Tiarat A baseball season is long enough to contain two completely different players inside the same body, and in 2026, San Francisco Giants outfielder Lee Jung-hoo has become a case study in exactly that. Through the season’s first half, he was hitting .302, a number that placed him among the National League’s more productive outfielders and … Read more
Six days is not a long time to go from a broken bone in your face to a national team training gym. Yet on September 14, Kim Do-young walked into the assembly point for South Korea’s Asian Games baseball team exactly as scheduled, with no medical hold-up and no asterisk next to his name. A … Read more
On September 12, four Korean ballparks — in Seoul’s Jamsil district, in Daegu, in Suwon, and again in Seoul’s western district of Gocheok — combined to welcome 80,942 fans through their turnstiles. It was a solid but unremarkable single-day total by the standards of a league that regularly fills its ten stadiums to a combined … Read more
Some players mark milestones with dramatic walk-off swings or towering home runs. Lim Chan-gyu marked his with a modest pitching line and a 13-5 final score that had already been decided well before reporters started doing the math. On September 13, at Samsung Lions Park in Daegu, the LG Twins’ longtime rotation mainstay threw seven … Read more
Four days is not very long to recover from a broken bone in your face. It is an even shorter amount of time when the plan afterward is to step back into a professional batter’s box against live pitching. Yet on September 13, at Gwangju-KIA Champions Field, that is exactly what Kim Do-young did — … Read more
There is a particular kind of baseball player who spends most of a season on the edges of the box score — a pinch runner here, a defensive replacement there, a batting average that never quite climbs out of the basement — and then, on one specific night when the standings actually depend on it, … Read more
Four days ago, Kim Do-young was carried off a baseball field with a fractured nose. On September 12, he stood in a batting cage at Gwangju-KIA Champions Field and started hitting again. No pain. No shortness of breath. Right on the schedule his own recovery plan had quietly laid out three days earlier — tee … Read more
On September 10, with the Atlanta Braves clinging to a 1-0 lead over the Tampa Bay Rays in the eighth inning, Kim Ha-sung stepped in against reliever Kevin Kelly with two runners on and one out. He turned around a sinker and lined it into play for two runs. Tampa Bay would add only one … Read more
Two days after a bunt attempt broke his nose, Kim Do-young walked out of the hospital on September 11 and did not go home. He went straight to Gwangju-KIA Champions Field, still dressed in his team training gear, arriving at the ballpark at around 3:30 in the afternoon. By the time he got there, his … Read more
A day can move quickly in a baseball season. On the night of September 9, Kim Do-young of the KIA Tigers underwent a procedure to reset a fractured nasal bone at a club-designated hospital. By the following morning, the story had a second headline attached to it: the national team that is preparing for the … Read more