Matt Manning goes to Korea

The Samsung Lions of Daegu, South Korea, have entered the free agent market, landing former Detroit Tigers prospect Matt Manning on a one-year, $1 million deal. All Manning has to do now is find a team called the Bears and he’ll have the whole set.

Manning, 27, has a career 4.43 ERA in 50 starts in the Majors, none since 2024. But he’s better known than most players with those credentials because he’s Detroit’s number one pick. 1 pitching prospect for several years. Being a team’s No. 1 pitching prospect isn’t always as impressive as it sounds; right now there are several teams without minor league pitchers with a future value of more than 45 on The Board.

But for the Tigers in the early 1920s, it was no. 1 was a big deal. On the 2020 list, Manning was the No. 12 prospect in all of baseball, followed by Casey Mize, Riley Greene, Pull SkubalAnd Isaac Paredes in the Detroit system. In 2021, Manning fell behind last year’s top draft pick, Spencer Torkelsonbut still rated higher than Skubal and Mize, in that order.

“A big part of the reason Manning was ranked No. 1 on the Tigers roster last year was because he had neither the red flags of Casey Mize nor the relief threat of Tarik Skubal,” Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein began in their 2021 article on Manning. What follows makes clear why they weren’t the only evaluators who loved the imposing young right-hander: plus fastball and curveball, changeup development, and better athleticism and pitching feel than you would normally see in a 6-foot-1 power righty.

If such a man does not perform, it is usually due to injuries. To the extent this is true for Manning, it happened in a strange way. Manning has been on the shelf a few times with forearm strains, but he has never undergone Tommy John surgery. He missed three months in 2022 with shoulder inflammation, but has never torn a rotator cuff or blown a capsule.

All things considered, Manning pitched quite well in 2023, his last full season in the Majors. But he took two comebackers off the same footfive months apart, each leading to an absence of several months. One blood-curdling line drive and you start to question the existence of God. Two in the same season is good evidence that God is real, and that he’s especially mad at you.

But this isn’t A Brady Aiken or Brendan McKay situation, where medical issues prevented Manning from even getting off the ground. He pitched a lot in the majors, but he just wasn’t very good.

Manning’s average fastball velocity has been in the 90-mph range in all four of his partial Major League seasons, but the league is throwing harder now. The average velocity of four Mariners has increased 2 mph from his draft year of 2016. Manning has continually tinkered with his secondary pitches, going from a hard slider to a slow sweeper. He added a sinker and then ditched it, dropped his arm angle and moved away from his changeup. In 2025, he mainly threw the four-seamer and two breaking balls in Triple-A, but he also played with a high-quality cutter.

The big problem is that Manning hasn’t been able to catch a whiff at any point in the majors. After coming through the minors with strikeout rates in the upper 20s, he struck out just 16.4% of opponents while walking 7.8% during his Major League stint.

The last time before that Manning was a subject of a non-RotoGraphs article here was in 2024, when Dan Szymborski labeled him a bust during spring training. Dan suggested Manning learn a splitter.

This is interesting for three reasons. First, as I said above, Manning at least tried to learn a splitter, but it didn’t work. Second: That Manning should add a splitter was also my first thought. His fastball and two breakers clearly don’t smell like the air, so he needs a pitch with arm movement that will keep opponents off his heater and help him generate weak contact. Third: Doesn’t everyone throw a splitter abroad?

For the record, I think it’s great that Manning will be playing in the KBO. For starters, seeing the world is good for the soul. If I were an athlete in a sport like basketball or baseball, where there are thriving professional leagues across the sea, I would be sure to spend a year abroad at the beginning or end of my career, just to get the experience.

And the KBO has been fertile ground for many players, like Manning, who have been successful in the high minors but have fallen flat in the major leagues. It’s the mythical Quadruple-A league, and there are ready hitters (Erik Thames, In that reputation) and pitchers (Erik Fedde, Merrill Kelly) both a world of good development.

The American returning from a sabbatical abroad has become a common free agent archetype. We have three in the free player class this year: Cody Ponce of the KBO, and Foster Griffin And Antonius Kaij from NPB.

But Japan is where you go to learn a splitter, not South Korea. Since 2020, 17 Japanese-born pitchers have appeared in at least one Major League game. That obviously includes guys like Yu Darvish And Yoshinobu Yamamotowho throw a little bit of everything, but she and 13 of the 15 other Japanese pitchers in the MLB regularly threw a splitter or a forkball. (That’s everyone except Yusei Kikuchi And Shinnosuke Ogasawara.)

In contrast, I couldn’t find a single instance of a Korean-born pitcher throwing even one splitter in the majors during the pitch-tracking era. It’s possible that during the days of PITCHf/x, some pitches were classified as changeups, but are now considered splitters. But from Hyun Jin Ryu Later, pitchers who trained in the KBO came to the US with more American-style repertoire: fastball, changeup, curveball.

The success of certain re-imported starting pitchers (mostly Kelly, but also Nick Martinez and a few others) has also made the KBO/NPB sabbatical seem like a more common path back to mid-rotation competency than it actually is.

The path Manning is supposedly trying to take — major leagues to Asia and then back to the big leagues, armed with a new killer outfield — is actually quite lonely. RosterResource’s archive goes back to 2020; in six offseasons, that career path describes just 10 free agent starting pitchers born and trained in America.

Kelly returned so early that he’s left out of this sample (both in terms of time and because he didn’t pitch in the majors before heading to Korea), so adjust your expectations accordingly. But only about half of these pitchers can be considered even qualified successes. During Lindblom’s second trip to Korea, he dominated the KBO. After returning to the majors, he was fine (good FIP, terrible ERA) in the shortened 2020 season, and has been a non-factor since.

Moore was great in his first season in the US as a starter, and then was excellent as a reliever for the Rangers in 2022 and three teams in 2023. Fedde was great in high volume for the White Sox and Cardinals in 2024, and at replacement level in 2025. On balance, Flexen was decent. But he also suffered a huge decline after a strong first season back, and while he posted a 3.09 ERA in 2025, he did so with terrible peripherals after a move to the bullpen.

So the only sustained success since Kelly has been Martinez, who has certainly had his ups and downs, moving from rotation to bullpen and back again. But as a young Texas Ranger, Martinez’s strikeout problems were even worse than Manning’s, and he’s been a million times better over the past four seasons than he was during his first Major League stint. If you told Manning right now that he would come back to the U.S. and pitch well enough to earn a qualifying offer at some point, he would likely accept that future without asking for any other details.

Is there anything in these past success stories that he can emulate? I don’t know if there’s anything specific. He does not come to the KBO as an unprecedented talent; Fedde was a big deal as a prospect, while Moore was a bigger deal than both Fedde and Manning combined. Manning isn’t going to blow everyone away based on pure skill.

And the pitchers who returned with new life from the KBO and NPB (Martinez, and Year 1 of both Flexen and Fedde) did not return as different pitchers. Their pitch mixes didn’t change much; they simply became better versions of themselves.

Fedde threw out a high-70s curveball with big horizontal motion but not much drop, replacing it with a sweeper that had similar motion but about 5 mph more speed. Martinez maintained his five-pitch mix: four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curveball and changeup. But after four years in Japan, he threw a little harder, dropped his curve more and discovered clearer movement patterns for his three fastballs and changeups. In particular, change left the country in 2017 as a mid-80s problem and came back as a 70s weapon.

Assuming Manning wants to come back as the pitcher he was always meant to be – which he might not; It’s possible he’ll have the time of his life in Daegu and never want to leave – that’s the kind of progress he’ll be looking for. Not reinvention, but rediscovery.