BK: Not Having It His Way

It’s about time.
After getting torched again last night, Red Sox pitcher Byung-Hyun Kim has finally been dropped from the BoSox rotation. Bronson Arroyo will replace the embattled Kim as the Sox fifth starter, and Theo Epstein and the rest of the Boston front-office will decide whether to send Kim to the bullpen, to Pawtucket or to the team’s rehab center in Florida.
The demotion came after Kim got shelled last night at Fenway. And whether it was because of his injury (his fastball topped out at 86 mph) or his mental makeup (Kim gets more nervous under pressure than Ray Finkle), BK has never lived up the grand expectations that came with him from South Korea.
The Sox traded for Kim last spring (for Shea Hillenbrand) and since coming to Boston, Kim has been a decent pitcher (ERA in the mid-3’s, 9-6 record, 16 saves), but has hardly become the star he was projected to be.
Granted, Kim is still only 25 and is coming off a stint on the DL because of inflammation in his pitching shoulder. But the young Korean has more problems than loss of velocity and some soreness in his arm.
This is the same pitcher who gave up game-winning homeruns on back-to-back nights in Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, then rebounded from that with an All-Star season in 2002, only to fall apart late last season with the Sox (a season that ended with BK flipping the bird to the fans in Fenway and getting left off the team’s ALCS roster.)
Since 2001 Kim has shown flashes of why he was considered the best Korean prospect in history when the Diamondbacks signed him in 1999, but more often than not, he looks like a shell-shocked war vet when opposing teams start getting hits off him.
Last night when he gave up two runs in the first inning (off line-drives that nailed the Monster) and only got outs on deep fly balls, it was obvious that Kim was done for the night. He lasted only 2 1/3 more innings and his final pitching line looked like the winning Powerball numbers.
It’s apparent that Kim is still smarting from those World Series homeruns that are looking more and more like they will be the defining moments of his career.
After giving up the game-winning homerun to Derek Jeter in Game 4 of that World Series (which came after serving up a gopher-ball to Tino Martinez two innings earlier), Bob Brenley put Kim into Game 5 in another save situation, in which he promptly gave up a game-tying homerun to Scott Brosius.
Thank goodness for Brenley that the Diamondbacks were able to score runs off Mariano Rivera in Game 7 of that Series to take home the title. Because if the Yankees had managed to win that series, Brenley’s name would be up there with Grady Little in the Pantheon of all-time managing blunders.
Kim should never have been put back in Game 5. And no, this is not one of those “hindsight is 20/20 deals”, I was going nuts about this when Brenley put Kim in the game back in November of 2001. A pivotal game of the World Series isn’t a time to build up a young pitcher’s confidence. But that’s what Brenley did, and in the process, he shattered it even more.
The knock on Kim has always been that he is immature (the one-finger salute at Fenway and a recent arrest in Korea for allegedly assaulting a photographer proves that). But he is now 25 years old and that excuse is wearing thin.
Kim still has a chance to become a great pitcher in this league. Once his arm heals the Red Sox need to put him back in the bullpen as a middle-reliever and keep him there until he builds some sort of confidence in his pitching. Maybe then they can think about putting him back in the rotation.
Some pitchers have never recover from giving up big homeruns (Mitch Williams and in the most extreme example, Donnie Moore, who killed himself a few years after Dave Henderson hit a go-ahead homerun in the 1986 ALCS), but others like Dennis Eckersley and Goose Gossage have.
The next two seasons will determine which list Kim’s name belongs upon.