Se-woong Park and Im Gi-yeong Duel in the KBO

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.

Yesterday, the Kia Tigers defeated the Lotte Giants by a score of 7–2 behind a strong performance from starter Gi-yeong Im who tossed 6 innings of 2-run ball. His opponent, Se-woong Park also went 6 innings but gave up four runs, 3 of which came on a home run in the 6th inning.

Gi-yeong Im has been a successful starter for the Tigers this season, posting a 3.67 ERA (3.59 FIP so not too much luck, bad or good, influencing his runs allowed) with a 1.19 WHIP. He’s done a good job of limiting his walks allowed this season, only walking 1.33 hitters per 9, backing that up with a solid K/9 of 8.00, resulting in the third-best K/BB ratio (6.00) in the KBO among pitchers with 25+ IP.

His start against the Giants showed both of those skills and just how his unorthodox delivery can get results. As Im begins his pitching motion, he appears as if he’s going to throw with a submarine style, but he starts to straighten at the last minute, releasing the ball a little higher than a sidearm slot. It’s an interesting delivery and took me a few innings for me to get used to, but it gives Im some advantages over opposing hitters. First, it’s unique and funky, taking some time to get used to watching. Second, he gets a huge amount of horizontal break and arm side run on his pitches, which he makes the most of by working side-to-side with a 4-seam, changeup, and slider trio.

He mixes and matches those pitches pretty well; with the velocity data I gathered from the broadcast, he averaged about 85–86 mph on his fastball, 75–76 on his changeup, and his slider slotting in the middle at about 81 mph for variety. The changeup and slider function similarly, with the slider diving away from righties and the changeup breaking in towards right-handed hitters and away from left-handed hitters.

Im worked down in the zone a lot, trying to get calls on the corner, with varied results, only throwing a strike 62% of the time. However, his plan of attack and the side to side movement of his pitches lent itself to a lot of ground balls rather than more dangerous fly outs. He did allow 2 home runs though, but those were isolated incidents. I’d love to see how Im Gi-yeong’s groundball and flyball rates stack up in the KBO, but that data doesn’t seem to be publicly available anywhere, which is unfortunate. But, from his start against the Giants, it’s clear that Im is a guy who relies on soft contact, rather than inducing a ton of swings and misses (only getting 7 on 17% of swings). His unique pitching motion and release tie that together and make it an effective package.

Im Gi-yeong’s counterpart, Park Se-woong on the other hand, hasn’t been as successful, despite what looks like a more typical pitcher’s arsenal. He primarily threw 3 pitches against the Tigers, relying on his fastball, slider, and changeup.

However, despite his higher velocity numbers, Park didn’t fare much better than Im did, allowing 2 home runs, one on the very first pitch of the game, which were the sum of the Tigers’ runs. He did induce 14 swings and misses for a 28% whiff rate, which is the highest rate that I’ve seen since charting KBO games.

A couple of things doomed Park. This year he has a K/9 of 6.38 and a BB/9 of 4.13 and an HR/9 of 1.50 which are pretty indicative that these are problems that have persisted throughout Park’s season. He only threw a first-pitch strike to only 11 of the 27 batters he faced for an astoundingly low first-pitch strike rate of 40.74%. Getting down in the count that early against hitters made it hard to control the at-bats. Interestingly though, Park didn’t actually walk anyone in this game, but the BB/9 figure indicates his struggles with the K zone.

But the biggest problem by far is his HR/9 of 1.50 (6th worst rate in the KBO), which reared its head with his GO/FO ratio of 6/8 and allowing 2 home runs against the Tigers. I’m not sure that Park really did anything wrong against the Tigers; it was more just them hitting the ball hard against him, which seems to have been a trend throughout Park’s career. The best case looks like relying a little more on his velocity to try and drive his Whiff rate and strikeout numbers.

The game between the Tigers and the Giants was pretty emblematic of the seasons that both Se-woong Park and Im Gi-yeong have both been having. It illustrated their strengths and weaknesses in what was an average start for both of them.