SEOUL-- One team kept pounding out hits with runners aboard. The other team kept frittering away chance after chance.
That the former, Doosan Bears, beat the latter, LG Twins, by 5-1 in a South Korean baseball postseason game on Thursday was hardly a surprise.
The Bears had 10 hits to the Twins' nine at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul in Game 1 of their first round in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) postseason. The bigger difference was when those hits came.
The Bears opened the scoring in the third inning, when they first had a man in scoring position. A single and a sacrifice bunt had a runner at second, and Jung Soo-bin brought the runner home with a single.
The Twins, on the other hand, had two runners on in the first inning and failed to cash in on any. Moon Bo-gyeong was stranded after hitting a one-out double in the second. Moon himself struck out looking with runners at first and second in the fourth, and then popped out to shortstop with men at the corners in the sixth.
That was the recurring theme all game. The Bears' second run came in the fifth, thanks to Park Kun-woo's two-out single with a runner at second.
The Twins finally scored a run in the seventh, but it could have been an even bigger inning had Kim Min-sung not lined out with two outs and bases loaded. An infield single in the eighth was erased on a double play.
The Twins also made played shoddy defense in the loss.
In the third inning, Park Sei-hyok nearly popped out trying to put his bunt down, and Park Gye-beom, the runner at first, waited for the ball to come down before running to second.
When he picked up the ball, catcher Yoo Kang-nam had enough time to nab the lead runner at second. But Yoo never even looked in that direction and ended up getting the out at first.
Jung, the very next batter, knocked in the game's first run.
Defense failed the Twins again in the pivotal eighth, when the Bears scored twice to increase their lead to 4-1.
With a man at third, the Twins' infielders came in on the grass to keep it a one-run game. The strategy only partially worked when second baseman Jung Ju-hyeon made a tough grab on a hard grounder by Kim In-tae.
Jung got up and sailed his throw home to the backstop as the Bears' third run scored. Kim went all the way to third, and pinch runner An Gweon-su came home on Park Sei-hyok's single.
The bottom eighth and the top ninth were the perfect encapsulation of the whole game.
In the home half of the eighth, Moon Bo-gyeong's one-out single was wiped out by an inning-ending double play. Then in the top ninth, Yang Suk-hwan hit a two-out double and Heo plated him with a single for Doosan's fifth run.
Heo paced the Bears' offense with three hits, and their leadoff man and No. 9 hitter, Jung Soo-bin and Park Sei-hyok, each had two hits.
Jung said scoring first made all the difference in such a big game.
"I think we just play better in postseaon games like this," he said. "Obviously, these are more stressful games (than the regular season ones). But I find these games more fun to play."
His two closest friends on the team, Heo Kyoung-min and Park Kun-woo, also had big moments Thursday. Park, in particular, broke out of a 1-for-11 postseason slump with his RBI hit in the fifth.
"They had a much better regular season than I did," said Jung, who only batted .259 this year, his lowest since 2016. "I have to pick up the pace now and catch those guys."
Lost in the series of timely hits and defensive miscues was a scoreless outing by Doosan starter Choi Won-joon. He held the Twins to just three hits and struck out four, while pitching around three walks.
"I think I got lucky today," the right-hander said. "I didn't have much of rest, but it was the same for everyone. I wasn't all that tired. I tried to take it one inning at a time and got the result I wanted."
Source: Yonhap News Agency