After a rather short spell in the WBC, the Korean national baseball team has returned a somewhat disappointing result to the KBO. The Korean baseball prospective infrastructure has a very underwhelming coaching staff, of course, with a player pool lacking diverse types of players. The Korean national baseball team has won two and lost two of their four games against Japan, Australia, the Czech Republic, and China. The two losses were from Japan and Australia. Aside from the hitting side, which Korea did show a glimpse of hope, the pitching side needed more basic quality. The pitching staff gave numerous home runs with extra-base hits. The players somehow struggled to hit the strike zone, despiting adapting to the WBC’s official match ball several times prior to its initial tournament opening. Some players particularly stood out, anyhow. Tae-In Won and Se-Woong Park pitched impeccably in the stretch of the four games. 

The outfielders - Jung-hoo Lee, Seong-Bum Na, Gun-woo Park, Hae-min Park, and Hyun-soo Kim - had ups and downs. Gun-woo Park and Jung-hoo Lee showed why they were included in the national team roster as they swung their hot bats. Disappointingly, Seong-bum Na and Hyun-soo Kim did not achieve success at the plate as he went 0-for-4 in RISP (runners in scoring position). Hae-min Park only appeared in games as a pinch runner most of the time. 

The infielders were also disappointing. Tommy Edman and Ha-Seong Kim, known as the ‘big league keystone duo,’ recorded only a single base hit in their three crucial games. Ha-Seong Kim did redeem himself after hitting two home runs against China, but it was presumably too late.

With the early knockout in the WBC tournament, the highly anticipated future of Korean baseball has faced some big turn of events. With the rise of the Korean soccer boom, the KBO League’s popularity is deemed to fall theatrically following its previous knockout in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. To revive the passion for Korean baseball, prominent critics mention the revision Rob Manfred, the current MLB Commissioner, made to bring back MLB’s popularity. The MLB’s revision certainly worked out, as the playing time of most MLB games decreased by over 30 minutes, with the watching rate over the first week of the opening day increasing over a percent. The KBO’s future is on everyone’s attention.

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