The KBO League’s newly minted home run king didn’t wait long to show the postseason what the regular season already knew. On October 17 at Gwangju-KIA Champions Field, Do-young Kim hit two home runs and drove in four of his team’s five runs as the KIA Tigers beat the LG Twins 5-1 in Game 1 of their best-of-five semifinal series. Starting pitcher James Naile matched him blow for blow on the mound, allowing just one run over seven innings to earn the game’s Most Valuable Player honor. Together, they gave KIA a one-game lead in a series that now shifts back to the same ballpark for Game 2 on October 18.
For KIA, the win was less a surprise than a continuation. Kim enters this series as the league’s reigning home run champion, having clinched the title on the final day of the regular season less than a week earlier. Game 1 of the semifinal was simply the first chance the league’s best power hitter had to prove that his bat doesn’t cool off just because the calendar flips to October.
A Tied Game Broken Open in the Fourth
The game was even at 1-1 when Kim stepped to the plate in the fourth inning with nobody on base and nobody out. LG starter Anders Tolhurst opened the at-bat with a 149 km/h (about 93 mph) fastball, and Kim turned on it immediately, pulling the pitch over the left-field wall for a go-ahead solo home run. The ball was measured at 125 meters — a figure reported by multiple outlets, with one source listing it at 124 meters — but however it’s rounded, the distance left little doubt about the quality of contact. The home run put KIA back in front, 2-1, and shifted the entire tenor of the game. What had been a tight, even contest between two playoff rotations suddenly had a clear leader, and that leader had done it on the first pitch he saw in the at-bat.
There’s a particular kind of statement a hitter makes when he jumps on the very first pitch of an at-bat in a tied postseason game. It signals that he came to the plate looking for something specific and got exactly the pitch he wanted. Tolhurst’s fastball was not a mistake pitch in any obvious sense — 149 km/h is a legitimate major league-caliber heater — but Kim’s bat got through the zone fast enough and in the right spot to turn a quality pitch into a souvenir for a fan in the left-field stands.
Building the Lead: A Sacrifice Fly in the Sixth
KIA extended the margin in the sixth inning, and this time the rally started with LG’s own mistakes. A sequence of Twins errors left runners at first and third with nobody out, and Kim came through again — not with another home run this time, but with a sacrifice fly to right field deep enough to let the runner on third, Jae-hyun Park, cross the plate. It pushed the score to 3-1 and, more importantly, kept the pressure squarely on LG’s shoulders. A team that has already seen one go-ahead home run fly over the left-field wall does not want to also be handing out extra bases through its own defensive mistakes, and that is precisely the situation Kim and the Tigers were able to exploit.
The sacrifice fly doesn’t show up in a box score the way a home run does, but it’s worth noting for what it reveals about the at-bat itself: Kim didn’t need to swing for the fences to be productive. With a runner on third and the infield playing for the out at home if needed, lifting a fly ball deep enough to score from third is its own kind of situational hitting, and it extended an afternoon in which essentially every time Kim came to the plate with a chance to add to the score, he delivered.
The Exclamation Point: A Two-Run Shot in the Eighth
KIA’s final runs came in the eighth inning, with two outs and a runner on first base. LG had turned to reliever Hyun-sik Jang by that point, and Jang’s forkball was the pitch Kim connected with for his second home run of the day, sending it over the center-field wall for a two-run shot. The ball traveled another 125 meters, matching the distance of his fourth-inning blast almost exactly, and it pushed the score to 5-1 — the final margin of the game.
Two home runs in the same game, each traveling the same reported distance, both coming against different types of pitches (a fastball on the first, a forkball on the second) from different pitchers, is the kind of detail that tends to stick with people who watched the game. It wasn’t one mistake pitch that Kim happened to find; it was two separate pitchers, in two separate situations, each making a quality pitch that Kim was still able to drive out of the park. By the time he rounded the bases on the second home run, Kim’s final line for the day read three at-bats, two hits, four RBI, and two runs scored — a remarkably efficient afternoon built on exactly two swings that left the yard and one productive sacrifice fly in between.
James Naile’s Quiet Complement on the Mound
It would be easy, given the drama of two home runs in a single postseason game, to overlook the pitching performance that made the whole afternoon possible. KIA starter James Naile, an American right-hander, worked seven innings and allowed just a single run, holding an LG lineup that had fought its way through a wild card series just three days earlier to one real scoring chance across two-thirds of the game. For that effort, Naile was named the game’s Most Valuable Player — a reminder that in a series opener where one hitter’s power numbers dominate the headlines, it still takes a full team performance, starting pitching included, to actually win the baseball game.
Naile’s presence on a KBO mound is itself a detail that resonates differently for an American audience than a Korean one. He is a United States-born pitcher who worked his way up through the St. Louis Cardinals’ minor league system before signing with KIA, where he has become a dependable mid-rotation starter for one of the league’s flagship franchises. For readers unfamiliar with how deeply international professional baseball has become outside of MLB, Naile represents a now-common career path: a pitcher who didn’t carve out a long major league career in North America, but who found a role as a legitimate ace-caliber starter for a championship-caliber club overseas. On a day when the Korean-born slugger was rightly the headline, it was the American-born pitcher’s seven shutdown innings that kept the game within Kim’s reach to decide.
What Kim Said Afterward
Kim’s own explanation for the performance was characteristically understated. Speaking after the game, he said simply that coming through in big moments is his job — a short, modest answer for a day in which he had just authored more offense by himself than every other player on both rosters combined. There was no claim of a hot streak or any particular adjustment at the plate; just an acknowledgment that the situation called for a hitter to deliver, and that delivering is what he considers his role to be.
A Home Run King Who Didn’t Need an Adjustment Period
To understand why Game 1 felt less like an upset and more like business as usual, it helps to rewind five days. On October 12, in KIA’s regular-season finale against this same LG club, Kim hit a decisive two-run home run in the eighth inning that did double duty: it delivered KIA a 4-2 win and clinched the regular season’s home run title for Kim outright, his first such crown, finishing one home run ahead of the runner-up. That same swing was also the 100th home run of his career. The Tigers’ win that day also secured third place in the standings, sending them directly into the semifinal round without having to survive a wild card game first — a cushion that gave Kim and his teammates four full days of rest before Game 1 of this series.
For a reader more familiar with how Major League Baseball structures its postseason, the KBO’s format works similarly in spirit if not in exact mechanics: finish high enough in the standings, and a team skips the single-elimination wild card round entirely, going straight into a best-of-five series with more rest and, in theory, a fresher roster. KIA’s third-place finish bought exactly that advantage over a Twins team that had to grind through extra elimination baseball against the Doosan Bears just to reach this point.
Kim’s regular season numbers help explain why pitchers around the league are reluctant to give him anything hittable, even in October. He finished the 162-game-equivalent KBO season having played 135 games, batting .308 with 153 hits, including those 45 home runs, while driving in 118 runs and scoring 120 more. Forty-five home runs was enough to edge the runner-up by a single long ball for the title, and it came with a slugging percentage that also led the league — a hitter who was not just powerful, but comprehensively dominant at the plate for an entire season. None of that guaranteed anything for the playoffs, of course; recent form and particularly a long layoff can derail even the most dominant regular-season hitter once the games start to matter in a single-elimination sense. Game 1 answered that question emphatically.
Why This Matters Beyond One Box Score
There’s a broader pattern worth watching as this series unfolds. A club that already has the league’s best offensive player locked in on form, paired with a starting rotation capable of delivering seven strong innings from arms like Naile’s, is the kind of combination that tends to be difficult for an opponent to solve across a multi-game series rather than a single outing. LG will have an entire night to make adjustments before Game 2 — different relief options, a different look from the bullpen behind whichever starter they choose, perhaps more cautious pitch selection to Kim specifically — but the Twins also now know firsthand that there is no obvious area of weakness in KIA’s lineup for them to target. A team that just won going away, by a score that at various points looked uncomfortably one-sided for the opponent, carries real momentum into a series that is still, mathematically, nowhere near decided.
It also reinforces something about how postseason narratives tend to play out in any league: the storylines that mattered most in the final weeks of the regular season rarely disappear just because a new round begins. Kim’s home run race, which went down to the literal final day of the 162-games-plus schedule against a KT Wiz slugger who finished a single home run behind him, was the story of KIA’s September and early October. Game 1 of this semifinal didn’t introduce a new storyline so much as it extended the one already in progress, with the stakes raised and the long rest finally over.
Looking Ahead to Game 2
The series now moves to Game 2, scheduled for October 18 at the same ballpark, Gwangju-KIA Champions Field. LG will need a response, and quickly — in a best-of-five format, falling behind two games to none before the series even leaves the first venue is a significantly steeper hole to climb out of than simply losing Game 1. For KIA, the formula from Game 1 is a simple one to want to repeat: quality innings from the rotation, limit the free baserunners and defensive mistakes that gave KIA extra chances to score, and let Kim’s bat do what it has done all season. Whether LG can find an answer for the league’s newest home run king over the course of a longer series — rather than in a single afternoon that got away from them in the middle innings — will go a long way toward deciding how far KIA’s October run ultimately goes.