Kwang Hyun Kim arrives rested for St. Louis Cardinals playoff opener in San Diego
Kwang Hyun Kim was the first St. Louis Cardinal to climb the pitcher’s mound at Petco Park on Tuesday afternoon, digging into the rubber and checking over each shoulder for the look of the field and the feel of the surroundings.
He’ll also be the first Cardinal to do so on Wednesday, as he was named the starter for the first game of the best-of-three Wild Card round against the Padres.
“A couple things,” said Cardinals manager Mike Shildt, when asked about the choice to turn to kim. “One, he’s earned it, and two, he was on the appropriate amount of rest.”
The latter is a more prominent wrinkle in these playoffs than years past, as the initial rounds feature no off days between games. A team which may previously have been able to skate by with three starting pitchers will now require at least four and perhaps five, should they advance past the first round.
The former is a testament to the success of a player who, at a total of $8 million, was the biggest add by dollar value made by the Cardinals in a quiet offseason. In the early days of spring training, he was a rock star with an entourage to boot, as nearly two dozen journalists from his native Korea followed his every move around the complex in Jupiter, Fla.
Now, he’s a lone man on the mound in an empty stadium, carrying the weight of opening baseball’s second season.
“I just think postseason is different from regular season, so I have to prepare for that,” Kim said through his interpreter, Craig Choi. “Since there’s no fans this year, that’s something I need to adjust for the postseason.”
“I’m just going to be bright and just be lively in the postseason.”
Part of what drew the Cardinals to Kim, Shildt explained, was that people in the game lauded his ability to perform in the postseason. As the long-time ace for SK Wyverns of the KBO, Kim has a great deal of playoff experience, winning four Korean Series championships.
“In postseason, the solo home runs, not allowing them, that’s really important,” Kim said. “If I allow the first run, I just don’t know what will happen, and then that’s not really a good case.”
“In the postseason, one run is really important because you don’t get many runs in postseason.”
These Cardinals didn’t score particularly many runs in the regular season either, and yet Kim excelled, recording a 1.62 earned run average in eight appearances (seven starts) and allowing as many home runs as he recorded wins — three.
Kim has also never faced the San Diego Padres, though he was very nearly a Friar himself. After the 2014 season, his Korean team posted him for acquisition by MLB clubs, and the Padres won the building. Though San Diego and SK Wyverns agreed on a price, San Diego and Kim could not, and he returned to Korea without a big league contract.
“I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve never faced a pitcher this big,” Padres first baseman Wil Myers said Tuesday.
“I guess this is a situation that I’ve never been in before. It’s still a lefthanded pitcher that’s trying to get you out with a fastball, curveball, slider. It’s still baseball, it’s gonna be the hitter versus the pitcher.”
Kim may have never faced the Padres, but he has pitched at Petco Park. In 2009, he was part of the Korean team which competed in the World Baseball Championship and was included in pool play in San Diego. That experience was one of the first which opened the eyes of western evaluators, and was perhaps the start of the path that led him right back to that same mound eleven years later.
“He’s been great. Really dealt with a lot of different things,” Shildt said of the pitcher who has not seen his family in person since before he left for Florida in February. “It’s well documented over the course of the season, him as much as anybody else, or probably more.”
Kim has often spoken of a fervent desire to return fans to the stands and for the production of a vaccine that could help wrangle COVID-19 into submission. He also had to undergo a brief hospital stay in Chicago for a kidney infarction, returning to pitch while on blood thinners and wearing a protective insert in his cap to minimize the risk of a brain bleed on a line drive back to the mound.
Under those harrowing circumstances, it was Kim who made rare comments in English while in Milwaukee three weeks ago, laughing and smiling as he told reporters, “don’t worry.”
“I am nervous,” Kim admitted Tuesday, “but I have to do my job.”
“It was really a hard time for us,” he said, “but every player did their job, and having gone through those adversities, we’ve become way stronger.
“I’m just blessed to be a part of this team. Everybody does their job well, so I think this experience we had, even though it’s hard times in regular season, that will help us be better in postseason.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 9:57 AM.