Yomar Flande, CPBL’s Answer to Robert Suarez

One of the more interesting pro baseball stories this season was the Fubon Guardians’ Yomar Flande. Flande was a 29 year rookie to professional baseball at any level in 2021, and he pitched effectively in a pretty good league.

I wrote about Robert Suarez earlier this year as possibly the best baseball player the vast majority of baseball fans in the United States had never heard of. If anyone in the U.S. has heard of Robert Suarez, besides whackadoodles like me, it’s because mlbtraderumors.com published a post about Suarez as a possible MLB sign this off-season. Note that Burly beat mlbtraderumors by 28 days — I have to take credit when I get it right for all the ones I get wrong — mlbtraderumors reported Suarez signing with the Hanshin Tigers on 12/13/2020 — they’re good at what they do.

Like Suarez, Yomar Flande is somebody the MLB system inexplicably missed, even for a brief Dominican Summer League/Rookie League look. Like Suarez, Flande is almost certainly the younger brother of a former MLB player. Yomar Conception Flande has to be the younger brother of Yohan Conception Flande, a pitcher who went 3-9 for the Denver Rockies from 2014 to 2016 and lasted all of 13 ineffective starts in the KBO, also in 2016. Baseball Reference does not list where in the Dominican Republic Yomar was born, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it is in or around El Seibo, where Yohan was born.

The back story per CPBL STATS is that Yomar Flande was recommended to Fubon by marginal major leaguer/Asian Ace Henry Sosa, who I have to assume saw Yomar pitch semi-pro ball in the Dominican Republic. Flande had been pitching in the semi-pro Inter-County Baseball League in Ontario, Canada. I am marginally embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of the Intercounty Baseball League (have you?) because it is Canada’s oldest semi-pro league and a significant number of Canadian future MLBers played in it.

Sosa recommended Flande, and Flande has a 95 mph fastball, which recommends itself. So, Fubon signed him and proved Sosa right. When you pitch like Sosa has done in Taiwan the last couple of seasons, you take his word seriously.

Rob at CPBL STATS seemed to think that Fubon signed Flande solely for organizational depth, but the 2021 season, where Covid meant that higher profile foreign replacement pitchers could not be brought in quickly, allowed Yomar a major league shot at the start of CPBL’s second half. Yomar ran with it.

In half a season, Flande pitched 58.1 innings with a 4.01 ERA and a pitching line of 48 hits, three HR, 28 BB and 62 K. He was a little wild, which showed in his ERA, but the other numbers are terrific for a 29 year old rookie pitcher jumping into what I consider to be a AA league. Yomar pitched at least two innings in 16 of his 26 appearances (five starts), which means a lot in a world of pro baseball where relief pitching of less than two innings per is becoming the majority of all pitcher effort.

One would have to think that Fubon would be crazy not to bring Flande back for another season in Taiwan. Fubon could probably sign Flande to a 2022 contract paying him $10K-$12K a month for minor league service and $17K-$18K for major league service — as a 29 year old foreign rookie in the CPBL who pitched the way Flande did, his next best option is Mexico’s Summer League at around $8,000 a month to start for much shorter season.

I love the stories of late bloomers who finally make good. Hard throwers who finally find command are classic late bloomers. Dazzy Vance is perhaps the patron saint of this kind of pitcher. I sure hope that Flande gets another CPBL season in 2022 to show what he can or cannot do.

Explore posts in the same categories: Baseball Abroad, Brooklyn Dodgers, CPBL, Denver Rockies, KBO, Los Angeles Dodgers, NPB