How Erick Fedde's Journey To Korea Reignited his MLB Career

It took about a month into his season in Korea for Erick Fedde to realize he had something special going. He’d gone to the KBO after parts of six seasons with the Nationals to work on his stuff, but his mindset shifted pretty quickly.

For Fedde, there was a sense of ambivalence about spending a year in Korea. On one hand, he was six years into a major league career that wasn’t going particularly well – Fedde posted a 5.41 ERA across half a dozen seasons in the majors – and he needed to do something. On the other hand, leaving to play in another country poses a risk; major league rosters in the United States fill and there might not be room for a 31-year-old pitcher trying to return after a year or more abroad. 

When Fedde’s contract with the Nationals expired after the 2022 season, his agent suggested he think about pitching in Korea. It would be a place to grow, and a change of scenery. In Fedde’s mind, this would be better than trying to figure things out in the minors, where there are factors outside of performance that impact players.

“I’d been in Triple-A, watched guys pitch well there and not go anywhere,” Fedde told CHGO. “I’ve been in Triple-A and I’ve watched guys get DFA’d and then they get DFA’d four more times that season. They’re bouncing around, and this game’s tough enough when you’re pitching in one place.”

Pitching in the KBO would mean some stability. Fedde would get the ball every fifth game and know what team he was pitching for. He would have the chance to improve without worrying about his status in an organization changing. Fedde signed with the NC Dinos and went to work on taking the mound every five days. 

At first, it was as simple as that. Fedde even dreamed of competing for a championship in Korea and fell in love with the crowds. The orchestrated cheers for nine innings helped provide an energy that was different from the typical buzz of an American crowd. But it didn’t take more than five or six starts for Fedde to start feeling like his time in the KBO could get him back on a major league roster.

“After the first month, I had a sub-1.00 ERA, and it was almost like telling myself I need to keep this up,” Fedde said. “After that first month, it went from the thought of working on stuff to ‘Let’s keep this going and find our way back.’”

The reason for this dramatic improvement, according to Fedde, was his arsenal. Pitching in Korea had given him a chance to work on both how he threw certain pitches as well as how often. His changeup use, for example, went from sparse during his first stint in the majors to around twenty percent in Korea. Through 14 starts with the White Sox this season, Fedde has thrown his changeup 21 percent of the time. 

That pitch is holding opposing hitters to a .192 batting average, and overall, their hard-hit rate against Fedde has dropped seven percentage points compared to 2022 while his strikeout rate has gone up and his walk rate down. 

After a start in late April, Fedde said he had been able to work on developing certain pitches in the KBO in a way he couldn’t have if he had remained here. That development has opened up all quadrants of the strike zone. As MLB batters have gotten better at being low-ball hitters, being able to effectively use the upper part of the strike zone is essential. And that means getting pitches in the zone but also using what Fedde calls “good misses.”

Figuring out how to use those to his advantage was one of the breakthroughs, Fedde said.

“With my cutter, for instance, my bad cutter maybe up and away, I know from throwing it tens of thousands of times, hitters don’t like that pitch from me up and away, and I don’t mind missing up there,” he said. “So with the changeup it’s the same idea,  where it’s ‘Where’s my good misses?’ Obviously I’m trying to hit perfect down and away every time, but if I miss away do I get swings, if I miss down do I get swings? I think that was the big thing.”

And being able to work on these pitches against actual hitters as opposed to in bullpen sessions made a big difference. The bullpen sessions don’t show a pitcher how batters react to certain types of pitches. Going up against professional hitters in Korea did.

Aside from the stability possible in Korea that wouldn’t have been in Triple-A, Fedde was also able to face different types of batters. In the KBO, the philosophy at the plate is a little different than in MLB. Fedde said it was almost like facing major league hitters of 15 or 20 years ago who took a lot of pride in not striking out. Hitters who strove for a .300 batting average and were more apt to foul off a pitch than swing and miss at it. 

The overall batting average here is .240 this season, the lowest since 1968. It’s .275 in the KBO. There are talented hitters in both leagues, but batters in Korea have a different approach.

“There’s definitely more of a contact emphasis, overall,” Chicago Cubs outfielder Mike Tauchman told CHGO. “I think maybe the nature of the pitching, maybe the nature of the style of how they do things, I think there’s a lot of approaches that are a little more contact-centric.”

Tauchman spent the 2022 season with the Hanwha Eagles and, like Fedde, has experienced much greater success in the majors the second time around after his stint in Korea. Tauchman’s experience with Korean pitchers was that they were less willing to give in and pitched in a way that focused on throwing off a batter’s timing. 

Like Fedde, Tauchman went to Korea in part for stability. He had bounced around the Rockies, Yankees, and Giants organizations and saw many of the same harsh truths in Triple-A that Fedde did.

“The minor league system itself, the way it is now, guys are constantly being pushed all over the place,” Tauchman said.

Fedde isn’t the only White Sox pitcher who spent a year in Korea; Chris Flexen pitched for the Doosan Bears in 2020. He echoes what Fedde and Tauchman said about the difference between batters in the United States versus Korea.

“They’re more the scrappy type,” Flexen told CHGO about the KBO. “They’ll try to hit and run, they’ll bunt and move them over, not necessarily rely on the long ball.”

One season in Korea seems to have genuinely transformed Fedde as a pitcher. He has a 3.10 ERA after 14 starts this season. The lowest he posted in a full season with the Nationals was 5.47, in 2021. And that ERA is not the product of fluky luck, either. Fedde’s fielding independent pitching (FIP) is 3.61 this season, and that’s lower by far than any number he’s put up in the majors. Batters have just a .239 expected batting average against Fedde this season, which – you can probably guess – is the lowest of his career. 

He’s also going deeper into games than he did before. This season, Fedde has gone six innings or more in seven of his fourteen starts. In 2022 with the Nationals, he went six innings or more just five times in 27 starts. Fedde leads the White sox with 81 ⅓ innings pitched this season, and he’s easily on pace to throw the most of his career, barring injury or some other setback. It’s probably safe at this point to say his changes are legit.

“I think that his adjustments are real,” White Sox manager Pedro Grifol said. “The adjustments that he made over there, his pitch mix, the way he goes about it, the way he attacks, it’s real and it translates to the big leagues.”

“I kind of knew a little bit of that in the spring. Then it took a couple of starts in the season to really know that this guy can pitch here easy. He’s having a great season.”

Fedde is with the White Sox on a two-year deal worth $15 million. At 31, he could be of use to the team longer than that, as they hope to eventually transition out of the current rebuild. But with the team on pace for one of the worst seasons in baseball history, there is also the reality that Fedde could be wearing a different uniform in a few weeks. There isn’t much reason to think of anyone on the roster as completely untouchable, and lots of contending teams would love to add Fedde to their rotation for the late-season and playoff push. 

That’s a reality on Fedde’s and the team’s radar, of course, but as with any player connected to trade rumors, ask and they will almost always tell you their focus is on their current circumstances only. 

If Fedde stays in Chicago, he could be a part of a burgeoning rotation of the future. Garrett Crochet was named the opening day starter at the end of spring training and has handled the role of de facto staff ace successfully so far. With six and four wins respectively, Crochet and Fedde are responsible for 10 of the 17 White Sox wins so far. They are a stabilizing duo for a team that has struggled on multiple fronts.

And more of that kind of pitching could be on the way. Of late, Jonathan Cannon has made four starts, most recently holding the Mariners to one run in seven innings while striking out seven and issuing just one walk on Wednesday night. And Drew Thorpe, acquired from the Padres in the Dylan Cease trade, impressed in his major league debut against Seattle the night before.

Project forward just a bit, and it’s easy to imagine a rotation of Crochet, Fedde, Cannon, and Thorpe taking the Sox somewhere. There are a lot of variables, of course, but that part of general manager Chris Getz’s vision is becoming clearer. 

As for Fedde, he made himself a part of that vision during his season in Korea, one that started as an effort to grow as a pitcher and quickly morphed into something much bigger.

“Towards the end of the year, it became more of a reality with how well I had thrown,” Fedde said. “After the first month, I was thinking about it, but as I get towards the end of the year – you know I wanted to pitch well and win the championship there – but in the back of my mind I was like ‘I think I’ve done enough to give myself a chance.’”