With some luck, Kim Kwang-hyun takes ERA lead in 1st season back from MLB

유지호 / 2022-04-28 14:29:06

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▲ SSG Landers' starter Kim Kwang-hyun pitches against the Lotte Giants during the bottom of the first inning of a Korea Baseball Organization regular season game at Sajik Stadium in Busan, 450 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on April 27, 2022. (Yonhap)

▲ SSG Landers' starter Kim Kwang-hyun (R) is greeted by teammates after completing the bottom of the fifth inning of a Korea Baseball Organization regular season game against the Lotte Giants at Sajik Stadium in Busan, 450 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on April 27, 2022. (Yonhap)

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With some luck, Kim Kwang-hyun takes ERA lead in 1st season back from MLB

By Yoo Jee-ho

SEOUL, April 28 (Yonhap) -- In his first season back in South Korea after two years in the big leagues, SSG Landers' starter Kim Kwang-hyun has seized the early ERA lead.

After tossing six innings of two-hit ball while allowing one unearned run against the Lotte Giants Wednesday, Kim lowered his ERA from 0.47 to 0.36.

Kim has been charged with just one earned run in 25 innings so far. He has held opponents to just 10 hits, while striking out 23 and walking five.

The Giants entered the game leading the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) in hits and batting average. But Kim stymied them with five no-hit innings before allowing a couple of hits in the sixth. The one Lotte run off Kim came via two infield errors in the second inning.

Kim remains 3-0 for the season. He didn't factor into a decision as he left the game after six frames with the score tied at 1-1.

In addition to ERA, Kim leads the KBO in walks and hits per inning pitched (WHIP) with 0.60, opponents' batting average with .115, and opponents' on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) with .358.

Kim pitched for the previous incarnation of the Landers, the SK Wyverns, from 2007 to 2019, before taking his talent to St. Louis to play for the Cardinals.

Kim became a free agent after two major league seasons, over which he went 10-7 with a 2.97 ERA in 35 games, and signed a four-year, 15.1 billion won (US$11.9 million) contract with the Landers in March. It was the most lucrative deal in KBO history.

Because he signed the deal more than a month into spring training, Kim, for all his individual workouts during winter, was still well behind schedule in his preparation for the new season. The Landers brought him along slowly, and Kim only made his season debut on April 9, a week after Opening Day.

The club managed Kim's workload in the early going and his pitch count has been rising steadily. He was kept at 74 pitches in his first outing, followed by games with 89 pitches and 91 pitches. Kim hit the century mark on the number Wednesday.

Kim has won the ERA crown once in his career, in 2009 with 2.80. He set a new career high with 2.37 the following year but finished in second place.

That 2010 season was also the last time Kim posted a sub-1.00 ERA in the opening month. He had a 0.29 mark across his first 30 2/3 innings in five games, including one relief appearance.

Kim's strikeout rates and walk rates are right around the numbers he'd put up in 2019, his previous KBO season. However, even though this season has all the makings of the one for pitchers, peripheral numbers suggest Kim has been fairly lucky so far this year and his tidy ERA will almost certainly shoot up as the season progresses.

Take Kim's fielding independent pitching (FIP), for instance. It is a metric that assesses a pitcher's performance independent of the defense behind him, with a focus on events that the pitcher can control -- strikeouts, unintentional walks, hit-by-pitches and home runs. An ERA that's lower that FIP generally means the pitcher has been lucky, thanks to some strong defense or fortuitous bounces.

Kim's FIP sits at 2.32, nearly two full points higher than ERA. He has never had that large a gap between the two metrics in his career.

Kim's batting average on balls in play (BABIP) sits at an impossibly-low .143, compared with the league average of .293. Kim's career BABIP is just over .300, and balls that have been going straight to SSG's fielders will soon start finding holes.

The Landers, in first place with a 17-4-1 (win-loss-tie) record, will enjoy this run of good fortune while they can. They boast the KBO's best team ERA with 2.44 and best opponents' OPS with .547.

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