“I don’t feel good hitting…”
I spoke with Kim Do-young (20) briefly in the KIA dugout after the Gwangju Hanwha game on Friday. It was a day before the first-ever Moon-Kim game. The mentality is definitely different. Kim didn’t seem to mind at all. “I’m not hitting well these days,” he said.
About 20 days have passed. Kim is suffering from the aftermath. In fact, she hasn’t been good since August. In 70 at-bats, he’s batting .257 with 18 hits, 10 RBIs and 14 runs scored. In his last 10 games, he’s even worse: 40-for-9 with a .225 batting average, seven RBIs, and four runs scored. Even when he wasn’t doing well, he was consistently producing a hit and a walk or two, but in his last two games, he hasn’t gotten on base once. He’s also struck out four times.
Clearly, he’s hit a rough patch. His batting average dropped by a third to .297 for the season. Of course, this doesn’t mean much since he didn’t get a full plate appearance. However, this is the first time since the opening game (April 1 against SSG in Incheon) that Kim’s batting average has been below 3%.
Kim has made a change this year. Instead of batting with the bat resting on his shoulder, he lowered his bat arm to his chest. The idea is to get to the hitting point faster. It’s a move that Kim Ha-seong (San Diego Padres) and Lee Jung-hoo (Kiwoom) have made in a big way this year to improve their ability to hit fastballs.
Kim ended up succeeding, while Lee returned to his hitting form after a terrible slump. The details of Kim’s transformation will be different from Kim’s and Lee’s. However, the direction is the same. In any case, if something is subtly off in the center of gravity and timing, the hitting will not be as good. Kim Do-young is probably analyzing the cause and responding to it.
The batting order dropped from 2-3 to 9. He moved from being a triple-setter to a leadoff hitter, setting the table for Chan-ho Park. It makes sense, as Park’s batting average is currently the best on the team, while Kim’s is not.
Everyone comes out of a slump differently. For some, it’s a slump that lasts forever and becomes a part of their game, while for others, it’s a slump that’s so short you don’t even realize it’s a slump. Kim Do-young struggled throughout August. This is also an experience. It’s her first time hitting well in the first professional team, so she has to experience a bad streak and then turn it around.먹튀검증
He’s been playing so well that he might have overlooked it. Kim Do-young is a second-year infielder with no full-time experience. It doesn’t take long to realize why he’s a baseball prodigy, because he’s already doing so much more than your average first or second-year hitter. We’ll see how he handles this slump and what he can do next.