It’s hard to believe that a year ago, no one was sure if Jung Ho Kang was really going to deserve the roster spot that the Pirates announced that they were going to give him, despite a dismal spring training. In early April, Kang looked well out of his depth with the Pirates. He hit horribly, and he looked slow on the bases an in the field. In his last game in April, he finally broke out a bit with a three-hit game against the Cubs. In his first at-bat of May, he homered. He never looked back. From that three-hit game in late April against the Cubs to the day in September when Chris Coghlan destroyed his left knee on a pointless and now illegal (and it burns me up to this day that when the new rule is discussed we talk about Chase Utley and Ruben Tejada, but that no one remembers the Kang injury except for Pirate fans) slide into second base, Kang hit .293/.363/.474 with 23 doubles and 15 homers in 114 games (443 PAs). Besides Andrew McCutchen, Kang was probably the Pirates’ second-best hitter last year, and his flair for the dramatic (he hit .378/.440/.612 in 98 plate appearances designated “high leverage” and had a 1.167 OPS with three of his homers in the ninth inning alone) created maybe more lasting memories than any other Pirate during the hot streak that the team started in late May and rode through the end of the season.
This creates a two-fold question with Kang for 2016: the first is the obvious one about how he deals with his injury, but the second is how well maintains, improves, or regresses in his second year in Major League Baseball. Without Neil Walker or Pedro Alvarez, Kang is one of the Pirates bigger power threats and will certainly be leaned on to anchor the middle of the lineup. So what does his first year tell us about what his second might look like?
The first question, the injury one, is the one that’s easiest to address today and toughest to answer. The broken leg is his left leg, so it’s not the leg he drives off to hit or throw, but it’s obviously a serious injury in that Kang is still rehabbing it now, seven months after the fact. I wrote quite a bit last week about the possibility that he might play shortstop this year, and the reality is that the leg might prevent him from doing that at all. Remember that Andrew McCutchen’s knee injury was to his left knee and that it prevented him from fully transferring his weight in the violent way that makes Andrew McCutchen Andrew McCutchen. The only answer about Kang’s injury right now is, “we’ll see what he looks like when he gets on the field.” You could read into the signing of David Freese as an indicator that the Pirates are worried about him long-term, but you could also look at that signing as an incredible deal to give the Pirates back some of the infield depth lost in the Neil Walker trade. There’s really no way to have a good answer for now.
Let’s assume that Kang can get past the injury, though, and ask what that means for him at the plate in 2016. If you go to FanGraphs, both ZiPS and Steamer see a regression for Kang coming mostly from a dip in his batting average; his projected triple slash line averaged between the two systems is .257/.324/.419. I assume that’s based a bit on translating his numbers from the KBO to the MLB; Kang was a career .298 hitter there, including his .356/40 homer season that directly preceded his arrival in the US. The thing is, besides the dip in power (which everyone expected), Kang’s numbers last year didn’t look that far off from his career KBO numbers. He struck out at almost the exact same rate last year (21.2%) as he did in his last KBO year (21.1%) and while he walked quite a bit less (6.0% vs. 13.6%), it’s hard to say how much of that was due to the league change and how much was due to pitchers treating him differently. It’s worth noting, I think, that he actually walked more before the All-Star break than after, so I’m not sure we should expect a doubling of his walk rate to match his KBO numbers in 2016.
That being said, there’s also not a ton of data that suggests that his .287 average was a fluke. In addition to his level strikeout rate, his xBABIP (an estimated of expected BABIP based on batted ball data) was .328, which is well above-average if not quite as good as his actual BABIP. We’re also not really spending a lot of time on the idea that another year in the States means that he gets closer to his KBO numbers, rather than drops off from his MLB numbers. His power was a big wild card when the season began, but he had what probably translates to a 20-25 homer season if you give him a break for that April adjustment and then extrapolate to 162 games. Those home runs were not cheap, either; Hit Tracker only measured three of his homers as “Just Enough” or “Lucky,” and of the nine homers that he hit 400+ feet, five came in August and the small bit of September that he played. Kang will obviously never be a 50 homer hitter in America the way he was in Korea, but there’s certainly more pop in his bat than I think a lot of us expected there to be in the early part of 2015.
The summation here, of course, is that Kang is still a really unique player in being the first KBO-trained Korean player in Major League Baseball, and so that makes him awfully hard to project. To my eye, I don’t see a whole lot that screams “FLUKE” about his 2015 season. He hit the ball often, he hit the ball hard, and he hit the ball far. For every argument that his batting average might drop, you could counter with one that his power or patience might rise. The Pirates need Kang in the lineup and they need him healthy; the trio of him, Starling Marte, and Andrew McCutchen isn’t the most stereotypically intimidating middle-of-the-lineup from a power perspective, but I somehow doubt that will mean much to the pitchers that face them this year, should Kang work his way past his injury.
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