The Kia Tigers have finally finalized all of their foreign player contracts.
“We have finalized the signing of James Nail on the 18th of this month,” the team announced today. The American-born Nail, who was born in 1993, signed for a total of $950,000, including a $200,000 signing bonus, $350,000 in salary, $150,000 in incentives, and a $250,000 transfer fee. His guaranteed salary is $550,000 and he is on the 40-man roster, so a transfer fee is due. The maximum a club can pay for a new foreign player, including the transfer fee, is $1 million. We signed him for less than $50,000.
Nail is a native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA. He stands at 6-foot-3 and weighs 193 pounds. He was drafted by the Oakland Athletics in the 20th round, 608th overall, in the 2015 First-Year Player Draft. He spent seven years in the minor leagues. After finally reaching Triple-A in 2021, Nail was eligible for free agency after that season and began looking for a new team.
He signed a major contract with his hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, to continue his career. Despite never seeing the big leagues in Oakland, St. Louis called him up to the big leagues for the 2022 season. In his first major league start, 카지노사이트 Nail appeared in seven games in 2022, posting a 5.00 ERA with no wins or losses. All seven appearances were out of the bullpen.
In his two seasons in St. Louis, Nail has split time between the big leagues and Triple-A.
Last year, he appeared in 10 games in the big leagues, posting an 8.80 ERA with one save, and 31 games in Triple-A (three starts), going 5-3 with a 3.66 ERA with five saves.
He’s been almost exclusively a professional starter through the 2019 season, with the only concern being that he’s made more appearances out of the bullpen over the last three seasons. However, the fact that St. Louis has kept him on the 40-man roster for now means that he’s a resource that could be called up at any point during the season, depending on the situation. Kia gets an active big leaguer. The Kia organization said of Nail, “He has excellent command of his pitches and has allowed few walks throughout his career. His fastball averaged 149 mph and topped out at 153 mph in the minor leagues last season. In particular, he has a powerful curveball and good sinker movement, so he has a high ability to induce ground balls.”
“Nail is currently on the 40-man major league roster. We decided to sign him because he has played a lot of games as a starting pitcher in college and the minor leagues and has a variety of pitches, so he has enough competitiveness. We look forward to working together with our domestic starters and hope that he will adapt well to the KBO and become an integral part of our starting staff.”
KIA was the last of the 10 clubs to finalize all three foreign signings.
In fact, speed wasn’t important. However, given the increasingly difficult market for foreign players, waiting was not always a good idea.
KIA re-signed foreign slugger Socrates Brito. Socrates has been playing for the Tigers since the 2022 season. In 2023, his batting average dropped compared to 2022, but his home runs increased. He reached the 20-homer plateau for the first time in his KBO career. Kia, which had been leaning toward re-signing Socrates from the start, finalized the deal for a total of $1.2 million, a $100,000 increase from last year. The deal includes a $300,000 signing bonus, $500,000 in salary, and $400,000 in incentives.
The two foreign pitchers were both replacements. Initially, KIA removed Mario Sanchez from the disabled list at the end of last year and included Thomas Pannoni. However, re-signing him was not a top priority, and the search for a new foreign pitcher who could fill a key starting role for the team ended with Panoni first signing a minor league deal with the Chicago Cubs.
Kia continued its search for a quality pitcher.
First, Will Crowe was signed. A year later. However, KIA proceeded with caution and finally announced its first foreign pitcher on July 7. Will Crowe is a right-handed pitcher from the Major League Baseball. Born in 1994, he has a solid physique with a height of 1.85 meters and a weight of 108 kilograms. The terms of the contract totaled $1 million, including a $200,000 signing bonus, $600,000 in annual salary, and $200,000 in incentives.
In terms of major league experience, he is in the upper echelon of recent new pitchers coming to Korea. He was selected in the second round, 65th overall, by the Washington Nationals in the 2017 First-Year Player Draft and made his big league debut in 2020. He then moved on to the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he made 86 appearances in the big leagues in the 2021 and 2022 seasons. He spent the 2021 season in the rotation as a sixth starter, going 4-8 with a 5.48 ERA in 26 appearances (25 starts), and the following year in 2022, he was out of the starting rotation but made 59 appearances out of the bullpen, going 4-10 with a 4.38 ERA in 16 appearances with four saves.
In 2023,
He had shoulder issues that limited him to five big league appearances and he finished the season in the minors. As a result, Kia reportedly took a closer look and made a more cautious signing. Kia is also “double-checking” the medical tests for new foreign pitchers this year. A renowned medical center in the U.S. performs the tests, and an affiliated hospital in Korea performs additional tests before finalizing the results. In Crow’s case, he had a history of shoulder injuries in the past year, so we had to be extra careful. We carefully reviewed the results of the medical tests several times, and when they were clear, the deal was finalized.
Kia wasn’t the only team interested in Crowe, as another Nippon Professional Baseball team was actively pursuing him for the Asian market. While Crowe’s agent did not disclose the exact clubs, we can infer that several teams were looking to add foreign starters. Kia won the battle to sign Crowe after negotiations with a Japanese club in a fierce battle for his signature.
There was another potential candidate, 카지노사이트 순위 but he failed a medical. The deal fell through at the final stage when a problem was discovered, and the team went back to reviewing the list. Nail was the player they signed. Initially, we said, “We want to finish the deal before we leave for spring training. Even if it takes time, the priority is to bring in the best players possible,” he said.
Crow and Nail, the one-two punch of foreign pitchers is over. KIA, which boasts a cohesive batting lineup, hasn’t had much fun with foreign pitchers in the past few years. Now, they need foreign players to anchor their rotation and challenge for the big time. It’s actually not an impossible dream.