Cody Ponce and Drew Anderson to make KBO history

WBSC Premier12 star Cody Ponce broke the single-season Korea Baseball Organisation (KBO) League strikeout record on September 3. Still, he may not be the new record holder at the end of the 2025 season.

The Hanwha Eagles right-hander has 242 strikeouts in 174.2 innings pitched over 28 starts. He also posted an impressive 17-1 record with a 1.85 earned run average (ERA). Ponce won 17 games in a row before suffering his first loss on September 20 against the KT Wiz. Ponce's 17 consecutive wins set a KBO record. According to the Yonhap News Agency, "the previous mark had been 14 straight wins by Chong Min-tae of the Hyundai Unicorns in 2003 and Hector Noesi of the Kia Tigers in 2017."

Drew Anderson of the SSG Landers, a Major League Baseball (MLB) and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) 31-year-old veteran, has now 240 strikeouts in 165.2 innings pitched over 29 starts. He posted an 11-7 record and a 2.28 ERA.

The Eagles (80-54 and 3 draws) are in second place behind the LG Twins (83-51 and 3) and have a nine-game lead over the third-place Landers.

Ponce and Anderson are not scheduled to pitch on Wednesday, September 24. Both teams will compete in five more games through the regular season, and Ponce and Anderson will get a start. They may get a second start in early October's makeup games.

Ponce's lead in wins is also in danger. His Eagles teammate Ryan Weiss, a 28-year-old right-hander who pitched as high as Triple-A in affiliated baseball in the United States and played in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), has 16 wins and will start on Wednesday, September 24, against Min-jun Choi and the SSG Landers.

The 2025 season has been a highly successful one for the KBO league. After setting its single-season record with 10,887,705 fans in 2024, the league surpassed the 10 million mark again when the total amount of paying spectators reached 10,088,590 on Saturday, August 23.