Professional baseball KIA manager Lee Bum-ho met with reporters ahead of the first showdown of the season against Doosan in the 2024 Shinhan SOL Bank KBO League at Jamsil Stadium in Seoul on the 29th and expressed his determination to play three consecutive games against Doosan.
Unfortunately, Kia failed to make it to the fall stage as it finished sixth, just one game behind Doosan in fifth place last season. Despite a series of fatal injuries at the end of the season, it had only four wins (12 losses) against Doosan, its fifth-ranked rival, one of the reasons it failed to advance to the fall baseball league.
"Originally, when we met teams in the Seoul metropolitan area, it was always difficult to deal with them. When I came to the metropolitan area, I always had a lot of tough matches. Especially, I was weak in nine consecutive games in the Seoul metropolitan area," Lee said. "It is important to win games for sure. If you try to win all the games, you can get worse. Especially in the Seoul metropolitan area, you don't want too much and you have to win games for sure. That is how we prepared for it."
"If you think about it personally, all teams in the Seoul metropolitan area are strong. There has been a long-standing situation where a large population lives in this area and we can secure a large number of good players," Lee said. "Of course, it is now a full-scale draft, but there were many good players in the Seoul metropolitan area in the past. I think that's why we had some difficult games."
"It can be good for some team every year or bad for some team, but when you play against a team with good depth, you have to prepare thoroughly based on data. If you do it in a sloppy way, you can lose," he said.
KIA has set up a lineup of starting pitchers in the order of Park Chan-ho (striker), Kim Do-young (third baseman), Socrates Brito (left fielder), Choi Hyung-woo (designated hitter), Lee Woo-sung (first baseman), Kim Sun-bin (second baseman), Lee Chang-jin (right fielder), Kim Tae-gun (pitch) and Choi Won-jun (center fielder) to face Doosan ace Raul Alcantara. The starting pitcher is Lee Eui-ri.
As the match against Lotte in Gwangju was canceled due to rain on the previous day, the starting rotation was set up in the order of Lee Ui-ri, Will Crow, and Yoon Young-cheol for the three consecutive Doosan weekend games. Yang will take the mound twice a week next Tuesday and Sunday.
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