Carlos Carrasco threw seven perfect innings in his KBO debut. LG still took the ball.

For seven innings at Jamsil on Saturday, Carlos Carrasco looked like the signing LG Twins fans had been waiting for.

The 39-year-old Venezuelan, making his Korea Baseball Organization debut against the Doosan Bears, faced 21 batters and put every one of them away. No hits. No walks. Two strikeouts. Seventy-four pitches. His fastball touched about 149 km/h, but the night was really about command — sinker, slider, cutter, changeup, and curve finding the corners and inducing weak contact.

LG led 2–0. Through seven, nobody had reached base. In a league that has never recorded a first-team perfect game, the thought was hard to ignore.

Then the plan took over. Manager Yeom Kyung-yeop and Carrasco had already agreed on roughly six innings or about 70 pitches. Carrasco had not thrown more than 70 in around two months, and it had been about two weeks since his last outing. He wanted to come out after the sixth. The staff asked for one more. He threw a perfect seventh — and still came out.

Woo Kang-hoon entered in the eighth and gave up two runs. The game crawled to a 2–2 draw after 11 innings. Carrasco did not get the win. He did get the outing LG needed.

That was always the point of the signing. In late July, the defending Korea Series champions released reliever Yacksel Rios and brought Carrasco in on a $360,000 deal for the rest of the season — swapping a bullpen arm for a veteran starter. Fellow foreign starter Anders Tolhurst had been giving up runs. Asian-quota lefty Lachlan Wells and domestic starter Lim Chan-gyu had rough Julys. LG needed length in the rotation more than another high-velocity setup man.

Carrasco arrived with a long MLB résumé: 17 seasons, 112 wins, a share of the American League wins lead with Corey Kluber in 2017, long Cleveland years, later stops with the Mets and Yankees, and a messy final stretch of Braves designations for assignment. Asia usually sends arms the other way. This time Seoul bought the finished product.

Afterward, Yeom said Carrasco’s command looked even sharper than the video the club studied before the deal. Seven efficient innings also eased a bullpen that has already worked past 100 games this season — LG used only four relievers even with extras.

So Saturday will not go down as the KBO’s first perfect game. It will go down as something more useful for a club still trying to climb: a 39-year-old who showed, immediately, that he can still start, and a staff that chose caution over a historic chase. If Carrasco keeps this up, the win column will catch up. The debut already did its job.