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Q. What is Kuo's early background?
A. Kuo was born in Taiwan and raised there until about age 17, I believe, and was signed by the Dodgers because he was a left hand pitcher who threw gassssss. Kuo and Chien-Ming Wang are the two significant Chinese players (pitchers) in MLB.
Anyway, if Kuo saved 30 games I'd probably try to hack the statistics onto the PRC internet, even under pain of assassination attempts.
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Q. Can he pitch?
A. When his arm is frisky and the moon is full, you could argue this man for best reliever in either hemisphere. Seriously.
This video will give you a feel for it. The first pitch clocks 96, it looks 101, and the batters' results against it read 105 mph. His good fastball is always that way. He's just hilarious to watch, like Byung-Hyun Kim was for a couple of years.
He comes short-arm, hides the ball, gets some sort of tremendous spin and life on it and .... even right at the knees, the batters just can't see it. They swing through fastballs thrown right at their bats.
His slider falls off the table too, gets one garbage swing after another. That was Adrian Gonzalez in the video, third pitch, running screaming into the night away from a Kuo slider.
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Q. Has the stuff translated to elite, closer-like results?
A. If he's healthy, he's the Mariners' best reliever, end of story.
He's been hurt a lot, like Chris Snelling "a lot," but check his two relatively healthy seasons:
| Year |
IP |
K:BB |
HR |
| 2008 |
80 |
96:21 |
4 |
| 2010 |
60 |
73:18 |
1 |
In 2010, left hand batters had 69 attempts against him, going .095/.159/.111. You are talking the Randy Johnson experience here. Okay, Aroldis Chapman these days. It's not much of an exaggeration to compare Kuo's results to Chapman's, except that a healthy Kuo throws strikes.
Visualize 63 at-bats, 28 strikeouts, a handful of singles, all year by lefties. That was 2010. Kuo's great period, but when his arm is okay, left-hand batters fear him like spiders.
In 2008 and 2010, Kuo racked up 2.2 WAR out of the pen. That's like 3.5 from the rotation, because those are leveraged innings.
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Q. What's with the walks in 2011?
A. He was hurting, of course. You might remember Norm Charlton walking a bunch of guys right before his elbow tendon snapped.
It's not a sabermetric issue. It's a pain issue.
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Q. Why would the M's be first in line at this guy?
A. His arthroscopic surgery was just a few months ago, "cleaned up some loose bodies" and it's a question of who will give him $1M (or ??) for the dice roll.
Funny thing. You'd have thought that Iwakuma would get a lot more, but somehow the M's talked to him sweet and he wound up here because the M's were such nice guys. If the M's wound up with Kuo, it would be more of the same: the M's Asian inside track paying off again.
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Q. Dr's prognosis?
A. From our standpoint as fans, we got no downside here. It's the M's who have to grind their teeth a little and budget the $750k, or whatever it is.
When Kuo is right, he's like a Strat-O-Matic card with nothing but outs on it - a Willy Wonka Gold Card to skip the inning once per series. Big fun. What's not to like?
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I'd like to see a simulation on that. Two equal teams, 3-game series, except one team gets to "smart bomb" exactly one defensive inning of its choosing, including an inning which had started with the first couple guys getting on base.
I wonder what its winning % would be? A lot higher than the WAR difference would predict, I'll tell ya that. Such a simulation would test the limits of WAR's relation to the real world.
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Kuo has been hurt a lot, yeah, but he's had two huge RP seasons in the last four. Let's see 3-for-5, my man.
BABVA,
Dr D