been one of the better pitchers in the KBO at limiting HRs, only allowing 0.66 HR/9. But he did allow 8 flyouts vs just 5 groundouts against the Twins and 4 of those fly outs, all from left-handed hitters on inside pitches, went a long way with the outfielder catching the ball at the warning track.
Han didn’t display a lot of variety with his pitches against the Twins, throwing his fastball with good speed and his secondary stuff all hanging around 82 mph. That can work for a relief pitcher, but I suspect that it’s caused Han some consternation so far this season.
Han’s opponent for the Twins, Cha Woo-chan on the other hand, had no problem mixing up his pitches, throwing 4 distinct pitches varying amounts against the Heroes. His velocity is closer to the KBO average that Han’s, with Cha’s fastball sitting around 86 mph, with his splitter coming in around 81–82 mph. Those were his effective pitches, especially the splitter which led to at least 6 of his 12 whiffs. His curveball, sitting 69–70 mph, didn’t do much, only missing up in the zone with a really distinctive hump that made hit to identify; his slider acted more to set up the splitter, fastball combo than anything else.
The combination and distinction worked well enough for Cha to post 7 scoreless innings, but it wasn’t always pretty. Cha allowed 11 baserunners, off of 6 hits and 5 walks, leading to a 1st and 2nd, no outs jam in the first and a bases-loaded situation in the 7th inning. Both times though, he managed to work his way out of it unscathed, keeping his team in position to win the game. Being able to strand runners has been a strength this season, according to his LOB % (% of runners left on base) of 74.2%, the 11th best mark amongst KBO starting pitchers.
I found it interesting that he threw strikes only 63% of the time, which is less than Han Hyun-hee did and I assumed it was the other way around as I watched. His near-collapse in the 7th didn’t help where he threw 9 balls over his 21 pitches (42%). But I’m inclined to believe that the pitch count played a part in the 5 walks allowed since he’s sporting a 2.33 BB/9 this season and has been pretty consistent in that category since his KBO debut in 2006.
He also struck out 5 batters which is a lower total than I would have expected given his K % of 21.9, the second-highest mark of his career when he’s thrown 10+ IP. That’s along with his 25% whiff rate in this game, a lot of which is due to his deceptive fastball/splitter combination. With just a few mph of separation and similar shapes before the splitter breaks right before the plate, hitters were way in front of it; the ESPN broadcast team mentioned that he entered the game throwing the splitter 19% of the time and I think he threw it closer to 30% this game.
One slight area of concern for me is Cha’s GO/FO ratio, allowing 7 groundouts and 8 flyouts, since he’s sporting an HR/9 of 1.67 this season due to allowing 1 HR each game this season except for this start against the Heroes.
I don’t expect Cha Woo-chan to continue to post 7 scoreless innings if he continues to allow a 1.57 WHIIP, but he’s been successful at getting out of jams this season and it showed against the Heroes. Han Hun-hee’s approach opposite of Cha is much more sustainable and could return similar results in the future.
