Pitchers Rule Korean Youth Baseball

1:0, 2:1, 3:0, 3:1, 5:0. These scores are not from soccer games. They are results from the quarterfinals of the 60th Golden Lion Pennant National High School Baseball Tournament, co-sponsored by Dong-A Ilbo and the Korea Baseball Association, which finished July 7 as Jangchung High won for the first time. The average runs recorded in the seven games from the quarterfinals to the final match were 3.3.

The number of home runs produced in all of the 26 games throughout the tournament was only five. With one homer each, five players including Jeong Dae-pyeong (Gangreung High School) jointly received the prize offered to the player with most home runs.

In the old days of high school baseball, watching five homers flying over the fence in a single game was not a rare experience at all. However, witnessing a home run, or “the quintessence of baseball,” in high school games has become few and far between.

Even coaches complain about their trouble scoring. A coach affiliated with a high school in Seoul said, “Even when all of the bases are loaded with none out, I get afraid that we might fail to win a run.” As a result, “defensive baseball” has become a trend, even in high school leagues, and bunts are usually attempted when teams happen to have a runner.

Pitchers are prevailing over batters excessively. One of the main reasons is the ban on the use of aluminum bats since summer 2004, which allowed players to use only wooden ones.

Another reason is the biased preference for being a pitcher, which is prevalent among prominent youngsters. As only for this single tournament, there was a flood of admirable pitchers consisted of almost each team. Among them were the tournament MVP Jeon Jin-ho, Lee Yong-chan, Lee Seung-u (Jangchung High), Kim Tae-sik, Lee Ung-han (Gongju High), Lim Tae-hun (Seoul High), Kim Seong-hyun, Kim Su-wan (Jeju Tourism Industry High), Yang Hyeon-jong (Dongsung High), and Jeong Tae-seung (Yushin High).

Many of them regularly pitch balls as fast as about 145km/h. Players whose balls are not as fast have superb control and curve balls. Since it’s usually the pitchers who attract the interest of professional scouts, the vast majority of promising young players insist on being a pitcher, while field positions are losing their popularity.

Concerning this phenomenon, one scout explained that “as we see in the case of Ryu Hyun-jin (Hanwha Eagles), good pitchers can easily stand out in the professional leagues. Hitters, on the other hand, generally take two to three years to get used to the pitchers’ curves. Regardless of their previous prominence, they have a difficult time competing with their senior professional batters.

The predominance of pitchers in the professional league this year as well could be understood with a similar explanation. The advent of new super-rookies in batting such as Lee Jong-beom (KIA Tigers), Yang Joon-hyuk (Samsung Lions), Kim Dong-joo (Doosan Bears) and Lee Byung-kyu (LG Twins) is becoming a scarce event in Korea.

uni@donga.com