KBO postseason hopefuls face busy week with makeup games on horizon

SSG Landers players celebrate their 10-8 win over the NC Dinos in their Korea Baseball Organization regular-season game at Incheon SSG Landers Field in Incheon, just west of Seoul, Aug. 31, in this photo provided by the Landers. Yonhap

Trying to hold on to their postseason hopes, a trio of clubs will face a full slate this week in South Korean baseball with makeup games coming up.

Starting Tuesday, teams in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) will no longer play two sets of three games per week. They will spend the rest of September, the final month of the regular season, playing games that had been canceled due to inclement weather from earlier in the season.

This will leave some teams with odd off days this week. The league-leading LG Twins, for instance, will play Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

However, three teams in the thick of a postseason race — the SSG Landers, the NC Dinos and the Kia Tigers — will each play a full slate of six games, with plenty of travel thrown in.

The Landers are in third place, but barely so. At 61-58-4 (wins-losses-ties), the Landers have a winning percentage of .5126, with the Lotte Giants (62-59-6) in fourth place at .5124. The Samsung Lions, who improved to 63-60-2 after completing a three-game sweep of the Hanwha Eagles over the weekend, are in fifth place with a winning percentage of .5122.

The Landers will begin the week at home in Incheon, just west of Seoul, with a game against the Kiwoom Heroes on Tuesday. Then they will travel nearly 300 kilometers south to Gwangju to play the Tigers for two games, before coming back up to Incheon to host the Lotte Giants for two games. The Landers will wrap up the week against the Twins in Seoul on Sunday.

The Dinos are in seventh at 56-58-6, 2 1/2 games back of the Lions for the final postseason spot. But the Dinos have the most games remaining in the league with 24 — the effects of having early-season games postponed after a tragic death of a fan during a home game on March 29.

The Dinos will visit the KT Wiz in Suwon, some 30 kilometers south of Seoul, on Tuesday, and then play the Hanwha Eagles on the road again in Daejeon, about 140 kilometers south of the capital, the very next day. The Dinos will then play the final four games of the week at their southeastern home of Changwon -- two against the Doosan Bears and two against the Tigers.

The Tigers, the defending Korean Series champions trying to cling to fading postseason hope, play the Eagles in Daejeon and then have three straight home games in Gwangju -- two vs. the Landers and one vs. the Wiz -- before the trip to Changwon.

With only three wins in their past 10 games, the Tigers have dropped to eighth place at 57-61-4, 3 1/2 games out of the last postseason berth. They lost a heartbreaker to the Wiz on Sunday, when their All-Star closer Jung Hai-young surrendered three runs in the bottom ninth for a 7-6 defeat.

The Wiz (62-60-4) are a half game back of the Lions in sixth place, as they try to qualify for their sixth consecutive postseason. They will play four games against four different opponents this week.