“It’s different in the second team,” says Hanwha’s new leadoff man, who has settled in with an open mind

“Slugging percentage 0.459.

Numbers aren’t everything. But they can give us hints and give us direction. Such is the case with Hanwha’s new leadoff man, Jin-young Lee (26). Hanwha and the Goching staff took note of Lee’s slugging percentage in the Futures League. His .459 OPS in the Futures League is not a number that can be taken lightly, even in the secondary leagues, where the level of play is much different than the first.메이저놀이터

The observations showed that the first and second teams played differently. Manager Son Hyuk said, “In the second team, Lee was very calm and saw the ball well. Even in games where he didn’t have a hit, he was able to calmly compete with the pitcher and walk out easily. It was different in the second team. On the other hand, I didn’t see that in the first team, so I interviewed him.”

The answer was “slack. In the second team, he stayed in his strike zone and took his time at the plate. In the first team, he was rushed. There was a lot of pressure on him to bat quickly and produce results.

So we decided to give him a chance. Jung Eun-won, Lee Won-seok, and Noh Soo-kwang, who had been selected as the leadoff hitter, were not the answer, so Lee Jin-young, who has been impressing in the lower order, has been batting first for about a month now. He was named to the top of the batting order against LG Electronics in Daejeon on March 10, and has been hitting close to his second-team rate in the first team since then.

In 22 games since June 10, Lee is batting .269 with a .425 on-base percentage. That’s the highest OPS among Hanwha batters in that span, with Choi Jae-hoon at 0.423. The elusive No. 1 hitter problem has been solved with Lee Jin-young. Lee is also having a career-high season in his seventh year as a professional.

He’s not a traditional number one hitter. He doesn’t steal many bases. He doesn’t have a lot of stolen bases, and he doesn’t have a high batting average. Against SSG on Sept. 9, he hit a bases-loaded double to right-center field in the third inning to drive in the game-winning run. He already had a multi-hit game in the first inning with an infield single and extended the lead with a sacrifice fly in the seventh.

Without the meeting, Lee might have been just another hitter stuck between the first and second base lines. But Hanwha wanted to know why Lee was a completely different hitter between the first and second teams, and he was open about the reasons for the difference.

Hanwha faced a lot of changes at the beginning of the season. In the midst of it all, Lee Jin-young is getting his chance and making a leap forward. He has become an integral part of head coach Choi Won-ho’s reorganized table-setting lineup. At this rate, he could be a consistent number one hitter. Lee’s untapped potential is finally being realized.