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 innings, allowed four runs, and picked up his 14th win of the season — a routine-sounding accomplishment that turned out to be his 100th career victory, making him just the 34th pitcher in the history of the Korea Baseball Organization to reach that number, and the first pitcher in the 36-year history of the LG Twins franchise to do it.
The milestone did not arrive alone. In the same lopsided win, LG’s American import outfielder Austin Dean hit his 39th home run of the season in the fourth inning, breaking a franchise record for single-season home runs that had stood since 2020. Two records, one final score, one afternoon in Daegu — and, as an added twist, the very game that produced them also widened the gap in one of the tightest pennant races the KBO has seen all year.
A Blowout Win That Turned Into a History Lesson
On paper, September 13 looked like a straightforward road win. LG traveled to Daegu to face the Samsung Lions and left with a 13-5 victory, LG’s second win in as many days over the second-place club. Samsung’s loss dropped the Lions to back-to-back defeats in a season where every game in the standings has carried outsized weight. But the final score barely tells the story of what actually happened on the field, where two separate personal milestones collided in the same nine innings.
Lim Chan-gyu started the game, and by the time he left the mound after seven innings, he had allowed seven hits and two home runs while striking out six and giving up four runs — a workmanlike, not spectacular, line by the standards of a dominant start. But it was enough. LG’s offense supplied more than enough support, and Lim closed out the outing with his 14th win of the season against five losses, pushing his career win total to exactly 100, against 90 losses.
Thirty-Four Names, One Franchise, Fifteen Years
In a league that has existed since 1982, reaching 100 career wins is rare enough that Lim’s total puts him in the company of only 33 other pitchers in KBO history. What makes the achievement resonate even further is that Lim did it in an LG Twins uniform — the only uniform he has worn since making his professional debut fifteen years ago — and no pitcher in the club’s history had ever reached the milestone before him. For a franchise that dates back to 1990 and has cycled through dozens of foreign and domestic starters over more than three decades, that is a striking gap to finally close.
The achievement is also a testament to durability in a sport where pitching careers are frequently cut short by injury, roster turnover, or a shift into bullpen roles. Lim has remained a rotation fixture for LG across a decade and a half, weathering the ordinary attrition of a long career to arrive, at last, at a number that separates workhorse starters from the rest of the league’s pitching population.
The Import Slugger Chasing a League Home Run Title
While Lim’s milestone was a story of accumulation over fifteen years, Austin Dean’s came in a single, decisive swing. In the fourth inning of the same game, Dean drove his 39th home run of the season out of Samsung Lions Park, surpassing the 38 that Roberto Ramos hit for LG in 2020 and setting a new single-season franchise record for home runs by any LG Twins player, foreign or domestic.
Dean’s home run did more than rewrite a record-book entry — it also tightened the race for the league’s individual home run title. With 39 home runs, Dean now trails Kim Do-young of the KIA Tigers, the league’s home run leader, by just a single home run, a gap that could realistically close in the final weeks of the regular season. For a Twins offense that has spent the season built partly around Dean’s power bat, watching him push a franchise record while also chasing the league lead adds a second storyline worth tracking through the season’s final stretch.
What “100 Wins” and “39 Homers” Actually Mean to an American Reader
For readers more familiar with Major League Baseball than the KBO, a useful way to size up Lim Chan-gyu’s achievement is this: even in an era when starting pitchers throw fewer innings and collect fewer decisions than in past generations, 100 career wins remains a marker MLB broadcasters still reach for as shorthand for a genuinely accomplished big-league career. The KBO has existed for well over forty years, and in that time, only 34 pitchers have ever crossed the same threshold — a list so short that adding a single new name to it, let alone the first name in a specific franchise’s history, is treated as a notable event across the league’s media.
Austin Dean’s accomplishment translates just as clearly. Imagine an established Major League franchise that has fielded rosters loaded with sluggers for more than three decades, and then imagine a single import player — not a homegrown legend, but a player brought in from outside the organization — hitting more home runs in one season than anyone who ever wore that franchise’s uniform before him. That is what Dean has done to the LG Twins’ record book in 2026, and he still has games left to add to the total.
Why an Import Player Chasing a Franchise Record Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds
American readers unfamiliar with the KBO’s roster rules might assume any team can simply stock up on power-hitting imports until one of them breaks a franchise record. In practice, the opposite is true: KBO clubs operate under a strict cap on foreign players. For most of the league’s history, teams could carry three imports on the active roster, with a maximum of two pitchers among them, meaning any given club typically fields only one or two everyday import position players at a time. Beginning with the 2026 season, the league added a fourth import slot reserved for an Asia Quota player drawn from other Asian leagues or Australia, but the core three-import structure — and the scarcity that comes with it — remains the backbone of how KBO rosters are built.
That scarcity is exactly what makes Austin Dean’s achievement land differently than a similar record set by a homegrown star. Every import signing is a finite, closely scrutinized roster decision, and a club typically has only one shot per season at each of those two or three import spots to find a bat or an arm capable of anchoring the lineup. For Dean to have hit more home runs in a single season than any player — import or otherwise — in the 36-year history of the LG Twins means he outproduced not only every domestic slugger the franchise has ever developed, but also every previous import brought in under that same limited-slot system.
A Pennant Race Getting Tighter By the Day
The ripple effects of the September 13 game reached beyond LG’s own dugout. Samsung’s loss — its second in a row — stretched the gap between the Lions and the league-leading KT Wiz to two full games. KT, playing in Suwon on the same day, beat the Lotte Giants 5-2 to extend its own winning streak to six games, improving to 75 wins, 46 losses, and three draws for a .620 winning percentage. Samsung sits at 74 wins, 49 losses, and three draws, a .602 winning percentage, in second place.
Only a few days earlier, on September 11, the gap between the two clubs had been microscopic — separated by a mere .001 in winning percentage after KT’s fourth consecutive win. That KT has since ripped off two more victories while Samsung has dropped back-to-back games illustrates just how quickly fortunes can swing in the KBO’s final stretch, where every regular-season game carries direct consequences for postseason positioning and, ultimately, for which team enters the playoffs with home-field advantage.
What a Two-Game Gap Actually Means in the KBO
For readers used to the length of an MLB pennant chase, it helps to understand exactly what is at stake in the KBO standings right now. The league runs a ten-team, 144-game regular season followed by a five-team postseason built as a ladder: the fourth- and fifth-place finishers meet first in a wild-card round, with the winner facing the third-place club, and so on up the bracket toward the Korean Series. Crucially, the team that finishes the regular season in first place skips every one of those preliminary rounds entirely and advances straight to the Korean Series to wait for an opponent that has had to survive three separate playoff rounds to get there.
That is why a two-game gap between KT and Samsung, with only a few weeks left on the calendar, carries so much more weight than a similar gap might in a longer MLB season. Finishing first does not just mean a higher seed — it means an opponent arriving in the Korean Series tired from three rounds of playoff baseball, against a team that has been resting and setting its rotation for over a week. Every game LG plays against a division rival like Samsung in the season’s final stretch has ripple effects on exactly who ends up with that advantage.
Why This Day Will Be Remembered
There is a version of September 13 that reads as just another lopsided regular-season result: a 13-5 road win, a comfortable final score, nothing that would normally draw much attention outside of the two fan bases involved. But layered underneath that scoreline were two separate, hard-earned milestones — one built across a decade and a half of pitching starts, the other delivered in a single swing — plus a shift in the league standings that will matter when the postseason picture comes into focus in the season’s final weeks.
For LG Twins fans, the day offered a rare split-screen moment: their longest-tenured starting pitcher completing a personal and franchise-first achievement, while their prized international power hitter etched his own name into the same record book on the same afternoon. Few single games in a 144-game regular season manage to combine two distinct milestones with a genuine playoff-race implication, but September 13 in Daegu did exactly that.
Two Careers Moving in Opposite Directions, Meeting in the Same Box Score
There is also something worth noting in the contrast between how these two milestones were built. Lim Chan-gyu’s 100 wins are the product of fifteen years of professional starts — of showing up every fifth day, season after season, through the ordinary grind of a long domestic pitching career that never included a stint in a bigger league overseas. Austin Dean’s 39 home runs, on the other hand, are the product of a single import season doing exactly what an import bat is brought in to do: provide the kind of power output a roster cannot always develop internally.
Neither path is more valuable than the other inside a KBO clubhouse, but they represent the two different pillars nearly every contending roster in the league is built on: a homegrown foundation of players who came up through a franchise’s own development system, layered with a small number of high-impact imports brought in to fill specific gaps. September 13 was a rare day when both pillars produced a franchise-record moment in the same nine innings, for the same team, in the same game.
What Comes Next
With weeks still remaining in the 2026 KBO regular season, both storylines have room to develop further. Austin Dean will keep pushing to close his one-home-run gap on Kim Do-young in the league’s home run race, while Lim Chan-gyu adds to a career win total that now sits at a milestone few pitchers in league history ever reach. Meanwhile, the standings battle between KT and Samsung shows no sign of settling, with two games separating the top two teams and weeks of baseball still to be played before the postseason bracket is set. For LG, a franchise that spent September 13 celebrating two record-setting performances in the same game, the rest of the season now carries the added texture of watching both milestones — and a suddenly more dramatic pennant race around them — play out in real time.