By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Alert the rightwing doomsayers because Korea is leaning extremely towards the left _ in baseball that is.
The national team is desperate to win a ticket for next year's Olympics, and to erase the memories of an embarrassing performance at last year's Asian Games, but its lack of potent right-handed hitting could prove to be its imploding point.
The depth of quality right-handed batters now in the domestic pro league is strikingly shallow, and this unusual trend is best reflected in the national team's provisional roster for the Beijing Olympics qualifying tournament announced Monday.
The Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) selected 55 players, including 24 pitchers, 20 infielders including five catchers, and 11 outfielders.
The national team will reduce its roster to 35 players by the end of September at the end of the domestic league's regular season and introduce the final 24-man squad by November at the start of the qualifying tournament in Taipei.
Six of the 11 outfielders hit left-handed.
Yoon Dong-gyun, who heads KBO's technical committee, admitted that most of the five right-handed outfielders were picked out of necessity, and they would have no business representing South Korea if they were solely judged by their league performances.
``Selecting the outfielders was the hardest job for us as good, right-handed hitters are so hard to find now. We had to leave off a number of talented left-handed hitters, such as LG Twins' Lee Dae-hyung, to make room for the right-handers,'' said Yoon, a former all-star first-baseman for the OB (Doosan) Bears.
``Lee (KIA Tigers) was chosen because he is still the emotional leader of the team and it's not like we have an abundance of players that are better than him from the right part of the plate,'' he said.
The five right-handed outfielders are Shim Chong-soo of the Samsung Lions, Song Ji-man and Lee Taek-keun of the Hyundai Unicorns, Lee Jong-beom of the KIA Tigers, and Bae Young-seob of Dongguk University, one of the five amateur players selected in the roster.
Among the pro players, only the Unicorns duo of Song and Lee is hitting over .250. Shim, who will earn 750 million won ($807,000) this season, is solidifying his reputation as the most overpaid player in the league.
The former homerun champ is hitting .226 with six homeruns and 26 RBIs, a slight improvement from last year when he appeared in only 26 games and batted .141.
Tigers centerfielder Lee, one of the heroes of Korea's impressive World Baseball Classic run, is a shell of his former self, batting just .192 this season. The 36-year-old, the only player ever to post a 30-60 (30 homeruns, 60 steals) in a season, saw his effectiveness diminish sharply in recent years with injuries accelerating his decline.
The quality of right-handed hitters in the outfield becomes even more of a concern when considering that many infielders on the team _ such as the Lions' Park Jin-man or the Tigers' Kim Jong-kook _ were selected for their defensive skills.
Korea's best right-handed bats come from Lotte Giants slugger Lee Dae-ho _ the winner of the batting ``triple crown'' last season leading the league in batting average, homeruns and RBIs _ and Hanhwa Eagles' Kim Tae-kyun, who is hitting .331 this season.
However, both are first basemen and do not have a prayer to overtake the starting job from ``Lion King'' Lee Seung-yeop, the left-handed slugger who batted .321 with 40 homeruns for the Yomiuri Giants last season.
The over-reliance on left-handed batters could hurt Korea's chances in the qualifying tournament, especially against its strongest regional foes Japan and Taiwan.
Japan manager Senichi Hoshino recently selected a provisional roster of 60 players, leaving out the country's Major League Baseball (MLB) stars Ichiro Suzuki, Tadahito Iguchi and Daisuke Matsuzaka.
The team is nonetheless young and talented, unlike the Korean team that relies more on its aging stars. Pitchers such as Yu Darvish of the Nippon Ham Fighters, a 20-year-0ld drawing convincing comparisons to Matsuzaka, and Yomiuri Giants lefty Norhito Kaneto are capable of shutting down any lineup the tournament could offer.
And one could make an argument that Taiwan, not Korea, is the second-best team in the tournament behind Japan. Although Taiwan lacks power hitters, it more than makes up for it with a potent pitching lineup expected to be anchored by New York Yankees ace Wang Chien-ming and LA Dodgers reliever Kuo Hong-chih.
Kuo, a left-handed pitcher, could be a nightmare against Korea, as he held left-handed batters to a .241 average last season without surrendering a homerun.
Eight teams will compete in the Olympic baseball tournaments next year, with China, as the host nation, guaranteed an automatic entry. Three continental tournaments will qualify one team from Asia, two teams from the Americas, and another team from Europe.
The remaining three teams will be selected from a Final Olympic Qualifying Tournament joined by the third and fourth place teams from the Americas, second and third place teams from Asia, second and third place teams from Europe, and the Oceania champion and African champion.
With the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voting to remove baseball from the program for the 2012 games, Beijing might be Korea's last chance to win a gold medal unless the game is reinstated in the future.