A 12-hour plane ride and a dream for pitchers reviving careers in Asia

Campbell Barnes is 3 years old and has already compiled more lifetime airline miles than many business travelers. She’s celebrated every birthday and spent most of her summers not in her “home” in South Carolina but on the other side of the globe in South Korea.

“She gets so excited when she gets to pick the [airplane] movie,” says her father, Charlie. “Outside of the whole screen time [concern], my wife’s like, ‘If you can sit in that seat quietly for 12 hours, you can watch a movie.’”

Campbell and her baby brother, Beckham, have had unconventional upbringings because of the professional pitching career that took their father from the Minnesota Twins of MLB to the Lotte Giants of the KBO, the highest level of baseball in Korea.

For players like Charlie Barnes, who struggle to stick stateside, the KBO and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) have long served as big league backup plans, a means to continue a career against first-class competition while drawing a paycheck very much worth the long flight.

What we’ve seen in recent years, however, is a trend of some of these players --particularly pitchers -- getting the chance to come back to MLB, better and wiser because of the opportunity in Asia.

With so many teams scrambling for pitching help and the cost of quality arms always on the rise, a number of pitchers who made the most of a mid-career reset have boosted their ballclubs and given hope to players like Barnes that you can go home again.

“There are tons of stories of guys coming to Asia and coming back as a different guy, whether that may be a stuff adjustment, a confidence adjustment or whatever it may be,” Barnes says via a Zoom call from Korea late in the KBO season. “It shows people around the league that coming over here and being successful can translate to being successful back in the States.”

Erick Fedde is a prime example from the 2024 MLB season.

When Fedde signed a two-year, $15 million contract with the White Sox last December, it was not exactly a high-profile Hot Stove happening. Fedde was 30 years old and had been non-tendered by the Nationals a year earlier after six nondescript seasons in Washington in which he pitched to a 5.41 ERA and 77 ERA+, or 23% worse than league average.

And though Fedde had flourished with the NC Dinos in the KBO, with a 2.00 ERA and excellent strikeout and walk rates in 180 1/3 innings to earn the league’s MVP honor in 2023, it’s not as if MLB clubs were clamoring to see how it would translate. He went to a rebuilding White Sox club simply looking for someone to soak up innings.

But Fedde was one of the few things that went well for the Sox this past season. Once prone to homers and walks, he was suddenly keeping the ball on the ground, in the ballpark and in the strike zone. He wound up becoming one of the top trade targets of the 2024 Trade Deadline, when the Sox shipped him to the Cardinals. He finished the season tied with the Royals’ Michael Wacha for the 14th-best ERA+ (126) of anyone who qualified for the ERA title.

Fedde, who a decade earlier had been the 18th overall pick in the Draft out of UNLV, credited the regular reps he received in Korea with sparking his turnaround.

“It's hard to work on new pitches in the big leagues when you know every pitch really matters and it's the best hitters in the world,” Fedde says. “Obviously, they're still very competitive over [in the KBO], but I think it reminded me of how to be the No. 1 guy. I used to do that in college, and you remind yourself how to pitch with a ton of confidence.”

When he was traded to the Cardinals this year, Fedde was paired in the St. Louis rotation with Miles Mikolas, who is one of the starker examples in the past decade of a pitcher revamping his career overseas.

Back in 2015, Mikolas, having made 37 undistinguished appearances with the Padres and Rangers over the previous three seasons, was out of Minor League options. Looking for a guaranteed salary, he signed a one-year, $700,000 deal with the Yomiuri Giants of NPB.

“I had just played with Colby Lewis of the Texas Rangers, and he had gone over there and come back and been really successful,” Mikolas says. “We had the same agency, and my agency had success with some other guys going over there and coming back. I was pretty well-informed on how it could work out.”

It definitely worked out.

Mikolas wound up spending three years with the Giants, who gave him his first legit opportunity to stretch out and get acclimated as a starter. The Cardinals brought him back to the bigs on a two-year, $15.5 million contract prior to 2018, and, in his first season in St. Louis, he was an All-Star, an 18-game winner and the sixth-place finisher in the NL Cy Young Award voting. He’s been a regular feature in the Cards’ rotation ever since.

“I think I’ve exceeded expectations,” Mikolas says. “It’s something that’s worked out really well for my career.”

The same can be said of Diamondbacks starter Merrill Kelly, who pitched four years in Korea with the SK Wyverns before latching on with Arizona in 2019 and playing a prominent role in the Snakes’ surge to the World Series in 2023.

Kelly had been with the Rays’ Triple-A Durham affiliate in 2014 and was primarily a swingman. One day, on the road in Rochester, teammate Doug Mathis came up to him after the game.

“Hey,” Mathis said, “there’s a Korean scout here who wants your agent’s info.”

Mathis himself had pitched in the KBO and told Kelly all about it.

“I didn’t even know there was a KBO until that day,” Kelly says. “I knew guys had gone to Japan. I knew that was kind of a thing. But I didn’t really know much about Asian baseball.”

When the Rays left Kelly unprotected in the Rule 5 Draft the following offseason, he ventured into a world he did not previously know existed.

Kelly feels he came out better as a player and a person.

“I got to spend pretty much four whole years there and experience a completely different culture and get outside my box a little bit and see the world for what it is, a little bit different perspective,” he says. “That’s always a positive.”

Kelly was only 26 in his first season in the KBO. At the time, there was a stigma attached to such a move, which had ordinarily been reserved for cup-of-coffee big leaguers trying to get a final payday prior to retirement. But as the quality of play in the KBO has risen in recent years, so too have the benefits the league provides to North American players looking to find their footing.

“If the choice is between being an up-and-down guy [going back and forth between the Minors and the big leagues] or going to Asia,” Kelly says, “I would go to Asia 100 times out of 100.”

Why is Asian professional baseball particularly beneficial for pitchers?

Well, at the risk of typecasting a continent’s style of play, one basic parameter is that Asian teams don’t play matchups nearly as much as MLB teams, which means starters are trusted to pitch deeper into games. And in order to get through a lineup multiple times, it is pivotal to have – or develop – a deep pitch mix.

Furthermore, given the high-contact nature of lineups in the Asian leagues, limiting walks is prioritized over notching strikeouts, and pitch shapes are important. This forces pitchers to rethink their approach.

“They don’t like to strike out over here,” Barnes says. “They’re going to stand up there and purposely foul balls into the dugout, choke up, do whatever it takes to not strike out. That’s just how their style of play is. So it’s helped me learn how to read hitters, how to realize sequences throughout a game that I may not have gotten the opportunity to do in the big leagues.”

Both NPB and the KBO have limits on foreign players – four on the active roster (with a maximum of three position players or pitchers) in NPB and three on the active roster (with a maximum of two pitchers) in the KBO. So teams in those leagues are selective about who they bring over and are therefore generally more willing to give a player some leeway to work through his struggles than an MLB team cycling through a multitude of developing options.

This security and room to grow is why younger players have been willing to pack up – often with a spouse and kids in tow – and move overseas.

But of course, that is a challenge all its own.

Barnes and his wife, Sydne, were new parents when they decided that moving to South Korea would be best for the advancement of Charlie’s career. In the three seasons since, Sydne and Campbell (and then more recently Beckham, who was born in early 2024) have accompanied Charlie in Busan for much of the year, detached from friends and family back home in Sumter, S.C.

“You’re flipped,” Barnes says. “It’s morning here and nighttime back home. People understand, but then they also don’t understand. Now that we’ve been over here and we’ve adjusted, you start to have more of a routine. So if the grandparents want to call the grandkids, they know nighttime is better because the kids are up in the morning and I’m not at the field. You start to figure it out."

An anonymous young player with the Twins in 2021, Barnes has been treated like a star from the moment he signed in South Korea. Lotte fans recognize him on the street, and Sydne and the children are always handed candy and stuffed animals at games.

Campbell is too young to know how strange this all is. She’s grown up going to games at Sajik Baseball Stadium and dancing on the dugout with the Giants’ cheerleaders.

“This is all that she’s known,” Barnes says. “So we’re trying to explain to her that not every ballpark has dancing cheerleaders.”

Perhaps one day soon, she’ll see that for herself. Like Fedde and Kelly and Mikolas and others before him, the 29-year-old Barnes hopes to parlay his experience in Asia into a return to MLB. Over the course of more than 500 innings with Lotte, he’s increased his velocity and developed two different sliders to vastly improve his chase and swing-and-miss rates. This season, he had a 3.35 ERA (third best in the KBO) and struck out 171 batters (also third) in 150 2/3 innings. Within his time in Korea, his strikeout-per-nine rate jumped from 7.7 to 10.2.

When pitching-starved MLB teams peruse the market, players like Barnes or former MLB relievers Albert Abreu and Javy Guerra (both of whom were among the top closers in NPB this year) or starter Kyle Hart (who, like Barnes, had one of the top three ERAs in the KBO this year) might be worth another look. Because we have proof of concept that success overseas can translate.

“In some sense, when you come back over here, you're playing for those guys as well,” Fedde says. “Because you want to make sure teams can see that growth is possible. If you go over there and make a change in arsenal or mindset, you can definitely come back here.”