“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Doosan Bears head coach Lee Seung-yeop said when asked about Jae-hwan Kim ahead of their game against the Lotte Giants at Jamsil Stadium in Seoul on Friday.
Looking ahead to this season, Lee has 메이저사이트identified Jae-hwan as one of the “key players. He thought that if he could hit in the No. 4 spot, it would have a synergistic effect on the batting lineup.
He had high expectations, but he didn’t live up to them. In the first half of the year, he batted just 2-for-4 with seven home runs in 77 games. In 2018, he was the “Jamsil Home Run King” with 44 home runs, but his presence was not followed by a cool one.
In July, he slumped even further to a 1-for-6 batting average. However, Lee realized that Kim Jae-hwan was gradually improving his hitting. On August 21, he hit a double against the Gwangju KIA Tigers.
Lee, who holds the KBO record for most home runs with 457 in his career, was right on the money. Kim Jae-hwan followed with a “Kim Jae-hwan-esque” shot.
In the bottom of the third inning, after taking a 1-0 lead on Heo Kyung-min’s RBI single, Kim took advantage of Lotte starter Na Kyun-ahn’s first-pitch forkball and sent it over the right field fence. It was a 110-meter shot, 21 days after his home run against Samsung Electronics on April 4.
After taking a 3-0 lead with Kim’s homer, Doosan extended the lead to 4-0 on Yang Suk-hwan’s double and Rojas’ RBI single, and began to move closer to an 11-game winning streak.