When KIA Tigers manager Beom-ho Lee and LG Twins manager Kyung-yub Yeom each announced their Game 3 starting pitcher on October 19, the names told a story neither club had planned to write at the start of the season. For KIA, holding a 2-0 lead in a best-of-five semifinal series that shifts to Seoul’s Jamsil Stadium, the ball goes to Keisho Shirakawa, a 25-year-old right-hander from Japan who had already been non-tendered by two other KBO clubs and had reconstructive elbow surgery before signing with KIA in May. For LG, facing a win-or-go-home game in front of its own fans, the ball goes to Carlos Carrasco, a 39-year-old Venezuelan-born American League veteran with 112 career MLB wins who didn’t arrive in Korea until the final week of July, brought in as an emergency fix for a rotation that was falling apart.
Neither man was supposed to be the centerpiece of anyone’s October. Shirakawa was a midseason replacement signing for an injured import, the third KBO club to take a chance on him in three years. Carrasco was pulled off the scrap heap of a struggling rotation with instructions to simply get outs. Now, with KIA needing one win to close out the series and LG needing a win just to keep its season alive for one more day, both pitchers are starting the most consequential game either has thrown in Korea.
Two Pitchers Who Weren’t Supposed to Be Here
It’s worth sitting with how unlikely this particular pitching matchup is. In late July, LG’s rotation was in genuine crisis. Import pitcher Anders Tolhurst had posted a 6.20 ERA across his most recent three starts. Domestic left-hander Chan-gyu Lim, one of the franchise’s most accomplished arms, had a July ERA of 8.25. Asia-quota pitcher Lachlan Wells wasn’t far behind at 7.20. A team that had spent much of the season near the top of the standings suddenly had almost no reliable starting pitching, and management went looking for anyone who could stabilize things immediately.
The answer turned out to be a 39-year-old who had already thrown 17 big-league seasons and collected 112 career wins against 105 losses — a résumé that, in a vacuum, reads like a mid-rotation workhorse rather than an emergency import signing. For Carrasco, pitching in the KBO wasn’t the plan five years ago, but by late July it was the opportunity in front of him, and he took it.
On KIA’s side, the path was less about a sudden crisis and more about a club willing to make an unconventional bet on a player other organizations had already moved past. Shirakawa first arrived in Korea in 2024 as a midseason injury-replacement import for the SSG Landers, then was dealt to the Doosan Bears. Across those two stops he made 12 combined appearances and posted a 4-5 record with a 5.65 ERA — a trial run that ended when elbow pain forced him out of Doosan’s rotation and, ultimately, onto the operating table for Tommy John surgery, the same ligament-reconstruction procedure that sidelines pitchers across Major League Baseball every season.
Shirakawa’s Long Road Back From Tommy John
Rather than chase another KBO opportunity immediately, Shirakawa returned home to Japan to rehabilitate, eventually working his way back onto a mound with the Tokushima Indigo Socks, an independent-league team in his home prefecture. The numbers he put up there this year were modest in scale but sharp in quality: five appearances, a 1-1 record, and a 1.08 ERA. It was enough to convince KIA, which announced on May 28 that it had signed Shirakawa as a replacement Asia-quota player for the injured Jared Dale, for a total contract value of $100,000. The move made him the first Japanese-national player in KIA Tigers franchise history.
In the months since, Shirakawa has settled into a rotation role for KIA, making 18 appearances this season with a 4-5 record and a 4.75 ERA — a serviceable, if unspectacular, line for a pitcher two years removed from major elbow reconstruction. The one soft spot in that profile happens to be his opponent on Tuesday: against LG specifically, Shirakawa has made two starts this year, going 0-1 with a 7.71 ERA across 9⅓ innings and eight earned runs allowed. It is, on paper, the single most unfavorable head-to-head matchup he could be handed in a game this important, and it is the one KIA has chosen to hand him anyway, trusting a now-healthy arm and a two-game cushion more than a small sample of bad history against this particular lineup.
Carrasco’s Perfect Debut That Wasn’t a Win
If Shirakawa’s story is about patience and rehabilitation, Carrasco’s introduction to Korean baseball was about immediate, almost unbelievable impact. In his KBO debut on August 1 against the Doosan Bears at Jamsil Stadium, Carrasco threw seven innings of perfect baseball — no hits, no walks, two strikeouts, with a fastball that touched 149 kilometers per hour (about 93 mph). For a 39-year-old making his first start in a brand-new league, it was as clean an introduction as a pitcher could ask for.
But the perfect game never had a realistic chance to continue. Before the game, manager Yeom had already decided to cap his new import’s pitch count at roughly 70 given it was his first KBO outing, a standard caution for any pitcher making a debut in an unfamiliar league with unfamiliar travel and routine. By the end of the seventh inning, Carrasco had thrown 74 pitches — right at that limit — and Yeom, true to his word, pulled him for reliever Kang-hun Woo to start the eighth, perfect game or not. Woo surrendered two runs that inning, tying the game, and LG eventually settled for a 2-2 draw after eleven innings. Carrasco’s bid for a win in his first KBO start evaporated not because he faltered, but because his manager kept a promise made before he’d thrown a single pitch.
It’s a small but telling detail about how LG has managed its new arm all season: with real caution, even when the caution seems to work against the team in the moment. That same instinct for protecting an older pitcher’s workload may become relevant again as this series unfolds, particularly if Carrasco is needed for a potential Game 5.
Carrasco Rises to the Moment in the Wild Card Game
Whatever rust or inconsistency crept into Carrasco’s performances over the second half of the season — and by several accounts his final stretch, from a September 9 start against the Hanwha Eagles in Daejeon through an October 9 outing against the Lotte Giants in Sajik, lacked the sharpness of his debut — he delivered when LG needed him most. In the winner-take-all wild card game against Doosan on October 14 at Jamsil, with LG’s season on the line in a single contest, Carrasco worked six innings, allowing four hits and just one run on 81 pitches before being pulled after allowing back-to-back hits to open the seventh. Reliever John Kennedy took over from there, and LG held on for a 4-1 win that sent the Twins into the semifinal round against KIA.
Manager Yeom had been direct about the stakes of that pitching matchup beforehand, saying he viewed the duel between Carrasco and Doosan starter Bin Kwak as the single most important variable in the game, and that he hoped to get at least five innings out of his import before needing his bullpen. Carrasco delivered exactly that and more. Afterward, Yeom credited the start directly: “I thought the starting pitching matchup would be hugely important, and because Carrasco pitched well, the overall game management went smoothly.” Kwak, for his part, lasted six innings as well but was saddled with the loss after allowing two runs on three hits and three walks.
The Numbers Working Against Shirakawa — and the Ones Working for Him
There is no getting around the fact that Shirakawa’s head-to-head record against Tuesday’s opponent is alarming on its face. A 7.71 ERA against any team over multiple starts would give a manager pause, and the LG lineup he’s set to face is precisely the one that has produced that number against him this year. The Twins have shown throughout this series that they can do damage even without home runs — Sunday’s Game 2 loss for LG came despite a late rally, but Game 1 and Game 2 both saw KIA’s bats, not LG’s, dictate the terms of the game. Still, a lineup capable of forcing mistakes, as LG’s has shown in flashes all season, is exactly the kind of opponent that can expose a pitcher who has already struggled against it twice.
KIA’s decision to start Shirakawa anyway reflects more confidence in his overall form — and in the two-game cushion the Tigers are carrying into Jamsil — than in any specific numerical edge against this particular opponent. A two-run lead in the series gives a manager far more room to let a pitcher work through early trouble than a manager facing elimination would ever have, and that margin for error may be the single biggest factor separating how Lee can afford to use Shirakawa from how Yeom must use Carrasco.
Why This Game Means Everything for LG
For LG, there is no such cushion. Having dropped both games in Gwangju — a 5-1 loss in Game 1 behind Do-young Kim’s two home runs and four RBIs, and a 6-3 defeat in Game 2 after starter Chan-gyu Lim was pulled having retired only one batter in the first inning — the Twins now need to win three straight games just to advance, starting with Tuesday’s contest at their own home ballpark. Losing Game 3 ends LG’s season outright. There is no Game 4 to plan for if the Twins can’t solve Shirakawa and KIA’s lineup on Tuesday night.
That context shapes everything about how Carrasco will be used in Game 3, in a way that’s different from both his cautious debut and his wild-card outing. There may be no pitch count held in reserve this time, no plan to turn things over to the bullpen at a predetermined number regardless of how well he’s throwing. A veteran who has already shown he can deliver his best stuff in a winner-take-all environment will be given every opportunity to keep LG’s season alive as long as he has something left to give.
Understanding the Stakes: How the KBO Semifinal Round Works
For readers unfamiliar with the structure of Korean baseball’s postseason, a brief explainer helps clarify exactly what’s on the line here. Unlike MLB’s Division Series and Championship Series format, the KBO uses a staggered bracket in which lower-seeded teams play first, with the winner advancing to face a higher seed that has been waiting on the sidelines. KIA finished third in this year’s regular-season standings, earning a direct bye into this best-of-five semifinal round. LG, which finished fourth, first had to win a single win-or-go-home wild card game against the fifth-place Doosan Bears just to reach this series — the same high-pressure environment in which Carrasco made his biggest start of the year so far.
The winner of the KIA-LG series doesn’t go straight to the Korean Series, either. That distinction belongs to the KT Wiz, who finished atop the regular-season standings with a franchise-record 90 wins and, as a result, advance directly to the Korean Series — the KBO’s equivalent of the World Series — without playing another postseason game until the finals begin. Whichever team survives the KIA-LG series will instead face the Samsung Lions, the second-place finisher, in a Playoff round before any trip to the Korean Series becomes possible. In other words, even a team that wins Game 3 on Tuesday remains two full series away from a championship — a long road that makes efficient series wins, like the 2-0 lead KIA currently holds, valuable far beyond the simple accounting of one win closer to the next round.
What’s Next
Tuesday’s game at Jamsil will be played in LG’s home ballpark, giving the Twins a chance to lean on their own crowd in a game they cannot afford to lose. For KIA, a win would close out the series in three games and send the Tigers to the Playoff round against Samsung with extra rest before that series begins — a meaningful advantage in a sport where bullpen arms and starting rotations accumulate fatigue over the course of a long postseason run. For LG, anything short of a win ends the season immediately, with no Game 4 to fall back on and no margin left for the kind of late-game stumbles that have plagued the Twins’ pitching staff so far this series.
Both managers have, in their own way, already shown their hand on how much trust they’re willing to place in these two pitchers under pressure. Yeom capped Carrasco’s pitch count during a perfect-game bid in August because the situation called for caution, then let him go the distance of his outing in a win-or-go-home wild card game in October because the situation called for exactly the opposite. Lee, meanwhile, is handing the ball to a pitcher with a rough personal history against Tuesday’s opponent, betting that the two-game lead his team carries into Jamsil buys enough room for Shirakawa to work through whatever trouble LG’s lineup creates early.
There’s a symmetry to how both pitchers arrived at this moment that’s hard to ignore. Carrasco was brought in because a rotation was collapsing and someone needed to stop the bleeding immediately; Shirakawa was brought back because a club believed a pitcher recovering from major elbow surgery still had something to offer, even after two previous KBO stops hadn’t worked out. Both bets have paid off well enough to get each pitcher here, to a mound in Jamsil, in a game that will go a long way toward deciding how this series — and each team’s season — ultimately ends. Whichever manager’s gamble holds up Tuesday night will have a direct hand in writing the next chapter of this semifinal, one way or the other.