Doctor Dykxhoorn dominating and dancing in Taiwan
Right-hander Brock Dykxhoorn (Goderich, Ont.) has been a dominant starter for the Uni-President Lions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League this season. Photo: CPBL Stats
October 20, 2021
By J.P. Antonacci
Canadian Baseball Network
Brock Dykxhoorn twirled a two-hit shutout in Tainan City, Taiwan, on Oct. 7, his third complete game victory in what has been a stellar season as the ace of the defending Chinese Professional Baseball League champion Uni-President Lions.
But the 6-foot-9 right-hander from Goderich, Ont., saved his best performance for after the game.
With upbeat music blasting through the stadium speakers and a colourful lei draped around his neck, the man Taiwanese fans call “the Big Doctor” celebrated prescribing another Uni-Lions win by flawlessly executing a personalized dance routine as the game’s most valuable player.
Smiling for the camera while towering over the Uni-Lions cheerleading squad, Dykxhoorn nailed the energetic choreography with the practised ease of someone who has been named game MVP 11 times this season.
The 27-year-old says while he is by no means a dancer, moving to the beat while fans cheer and dance along is part of what makes Taiwanese baseball so much fun.
“It look me a little bit to get used to it, but it’s definitely cool, and if you can buy in it’s a lot of fun,” Dykxhoorn told Canadian Baseball Network over the phone from Taiwan.
He said the stadium atmosphere in Taiwan and Korea – where he played before joining the Uni-Lions in 2020 – is “the best.”
“It’s very interactive, very loud. For us it makes every game feel like a weekend game,” he said.
“It almost has a European soccer vibe where fans are up chanting, singing, they’ve got songs going all game. It’s not like American baseball where you sit back with a beer and watch the game.”
All the commotion in the stands actually helps Dykxhoorn “zone in” on the mound.
“Whereas some of those minor league days when there’s 400, 500 people in the stands, you can hear one individual voice and exactly what they’re saying, which isn’t always the best,” he chuckled.
Uni-Lions fans are only saying good things about their star hurler – even if some can’t quite pronounce his name.
“They threw my last name out the window,” Dykxhoorn said with a laugh.
Instead, fans call him a Taiwanese version of Brock, with the Big Doctor nickname based on a Chinese translation of Dykxhoorn’s name in Korean.
The tall – make that very tall – right-hander turned heads right away upon landing in Taiwan near the end of last season.
“I get a lot of eyeballs on me, for sure,” Dykxhoorn said. “You don’t hide too many places around here.”
But he now stands out for his work on the field, especially after pitching the Uni-Lions to the 2020 Taiwan Series championship.
Dykxhoorn got the series off to a strong start against rival club CTBC Brothers, allowing one run over six innings in the opening game.
With his team facing elimination in Game 5, he threw a complete game shutout – the first of his professional career – before coming back on short rest to close out Game 7 with a six-out save.
Dykxhoorn was named series MVP and said his first taste of playoff baseball “lived up to everything I thought it would be.”
“It was definitely cool. The place was rocking,” he said. “My complete game shutout was at home, so that was really cool, and then we ended up winning it on the road. Both were awesome games.”
Watching in the early hours of the morning from halfway across the world, the Dykxhoorn family was cheering almost as loudly as the stadium crowd.
“For me it was the culmination of his career,” Brock’s father, Dave Dykxhoorn, said of watching his son clinch the CPBL championship.
“Brock, from minor baseball, has always been consistent. I knew he wasn’t going to buckle to the pressure. His team rallied around his pitching performance and they were able to get the win.”
Going the distance
Dykxhoorn’s stellar work in the Taiwan Series erased any doubts Uni-Lions faithful might have had after the newly arrived free agent scuffled a bit to end the season. It took some time, he said, to get into a groove after having to quarantine in a hotel room and then being thrown right into game action.
With the benefit of a full spring training this year, Dykxhoorn is showing the baseball world his true potential. Along with his league-leading 15 wins, he has a 1.82 ERA and 0.89 WHIP in 153 1/3 innings, with 130 strikeouts and 33 walks.
Helped by a new split-fingered fastball – which late last year replaced his changeup as his “bread and butter pitch” – Dykxhoorn has dominated, perhaps no more completely than during an April 14 near-perfect game in which he set down the minimum 27 batters with 11 strikeouts. The only blemish on his day was a third-inning single that was promptly erased on a double play.
“I think for me (the splitter) helps so much because I’m so tall and I throw from such a high arm angle. They’ll look like the same pitch, and the fastball stays up near the letters and the splitter will dive into the dirt,” said Dykxhoorn, who also throws a slider and curveball.
“Brock is not a flashy pitcher who can throw 99 miles an hour,” said Dave Dykxhoorn, recalling how scouts used to take one look at the tall youngster and expect a flamethrower.
With a fastball that sits in the low to mid 90s, Dykxhoorn relies on preparation and guile.
“His ability to recognize who’s in the batter’s box and know their strengths and weaknesses, that’s him as a pitcher. He studies patterns and swings. He has notes on everybody,” Dave Dykxhoorn said.
“His success is basically hard work.”
Dykxhoorn’s cerebral approach plays well in Taiwan, where hitters eschew mighty uppercuts in favour of working the count.
“It’ll be like six, seven, eight-pitch at-bats pretty regularly, just because they’re so good at fouling off pitches and waiting for you to make a mistake so they can put a ball in play,” Dykxhoorn said.
“That’s when you tend to build up those big pitch counts and you’re out of games in the fifth inning with 100 pitches.”
He soon learned to crowd the strike zone and try to generate soft contact.
“Of course, if I get to two strikes I’m still going to take my pitch or two to try and strike them out, but for the most part I’m just trying to get those quick outs,” he said.
Dykxhoorn said he is most proud of the complete games he has thrown in Taiwan, starting with last year’s playoffs.
“Between college and professional, I’d never had a complete game shutout,” he said, explaining that Houston used a “piggyback system” in the minor leagues where a starter threw the first five innings and another starter finished the game.
“We rarely had times where we were allowed to go seven, eight, nine innings,” said Dykxhoorn.
He has since proven himself capable of regularly going the distance. On July 21 of this year, the Big Doctor paid another memorable house call, blanking the Wei Chuan Dragons over nine innings to record a two-hit shutout.
“It’s just so fulfilling to be able to start a job and finish it,” he said.
Ahead of his time
Dykxhoorn had just turned 24 when he left the States in 2019 to play in the Korea Baseball Organization.
“I was young to come here, but I thought it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” said Dykxhoorn, who was drafted by Houston in 2014 out of Central Arizona College in the sixth round.
“I was in Triple-A with the Astros, but that’s when the Astros had Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole and Zack Greinke. They were just rolling out stud after stud after stud. And it was like, okay, where does Brock Dykxhoorn fit in this picture?”
So he signed with the defending KBO champs, SK Wyvens, putting his North American career on hold.
He wasn’t going to Korea entirely green, however. As a teenager Dykxhoorn won a silver medal with the Canadian Junior National Team at the 2012 18U World Cup in Seoul.
“I had a great experience there in high school with the 18U team,” Dykxhoorn said. “I think it definitely helped me personally, even just in being familiar with where (Korea) is in the world and kind of what to expect culturally.”
Travels with Team Canada to the Dominican Republic, Italy, Germany and Japan whetted his appetite for more international experience and a return to Asia if the chance ever presented itself.
“Korea stood out as the place that if I could choose, that’s where I’d want to go back, and it’s kinda crazy that it came full circle,” said Dykxhoorn, a Goderich Seahawks alumnus who counts winning the 2015 Pan Am Games on home soil as another career highlight.
Helping his transition from the minor leagues to life in the KBO was having his friend and offseason workout partner, London’s Jamie Romak, as a new teammate.
At the time, Romak told CBN’s Alexis Brudnicki he had every confidence in Dykxhoorn making the jump at his young age.
“Those skills and life mechanisms you need to survive on your own in a completely foreign country, that’s typically why (KBO teams) have gone for some older guys,” Romak said. “But Brock is a mature guy and he’s going to do really well.”
As much as the family would miss their semi-regular trips to see Brock pitch in whatever minor league city he called home, Dave and Connie Dykxhoorn were excited for their son to make the big move.
“We knew he had the potential, he just required the opportunity,” Dave said. “We were proud of him for being offered the opportunity to play down there.”
Soaking up the experience
Dykxhoorn ended up splitting the 2019 season between SK Wyvens and the Lotte Giants. That October he joined Team Canada at the 2019 WBSC Premier12 tournament in Korea, after which the free agent flew home to Canada to consider his options.
The Uni-Lions pounced the following spring, and in June 2020 Dykxhoorn boarded a plane for Taiwan.
Bubbled with his teammates to start the 2021 season, Dykxhoorn tuned up his pitching arm while trying out the few words of Mandarin and Taiwanese he picked up with help from the team’s translators.
“Just camaraderie-wise around the clubhouse, it’s fun to be able to talk a little smack or joke around with them,” he said.
Away from the field, Dykxhoorn does his best to interact with fans in the streets and online, getting by on his broken Mandarin, fans who know some English, and body language.
“It’s great here. They’re very hospitable for sure,” Dykxhoorn said.
“Taiwan in particular is really known for their food, and I feel like a lot of people outside the ballpark try to be hospitable through their food. We’ll go out for dinner and they’re always trying to share stuff with us and get us to try different things, just because they’re so proud of it. I feel like that’s their way of welcoming you and kind of having you part of their family, part of their culture.”
After living alone in a dorm room last season, Dykxhoorn had some company this year. He and his wife Carly spent several months living together and exploring the country, with Brock chronicling their adventures and taking fans behind the scenes of a pro athlete’s life in videos he posts to his YouTube channel.
The only downside for a Canadian living in Taiwan, Dykxhoorn said, is the relentless heat.
“It’s honestly unbelievable how hot it is here,” he said. “You have to get used to it and learn how to play in it.”
On a more serious note, Dykxhoorn said is aware of the growing tension between Taiwan and China and tries to keep up with current events by monitoring Twitter or watching American news online.
“I got a glimpse of that political tension in Korea between South and North Korea. It’s something that obviously crosses your mind when you go there, for sure. And the same thing here with Taiwan and China,” Dykxhoorn said.
He said the team’s translators and the locals he talks with “don’t seem to be too overly concerned” about the simmering bad blood, which helps expat players like Dykxhoorn relax.
“I feel like us foreigners are more nervous or aware of it than they are,” he said.
“I don’t know if that’s them shrugging it off, but it hasn’t been that much of a big deal here. Of course it’s talked about on the news, but they don’t seem to fret too much over it. We just go with the flow, and if they say it’s okay, we just have to trust them.”
In the meantime, the Big Doctor keeps dealing.
In his latest gem, Dykxhoorn shut down the Fubon Guardians on Friday, tossing seven scoreless innings to secure his 15th win and another post-game MVP dance.
Though Dykxhoorn is focused on helping the Uni-Lions repeat as CPBL champions, each strong performance only helps his standing in the eyes of pro scouts from back home.
The Canadian said he remains open to the idea of playing professionally in North America again.
“I’m on a year-to-year contract here, so every offseason presents those conversations,” he said. “It’s definitely something I think about every year.”