Projecting Byung-ho Park and Hyun-soo Kim – The Process

This year’s new faces from foreign leagues on the offensive side come to us from the KBO League of South Korea. First baseman Byung-ho Park was signed by the Twins and is expected to serve as the team’s primary designated hitter, as Joe Mauer is entrenched at first. The Orioles signed outfielder Hyun-soo Kim and he figures to play left field on an every day basis, though as a lefty, could end up being platooned. We have precious few players historically who have come over from the KBO League to look to in order to assist with our translations. So forecasting these two players is extremely difficult. They are essentially just educated guesses, and although all projections technically are, these are far less educated ones!

So let’s discuss the process I use to go about making these somewhat educated guesses. The first step requires us to find a good source of historical statistics for each. Luckily, we do, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com:

Let’s briefly talk about each hitter’s careers in the KBO League before introducing my next step.

As we have heard about Park, he possesses some serious power. He has hit 105 homers in the past two seasons with a slugging percentage around .700! He has also hit over .300 for three straight seasons, so he hasn’t been an all-or-nothing “close your eyes, swing hard, and hope something good happens” hacker. Along with that batting average, he has also posted on base percentage marks in the mid-.430 range for those three seasons as well, suggesting he has been a patient hitter.

Kim has been a somewhat different hitter than Park, though still quite productive. He, too, has hit over .300 for three consecutive seasons, though he also sports a career average above .300. He doesn’t have quite the power that Park possesses, as he just set a new career high in homers and it was barely more than half of what Kim has launched in each of the last two seasons. He has only posted a slugging percentage above .500 once in the past five seasons.

After assessing the hitter’s career stats, I turn everything into a ratio to more effectively analyze their record and help me forecast their MLB performance for my Pod Projections (hopefully being released this week!). We’ll start with Park:

We’ll go stat by stat for each player to get a better idea of what type of hitter each was. The caveat here is that none of this is league adjusted, so I will be using the actual stats and comparing them to MLB league averages. The better way to do this would be to compare each stat to the KBO League average and present it as an index. Unfortunately, I have only found such work done for Kim and that was only for his BB%, K%, and ISO.

So with that being said, Park was about average at hitting doubles, and judging by his triples rate, doesn’t possess much speed. His 2016 projection should probably include a forecast of 0 triples. The SBA/TOB (stolen base attempts per times on base, and excludes triples and homers) is a metric I created and explain more in-depth in Projecting X 2.0. It is a method to turn stolen base attempts into a ratio to better control for fluctuating plate appearance totals and on base percentage marks. Park’s SBA/TOB is on the low side, but higher than I would have expected. It means he could chip in five or so steals, assuming he maintains the acceptable success rate he has.

As typically comes with a power hitter, Park has posted a healthy walk rate. Unfortunately, his strikeout is high, which could be worrisome for his batting average. A better than league average walk rate paired with a high strikeout rate implies that Park will gain considerable value in leagues that count OBP instead of AVG.

We then saunter over to his BABIP which has remained above .320 for the past five seasons and even jumped over .400 in 2015. I have no idea what BABIP marks are like in the KBO League, but if they are similar to MLB marks, then Park could post a BABIP a bit above the league average, which could somewhat take the sting out of his high strikeout rate.

Last, we get to the best indicator of his power, his AB/HR ratio. For reference, Chris Davis led qualified hitters with a 12.2 AB/HR mark in 2015. Park has been at or better than that mark for three straight seasons and has improved in near lock-step fashion every year since his debut.

We can go one step further to determine how he has fared over the past three seasons versus his career:

He has hit a couple more singles, walked a bit more often, and struck out slightly less frequently, which are all good signs. The biggest difference, however, is that power surge. The career line obviously includes his last three years, so the power spike is even more dramatic than it appears. It’s possible that this was his peak and it’s all downhill from here, but it’s more likely that the Twins signed Park in the midst of his peak.

Now let’s run Kim through the same analysis. First, his career ratios:

Kim has been more adept at the two-bagger than Park, and the same goes for triples, though those have fallen off the last four seasons. Very surprisingly, Kim has attempted a stolen base when he has had an opportunity to even less often than Park! Maybe that ugly success rate has something to do with it. I assumed he had better speed than Park, so maybe he just needs to learn better technique.

The article I linked to above displays graphically how Kim has performed compared to the KBO League in both BB% and K%. From 2013 and 2014, his BB% declined from about 25% better than average to just a smidge better than average. Then in 2015, his plate patience shot through the roof, finishing nearly 75% better than average, which would equate to a low-to-mid teens walk rate in MLB. But Park still owns a slightly better career walk rate and has posted inflated marks more consistently than Kim has.

One of the big differentiators between the two is in their respective strikeout rates. Where Park has the hefty strikeout rate like a prototypical power hitter, Kim has a microsopic one you would expect from a high batting average, low-to-middling power guy. In that graph, we see that his K% has been about half the league’s mark in the past two seasons and he has always been in the low teen range. A combination of strong walk rate and low strikeout rate seems to make him an ideal lead-off hitter.

This is especially true when we notice Kim’s power pales in comparison to Park’s. It is still above average, but more of the 15-20 home run variety, rather than the 30+. For reference, Evan Longoria posted a similar AB/HR mark in 2015 to Kim’s career mark.

I skipped over BABIP because it made more sense to get right into the AB/HR ratio, so let’s touch on it now. Kim has posted a career mark a bit higher than Park, and has been extremely consistent now since 2010. Over six seasons, his BABIP has remained in a narrow range between .316 and .331, which is pretty amazing considering how the metric seems to fluctuate wildly from season to season.

Now let’s compare his last three seasons to his career:

Wow, talk about consistency! He has hit a couple more home runs, which has boosted his slugging percentage, but aside from that, he has been virtual the same. I wish there was more I could type, but there’s little else to say. While his individual season numbers have been up and down, his last three years have mirrored his career. I guess that can be looked at optimistically in that you (think) you know what you’re going to get.

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In the next article, we’ll get to actually projecting and talk more specifics like ballpark, lineup slot, etc to come up with a somewhat educated guess to help decide if either of these guys are worth tossing money at in shallower formats, and how much in deeper ones.