“Neither I nor the pitching coach asked me to do it…”
The hottest commodity on the LG mound this season is the 174-centimeter rookie submarine Park Myung-geun (19). Manager Yoon Kyung-yeop’s unique insight has been on point once again. The talent he has been watching since his days as the KBO’s technical commissioner has exploded in his first year. In 22 games, he has 1 win, 4 saves, 4 holds, and a 2.75 ERA.
Manager Yoon Kyung-yeop is quite pleased with Park Myung-geun. Before the 28th game against the Gwangju Kia, he said, “Myung-geun can’t be without his changeup. He should throw it to both right-handed and left-handed hitters. At some point, he throws it to right-handed hitters. It wasn’t me or the pitching coach. I made him throw it to left-handed hitters first, and that’s his strength.”
According to baseball stats site Statiz, Park’s changeup is being thrown 22.4 percent of the time this season. That’s second only to Posey’s 56.1 percent. He believes that in modern baseball, if a right-hander wants to avoid losing control to a left-hander, he will eventually need a changeup that flows outside the left-field zone.
Yeom was surprised that the rookie right-handed sidearm was bold enough to use the changeup against right-handed batters. It shows that he is confident in his body control and command. He is definitely different from the average high school rookie. He may be small in stature, but he has a big heart. His pitches don’t change whether he’s the setup man or the closer.
His changeup has a .208 batting average. His fastball has a BABIP of 0.263, so it could be his go-to pitch. Since he doesn’t have a two-seam fastball, it’s even more important to utilize his changeup and curveball. In any case, Park is a thinking baseball player.
He’s small in stature, but his body is quite solid. “I’ve been doing weight training according to the schedule set by the training department since the Arizona camp,” he said after his save against the KIA in Gwangju on June 26 with ⅓ innings of one-hit, one-strikeout ball. He’s a side arm, but he’s very good at getting runners out, and he’s not an evasive pitcher.
“Even though I went out in the closer’s role, I feel like I’m more relaxed than I was at the beginning of the season, so I’m just grateful that they sent me out in the closer’s role,” Park said. I threw the changeup following Dong-won Park’s lead. “I think you saw it okay. I’m thinking about what I need and what I’m lacking.”안전놀이터
It’s still early, but he’s a candidate for Rookie of the Year. “I hope there will be a lot of people who win awards from our team, and that will be an opportunity for players to grow to the next level,” said Yeom Kyung-yup. Park Myung-geun said, “I can’t win the Rookie of the Year just because I want to, so I’ll do what the team needs. If we play against each other, we have to win.”