Professional baseball has completed the first half of the season and will enter the All-Star break to begin the second half on July 21,
Lotte, which had a strong start to the season, has slumped since June and now has to worry about making it to fall baseball.
Reporter Lee Sang-jun reports.
It was a word that summed up Lotte’s performance in April and May.
The team formed a three-way tie with LG and SSG and brought the baseball city of Busan back to life.
Weekend games were sold out one after another, and the average attendance at Sajik Baseball Stadium in the first half of the season was over 34,000, a whopping 53% increase from last season.
After June, however, Lotte slumped, and their final record in the first half was 38 wins and 39 losses, and their barely-hanging on 5 percent winning percentage collapsed.
They’re still in fifth place, which is the minimum for fall baseball, but the gap between them and the teams below them is small.
The second half of the season begins on the 21st, and Lotte’s outlook isn’t very bright.
They sent out outfielder Rex, who has a knee injury, and brought in Nico Gudrum, but he’s an unproven hitter, and they’re late in replacing their two struggling foreign pitchers.
[Jong-seok Yeom, baseball coach at Donghwa University of Science and Technology/Former Lotte pitcher: “I think the first and second starters are enough to account for 50% of a team’s pitching power, and I think the performance of Lotte’s two players, Staley and Barnes, is quite insufficient.”]
Two pitchers, Park Se-woong and Na Gyun-an, who have been doing their part, will miss more than two weeks due to being sent to the Asian Games in September, right 카지노 in the middle of the ranking battle.
As a result, Lotte may try to turn things around by bringing in one foreign pitcher this month or early next month.
It will also be a challenge for the middle pitching staff of Koo Seung-min, Kim Sang-soo, Kim Jin-wook, and Choi Jun-yong to regain their early-season form.
Lotte doesn’t have any standout players in the batting order, ranking last in team home runs, so the pitching will likely determine the team’s performance and whether or not they make it to fall baseball.
Lotte will play 67 games in the second half of the season, starting with a three-game series against Kiwoom in Sajik on the 21st.