In yesterday's third game against Doosan I was appalled the moment Moon Bo-gyeong was put in.. The blinkers I had on about manager Yeom because of two championships have come off..
First, my conclusion is that manager Yeom will never change, and that the same goes not just for this year but for next year and the year after..
In his first year, claiming to actively change the team's character, he advocated running baseball, and back when runners were dying on the bases like soldiers falling in the Normandy landings, the acting team owner could not bear it and conveyed a rebuke through the club asking what kind of baseball this was; he pretended to stop for a while and then went right back to doing it until he himself felt satisfied..
In May this year the club's president even asked him to build a team where anyone with ability could become a starter at any time, not a team where only fixed starters play, yet he keeps going his own stubborn way to this day while talking about corporate principles..
Looking back at past interviews, among things that simply passed by at the time there were some very important hints, and two of them strike me as rather chilling: "in three years Oh Ji-hwan could retire, so before then a replacement has to emerge", and that our team lives only if Moon Bo-gyeong lives..
That means that during his tenure Oh Ji-hwan is the starting shortstop, and that Bon-hyeok or Yeong-bin will be used merely as backup and backup-to-the-backup.. If he really thought a replacement for Oh Ji-hwan was needed, he should already be preparing by fielding Bon-hyeok and Yeong-bin at shortstop at close to a 50:50 ratio with Oh Ji-hwan.. What is more, Koo Bon-hyeok's batting numbers are far better..
How nonsensical it is that, while saying the team lives only if Bo-gyeong comes alive, he has been killing both Bo-gyeong and the team for over two months..
For two months he batted him fourth while he hit .190 and .180, and since August he flounders even when put in seventh or as a pinch hitter; now even if Bo-gyeong comes alive the team looks set to die..
It looks like they will even replace pitching coach Kim Kwang-sam, but no matter how many coaches are swapped out, none of them can say a peep to manager Yeom and he will beat both the drum and the janggu by himself, so I wonder what good it does..
When the team batting average is at rock bottom you cannot find with a magnifying glass an article about what training the batting coach or the coaches are doing; instead there are piles of articles and photos of a manager with a career batting average under .200 holding a bat and coaching hitting in front of Bo-gyeong, Chan-ui and Jeong-bin, which often struck me as ridiculous, though I used to think of it kindly because of the championship blinkers..
He talks about corporate principles, yet with a character that does not even listen to the team owner and the president, his superiors at work, and with two championships under his belt, it looks like we will have to watch baseball while enduring the same or even greater high-handedness at least until 2028, which is a big worry..
Far from holding third place, we seem to be in a position where we have to worry about falling to fifth..
Based on last year's sweet experience he gave an interview saying other teams would not withstand the heat and would fall, and that we would climb from then on; but the other teams have already finished reinforcing themselves in one way or another and are playing their games, while we, however grandly we intend to show ourselves climbing, are for now heading to the bottom..ㅎㅎ
Seeing manager Yeom say Carrasco will throw around 80 pitches in his second start, he still seems perfectly relaxed..
He is probably already preparing an interview saying "Carrasco wanted to throw 70, but given the team's situation we asked him to throw a bit more"..
As we saw in this weekend's series, Oh Ji-hwan, Hong Chang-ki, Moon Bo-gyeong, Park Dong-won and Moon Seong-ju will never be dropped from the starting lineup until they are injured and barred from playing or unable to play, and there will be almost no opportunities going to the young players..
(In Shin Min-jae's case, about a month ago when his form was slowly coming up he was substituted mid-game and threw his helmet in the dugout, and there is talk that after that he was suddenly and consistently left out of the lineup)
In yesterday's game, when Moon Bo-gyeong came out as a pinch hitter, the jeering sighs of the spectators at the ground and people leaving the stadium left Oh Ji-hwan, who was on first, and manager Yeom looking flustered, but that will be the end of it.. because they are permanent employees.
Watching how, when they won this Doosan series, they kept changing the batting order of the hitters who were hitting well to maximize the offense, while our team responded from game one to game three with a lineup you could just submit three copies of, regardless of whether the pitcher was left-handed or right-handed, strong or weak against LG, I even felt a bit embarrassed..ㅎㅎ
Personally I have been waiting only for news of Bo-gyeong's call-up to the national team for the Asian Games, but talk is slowly starting that his national team call-up should be changed..ㅠ
