It’s mid-June, and the MLB leader in ERA is a big Dodgers left-hander with impeccable command and a dizzying arsenal of pitches. “Oh, it’s so good to be back in 2014,” one could be forgiven for thinking. Only the big Dodgers lefty in question is not three-time Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw, but Hyun-Jin Ryu.
Ryu tops MLB with a 1.26 ERA, which not only leads all qualified starters by almost a full run, but over a full season would be the lowest since Bob Gibson’s 1.12 in 1968 and second lowest in the live-ball era. Though this isn’t a particularly high-scoring time in baseball history, it’s higher-scoring than 1968, and Ryu’s ERA+, 335, would shatter the all-time single-season record if he keeps up through the year’s end. Nobody—not Gibson, Koufax, Maddux, or Pedro at the height of the steroid era—has ever been this good at preventing runs over a full season.
In 14 starts, Ryu has walked just five batters, giving him a walk rate of 1.4 percent, which is less than half the walk rate of second-place Zack Greinke and would be the second lowest since 1901. Despite striking out a pedestrian 24.4 percent of opposing hitters, Ryu is on pace to crush the all-time single-season K/BB record, with a ratio (17.0) higher even than what Kershaw posted in his astonishing but injury-shortened 2016 campaign.
Suffice it to say, Ryu is red hot. Hotter than this pot of noodles he’s endorsing in an all-time great commercial.
Ryu is a prolific commercial pitchman, and this noodles spot is his masterpiece, notable for two reasons. First is the hysterically ersatz Kershaw cheering Ryu on in the dugout, with a fake beard so outrageous there’s about a 6 percent chance it’s not a caricature of Kershaw at all, but instead an homage to Jan Rubes in Witness. Second, when Ryu takes an overhand scoop into the pot of noodles, he does it with his right hand, not his left. That’s because Ryu, like Billy Wagner, Michael Vick, and Rich Hill before him, throws with his left hand but does everything else—including eating—with his right. Ryu is putting on a historically great command pitching performance, and he’s doing it with his nondominant hand.
Because so much of Ryu’s popularity is based in South Korea, and because he’s played his entire career on star-studded Dodgers teams, Ryu has flown under the radar despite being an incredibly interesting player and celebrity. This spring, Korean pop superstar Suga of BTS wore a Ryu jersey and took in a start at Dodger Stadium. Ryu shut out the Braves on 93 pitches, then met the heartthrob after the game without screaming, a feat heretofore never before accomplished in human history. (Did Suga imbue Ryu with some undetermined BTS-related superpowers that enabled him to post this historic ERA? Who’s to say?)
Born in Incheon, Ryu pitched seven seasons for the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO before signing a six-year, $36 million deal with the Dodgers in December 2012 at age 25. Ryu was a valuable but not spectacular starter in 2013 and 2014, averaging 28 starts, 172 innings, and an ERA+ of 111 over those two years, as he slotted in as a no. 3 starter behind Kershaw and Greinke on a pair of division-winning teams.
Over the next four and a half seasons, Ryu battled a series of injuries notable not just for their number, but for their severity and diversity. While some ballplayers suffer multiple injuries to one body part, Ryu has injured a handful of different body parts once or twice each. After battling shoulder soreness in 2014, he missed all of 2015 with surgery to repair a torn labrum. It turned out that he’d been pitching through the injury during his first two years in the United States. A March 2015 MRI matched a scan of Ryu’s shoulder from when he signed; this finding was originally interpreted as a lack of structural damage. Further examination revealed that Ryu had been hurt when he left Korea and had managed to put up above-average numbers despite the injury; he went under the knife to fix the issue.
After sitting out 2015, Ryu made just one start in 2016 while battling elbow tendinitis, then returned to throw 126 2/3 innings with a 110 ERA+ in 2017, though further injuries—a hip contusion in May and a comebacker off the forearm in September—prevented him from pitching a full season.
Then in the second inning of a May 2, 2018, start against the Diamondbacks, Ryu came up limping and had to leave the game. The next day, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts revealed that Ryu had not just strained his groin, he’d sheared the muscle clean off the bone like a competitive eater sucking the meat off a chicken wing. That latest setback kept Ryu out until mid-August.
Since then, Ryu’s been just about the best pitcher in baseball. The Dodger lefty made nine starts between August 15, 2018, and the end of last season. In those nine games, he struck out a batter per inning and 10 batters for every walk, en route to a 1.88 ERA, then followed it up with seven scoreless innings in Game 1 of the NLDS against the Braves. (The Brewers and Red Sox beat him up a little during the next two rounds of the playoffs, but they beat everyone up during last year’s playoffs.) From August 15 of last year through June 19, 2019, Ryu has posted a 1.48 ERA, by far the best in baseball over that time, with the lowest walk rate of any qualified starter. Just as important, he’s been healthy enough to make 23 regular-season starts; only 13 pitchers in baseball have made more.
Ryu isn’t completely clear of the injuries that derailed his career for parts of four seasons—on April 8, he left another start early because of discomfort in his groin, though this was a precautionary move and Ryu returned to the rotation 12 days later—but he’s healthier now than he’s been at any point in his MLB career, which has to have something to do with his extraordinary performance.
But Ryu’s improvement isn’t just a matter of improved physical fitness. He’s not throwing harder; he continues to throw his four-seamer at an average of about 91 miles per hour. He’s also not snapping off some hellacious new breaking ball, though Ryu’s curve is moving about an inch more vertically and two and a half more horizontally in 2019 than it did in 2013. Ryu is succeeding on finesse, even as baseball becomes increasingly dictated by brute force.
In 2019, the key to Ryu’s success is his ability to throw and command three discrete, if similar, fastballs. These pitches—a four-seamer, a cutter, and a sinker—allow Ryu to toy with hitters.
In 2013 and 2014, Ryu employed a basic four-pitch mix: a four-seamer he used a little more than half the time, plus a slider, curveball, and changeup that he could call on depending on the opponent and situation. When he came back in 2017 from his two-year layoff, Ryu phased out his slider and replaced it with a cutter, which came in a few mph harder and didn’t break as much vertically or horizontally. In 2018, Ryu worked in a two-seam fastball, or sinker, that came in at the same velocity as his four-seamer but broke farther to his arm side.
About 90 percent of the pitches Ryu has thrown this year are the changeup and the three fastballs. His curveball, a change-of-pace option that comes in 18 mph slower than his four-seamer, is the only one of Ryu’s pitches that has significant glove-side movement. The cutter has neutral horizontal movement and the changeup and the other two fastballs break to the arm side.
Ryu’s variety of fastballs is incredibly difficult for hitters to read, because his fastballs and changeup all come out of his hand the same way, have similar movement, and still look about the same when the hitter has to decide whether and where to swing. The four-seamer and sinker aren’t particularly different—a two-and-a-half inch gap in vertical movement, three and a half inches in horizontal movement, and almost none in velocity.
But if a hitter swings expecting the ball to be in one place and is wrong by just a few inches, that can be the difference between a home run and a fly out, or a line drive and a grounder off the end of the bat. Eyeing up a four-seamer and finding out it’s a cutter can be quite disconcerting for a hitter, as poor Todd Frazier found out when he encountered all three of Ryu’s fastballs in the space of three pitches on May 30.
Ryu missed his spot with the 0-1 four-seamer and missed out on a borderline call on the ensuing cutter, but dotted the corner on a changeup with the next pitch. Frazier didn’t even take the bat off his shoulder until the count was full and Ryu came back with a 92 mph four-seamer, belt-high and right over the center of the plate.
Objectively speaking, that pitch is a meatball. A lukewarm, middle-middle four-seamer that by all rights ought to have ended up being blasted out of the park so quickly the outfielders wouldn’t have needed to turn around. But Ryu’s success, like that of a great improvisational pianist, comes not from the strength of the primary theme, but from his ability to compose variations on that theme, on the fly and under tight constraints. By the time Frazier swung, all he could offer was a half-hearted defensive poke, the kind of speculative stab one might make at a particularly mean-looking bug that appears in the bathtub.
Ryu doesn’t have to make the batter miss for this bit of legerdemain to work, which is lucky for him because he doesn’t get batters to swing and miss that much. Through Wednesday’s action, Ryu is just 34th out of 84 qualified starters in opponent whiff rate, 26th in opponent contact rate on pitches outside the zone, and 47th on contact rate on pitches inside the zone.
The only plate discipline category in which Ryu isn’t broadly average is swing rate on pitches outside the zone. Opposing batters are swinging at 37.1 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, the third-best mark among qualified starters, behind Justin Verlander and Stephen Strasburg, a testament to Ryu’s command and ability to show different looks off his fastball. But despite a lackluster strikeout rate, Ryu is allowing the second-lowest xwOBA in baseball among pitchers with at least 200 opponent plate appearances. Only Strasburg has him beat.
It’s worth noting that Ryu is benefiting from some factors outside his control, which is neither surprising nor an indictment of his season. The Dodgers defense he’s pitching in front of is unbelievably good, by far the best in baseball by defensive runs saved, and a close second to Houston in park-adjusted defensive efficiency. Ryu’s .256 opponent BABIP stems partially from his ability to induce weak contact, and partially from his defense’s ability to convert batted balls into outs.
Ryu is also stranding 92.3 percent of runners who reach against him, the second-highest mark among qualified starters behind Verlander, who allows runs essentially only via home run. To an extent, this can be explained away by the fact that Ryu gets hitters out at such a high rate—i.e., once a batter reaches base Ryu tends not to let his teammates advance him—but it does look a little fluky against the MLB average of 72.3 percent.
Even so, Baseball Prospectus’s DRA, the best holistic public-facing ERA estimator, says Ryu ought to be giving up an ERA of just 2.03, which over a full season would be the lowest mark any qualified starting pitcher had posted since Clayton Kershaw in 2015. So even if Ryu isn’t really pitching like prime Bob Gibson, he’s pitching like prime Kershaw. Kershaw might be pitching only like a good no. 2 or no. 3 starter now, but the Dodgers still have the best left-handed starter in baseball.
