CPBL Archives - All Mississippi Baseball

globe-trotter

On the heels of a strong season in the Korean Baseball Organization, Kirk McCarty will travel over to Taiwan in 2024 to play for CTBC Brothers of the Chinese Professional Baseball League. The former Southern Miss standout and Hattiesburg native pitched in Major League Baseball for Cleveland in 2022. A diminutive left-hander, the 28-year-old McCarty went 9-6 with a 3.39 ERA in the KBO last season after going 4-3, 4.54, in 13 games for the Guardians the year before. He was released by Cleveland after the 2022 season. McCarty has a fairly impressive resume. He was an All-State performer and a strikeout machine at Oak Grove High, going 25-3 and winning a pair of state titles. He was a two-time All–C-USA pitcher at USM, going 22-4, 3.50, in three seasons in Hattiesburg. Drafted in the seventh round by Cleveland in 2017, McCarty was 23-28, 4.30, overall in the minors, 13-8 in Triple-A. He made his MLB debut on April 24, 2022. P.S. Today is the birthdate of another USM pitcher who made the majors: Hugh Laurin Pepper. Pepper, born in 1930 in Vaughan, died in 2018. A Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer, he was a baseball and football standout at USM, throwing a no-hitter in 1954 and rushing for 1,000 yards in 1952. He signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates in ’54 and played parts of four seasons in the big leagues.

totally random

While in the grip of postseason fever, here’s a well-deserved shout-out to Luther Hackman, the former Columbus High star who took MVP honors in back-to-back Taiwan Series in 2008 and ’09. (Stumbled across this compelling nugget of information while searching for something else on baseball-reference.com.) Hackman, a 6-foot-4 right-hander who pitched in the big leagues from 1999-2003, threw 17 shutout innings for the Uni-President Lions and won Games 4 and 7 in the ’08 Taiwan Series, the championship of the Chinese Professional Baseball League. In 2009, Hackman won Games 1, 4 and 7 of the series for the Lions. Hackman pitched in the CPBL for three years, 2010 being his last as a player. Drafted by Colorado in the sixth round in 1994, Hackman pitched in 149 big league games with three clubs and posted a 5.09 ERA. He also pitched in the independent Atlantic League, Mexico and Korea, with middling success. Yet he may still be a legend in the CPBL. P.S. A belated shout-out to umpire Lance Barksdale, the Brookhaven native who was behind the plate for Saturday’s Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. Barksdale missed just one call, according to umpscorecards.com, posting a 99 percent accuracy rate. The one miss: a called strike on a 3-2 pitch to Philadelphia’s Trea Turner in the third inning.