Slugging It Out in South Korea: The Best Foreign Hitters in KBO History, 2021-2022

This is the post-2021 regular season update of a post I originally published back in 2015.  South Korea’s KBO only began allowing foreign players in 1998, and it’s is a young league, starting play only in 1982.  This means the records for foreign players are very much in play almost every season.

Initially, KBO teams brought in mostly hitters; and the foreigners, at least at first, hit a lot of home runs.  As the league improved, KBO teams began to realize after about 2005 that foreign pitchers were worth more to them than the hitters — so much so that by 2012 and 2013, there were no foreign hitters in the league at all.

KBO teams expanded the roster space for foreigners from two to three beginning with the 2014 season, as the league was undergoing expansion, with the requirement that one of the three foreigners be a position player/hitter. Foreign hitters have been back in the league the last seven seasons and initially took advantage of what was until the 2019 season an extreme hitters’ league. However, relatively few have lasted long enough in the KBO to challenge the foreign player records set before 2010.

Batting Average  (2,000 at-bats)

1.     Jay Davis      .313

2.     Tyrone Woods   .294

3.     Tilson Brito    .292

Mel Rojas, Jr. .321 (in 1,971 at-bats)

Cliff Brumbaugh .299 (in 1,971 at-bats)

Mel Rojas, Jr. had a KBO career batting average of .321 in 1,971 at-bats through the end of the 2020 season. He had a tremendous 2020 season (.347/.417/.680 slash line), after which he signed a two-year deal to play with the Hanshin Tigers of Japan’s NPB. The first year with Hanshin was dreadful (.217/.282/.381 in 60 games). I expect Rojas to hit better in 2022, but there is still a good chance he’ll return to the KBO in 2023. Brumbaugh turned a big year in the KBO in 2004 into two seasons in NPB, but was back in the KBO in 2007.

Hits

1.      Jay Davis   979

2.     Tilson Brito  683

3.     Tyrone Woods  655

4. Mel Rojas, Jr. 633

5. Jamie Romak 610

Jay Davis had far and away the best career of any foreign hitter in the KBO, with Tyrone Woods as the only other player in the conversation.  Davis, Woods and Brito are the only three foreign players to reach 2,000 career KBO at-bats so far.

The problem is that very few foreigners have had long careers in the KBO.  Until the last ten years, when increased revenues made bigger salaries possible, the foreigners who played in KBO were clearly a cut below the foreign players who signed with Japanese NPB teams.  They tended not to maintain their initial KBO performance levels for long — three full seasons was and still is a long KBO career for a foreigner — or they moved on to greener NPB pastures or back to MLB.

Home Runs

1.     Tyrone Woods   174

2.     Jay Davis           167

3.     Jamie Romak     155

4. Mel Rojas, Jr. 132

5.     Eric Thames      124

6.     Cliff Brumbaugh  116

7.     Tilson Brito         112

8.     Karim Garcia      103

9.     Felix Jose            95

In the early days (late 1990’s and early 2000’s), KBO teams paid foreigners to hit home runs.  The most prolific was Tyrone Woods, who blasted 174 dingers over five KBO seaons and then moved on to the NPB, where he blasted 240 HRs in six seasons.  Woods never played even one game in the major leagues, and there are some reasons to believe that PEDs may have had something to do with his tremendous Asian performance, at least by the time he reached NPB.

Eric Thames was the best of the hitters to join the KBO since the foreign player roster expansion in 2014 (at least until Mel Rojas), and he was the caliber of player who would have signed with an NPB team during the earlier era when KBO teams were signing foreign sluggers.  As I predicted in October 2016, Thames did return to MLB (I actually predicted he’d sign with either an MLB or NPB team that off-season — the Yomiuri Giants signed Thames for 2021, but he got hurt and barely played at all in Japan), and his contract was a steal for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Cliff Brumbaugh played briefly for the Rangers and Rockies in 2001 before starting a successful seven year career in South Korea and Japan.  You probably remember Karim Garcia and Felix Jose, who both had significant major leagues careers, and you may even remember Tilson Brito, who played in 92 MLB games in 1996-1997 for the Blue Jays and the A’s.

Jamie Romak has probably played his final season in the KBO. He is now 36, slashed .225/.340/.425 in 2021 and missed the last two weeks of the regular season with an injury, and his $900K-to-$1.15M salary is at the high end in the 2021 salary-retrenching KBO.

Runs Scored

1.     Jay Davis    538

2.     Tyrone Woods   412

RBIs

1.     Jay Davis   591

2.     Tyrone Woods   510

3T. Mel Rojas, Jr. 409

3T. Jamie Romak 409

As you can see from the above numbers, the KBO records for foreign hitters are ready to be broken in all categories, because so relatively little has been accomplished by foreign hitters to date.  It’s mainly a matter of whether any of the post-2014 crop of foreign hitters can hang around long enough to add their names to my lists as the seasons pass.

The KBO imposed a $1M salary cap on new foreign players (or foreign players moving to a new team) a couple of years ago. This will impact the quality of the foreign players KBO teams can sign and makes it easier for better paying NPB to filch the best foreign hitters like Rojas and Jerry Sands.

A Name to Remember

Roque Salinas batted .400 in the Mexican League this summer. Sure, he only played in 45 games and accumulated only 109 plate appearances, he’s got no power (four doubles and two HRs) and doesn’t walk much (two this year), but .400 is .400, and HE’S ONLY 18 YEARS OLD.

The age is a big, big deal for a player playing in a league as good as the Mexican summer league. It’s about a AA league (it used to be classified as AAA, but mainly as a courtesy, based on a close working relationship with MLB), and an 18 year old who can hit in a AA league is a prospect, even if it’s a small sample size.

He’s a corner outfielder listed at 5’7″ and 176, which isn’t so small if you remember that Joe Morgan was about the same size in his prime. He’s 1-for-7 in two Mexican Winter League games so far, but it says something that a player with so little experience gets to play in the smaller winter league, which is a better league by virtue of its smaller size (10 winter teams compared to 18 summer teams) drawing from the same general talent pool.

Mark my words, an MLB or NPB team will buy his contract this off-season. 18 year olds who hit .400 in pro ball anywhere are worth taking a flyer on.

Best Player You’ve Never Heard Of, Vol. 7

Robert Suarez is the closer for the Hanshin Tigers in Japan’s NPB. His 36 saves leads the Central League by eight and NPB by two with fewer than 20 regular season games to play. He is a foreign player in Japan who never played in the MLB system.

Robert is the younger brother of Albert Suarez, who I remember when the reached the San Francisco Giants five years back. He’s also in NPB, working as a starter for the Yakult Swallows., Albert signed out of Venezuela at age 16 or 17, but his brother did not. Instead, the story, as I understand it, is that Robert was pitching semi-pro ball in Venezuela at age 22 when a Venezuelan player playing in Mexico saw him pitch back home and thought to himself that Robert had the arm if he could improve his mechanics. The countryman brought Robert back with him to Mexico, and Robert trained for a year until his Mexican League debut in 2015 at age 24, and It went well. Out of the bullpen, he posted a 1.71 ERA in 43 appearances with an exceptional pitching line.

The NPB big-money SoftBank Hawks took notice, and signed Robert up before the ink had dried on the 2015 season. His 2016 rookie year was a good one, but he promptly hurt his arm and missed the 2017 season. It took him two full seasons to work his way back, and at the end of 2019, the Hawks apparently gave up on him. The Hanshin Tigers stepped in, and the rest is history, so far.

In the short 2020 season, Suarez posted a 2.24 ERA and saved 25 games. This season, his ERA is 1.38 through 53 appearances so far. And he leads NPB in saves, as mentioned above.

Robert Suarez is 30 this season, so I kind of think he’d be a fool to leave NPB. He can earn about $5.5 million a year there, and it sure looks like he’s mastered that major league.