NC Dinos advance to first baseball championship final
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In just their fourth year in the league, the Dinos will be playing in their first Korean Series. / Yonhap
The NC Dinos are going to their first South Korean baseball championship final.
The Dinos defeated the LG Twins 8-3 on Tuesday to claim the best-of-five second round series in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) postseason. In just their fourth year in the league, the Dinos will be playing in their first Korean Series.
The Doosan Bears, the pennant winner, await the Dinos in the best-of-seven series. The Bears won last year's Korean Series, too.
Four of the Dinos' eight runs came on home runs. With the Dinos down 1-0, Eric Thames hit a game-tying solo shot in the fourth, and Park Sok-min blasted a go-ahead solo homer in the top seventh.
Later in the seventh, Kim Seong-uk launched a two-run shot to put the Dinos ahead 4-1.
Park Sok-min was voted MVP of the series. He went 2-for-9 with three RBIs and both of the hits were home runs.
NC starter Eric Hacker, pitching on three days' rest, worked around some command issues to toss seven solid innings for the win.
The Twins, who stranded a franchise postseason record of 19 men on Monday, remained cold with their bats early Tuesday.
Moon Seon-jae led off the game with a double but never came home, as the inning ended with Luis Jimenez's double play.
In the bottom second, the Twins got a two-out double from Jeong Seong-hoon, but he was stranded there as Yoo Kang-nam lined out to third.
The Twins eked out just one run after loading the bases with no outs in the bottom third. No. 3 hitter Park Yong-taik, who had gone 0-for-12 in the series before Tuesday, grounded into a 4-6-3 double play as a run scored. Jimenez grounded out to third to end the inning.
This was eerily reminiscent of the Twins' futile performance on Monday, when they frittered away five bases-loaded opportunities. And they couldn't take advantage of a shaky Hacker in early innings, scoring just once despite putting a man at second base in each of the first five innings.
The Twins paid a hefty price for that.
The Dinos' cleanup Eric Thames tied the score with one swing in the top fourth. With the count full, the reigning league MVP sent a flat fastball over the right field wall.
Woo struck out at least a batter in each of the first three innings but left the game after one out in the fifth.
David Huff, who started Game 2 last Saturday, relieved Woo with a man at second, and got two ground outs right back at him to end the rally.
Huff enjoyed another quick inning in the sixth, but he couldn't get out of the seventh inning.
Leading off the inning, Park Sok-min sent a high fastball deep into the left field seats to make it 2-1 Dinos. Park had also homered off Huff in Game 2 on Saturday.
After a one-out walk, No. 9 hitter Kim Seong-uk then stepped up and hit a towering two-run shot to left. The long ball chased Huff from the game.
The Twins got a leadoff single in the eighth, but Hacker again came away unscathed, getting two pop outs and one ground out in what turned out to be his final inning.
He scattered six hits in seven innings and saved the taxed bullpen that exhausted five relievers in an 11-inning loss Monday.
The Dinos gave themselves some much-needed breathing room in the top of the eighth. After loading the bases with a single and a pair of walks, Park Min-woo dumped a single to shallow left to add two more runs to the board.
Those extra runs loomed large, as the Twins got two back in the bottom eighth with a two-out single by Jeong Seong-hoon.
The Dinos answered right back in the top ninth, as Lee Ho-jun delivered an RBI single for a 7-3 lead. Three batters later, Kim Tae-gun made it 8-3 with a single of his own.
NC manager Kim Kyung-moon will be going up against his former team, the Bears, for a chance to win his first KBO title.
And he wasn't shy about his desire to get past the team he led to three runner-up finishes.
"Coming up short so often in the postseason has left scars deep inside me," Kim said. "And we'll try to beat Doosan. We've come a long way to get here."
He said the two home runs in the seventh inning were crucial and shifted the momentum in the Dinos' favor.
"I was shocked with Kim Seong-uk's home run," the manager added. "It was the single most surprising moment for me the entire series."
Kim used a three-man rotation against the Twins, forcing Hacker to pitch on three days' rest on Tuesday. He said he will look for another option and rely on four pitchers to run his rotation in the Korean Series, which is best-of-seven. (Yonhap)