Card Of The Week May 10

The KBO kicked off their season last week, becoming the second of the top baseball leagues in the world to start play this year after the CPBL (I think there are also professional leagues playing in Nicaragua and somewhere in Eastern Europe).  An interesting thing happened in yesterday's Samsung Lions/Kia Tigers game - Samsung came into the bottom of the eighth inning with a 5-2 lead and proceeded to score 9 runs.  Kia went through three pitchers during the inning before bringing in infielder Hwang Yoon-ho to pitch.  Hwang only threw four pitches, getting Park Hae-min to hit a foul pop fly that catcher Baek Yong-hwan grabbed for the final out of the inning.

I don't know how often position players come into pitch in Korea.  I asked the Japan Baseball Weekly podcast how often it happened in Japan a few years back and was told by Jim Allen that because of the roster rules (there's a 28 man roster but only 25 of the players are active for any particular game which means there's three starting pitchers not active so there's usually three more relief pitchers on the roster than for a comparable MLB team) and the games being limited to 12 innings it was extremely rare for a position player to pitch in an NPB game (unless it was a "play-all-nine-positions-in-a-game" stunt).  I imagine that it's fairly rare in Korea.  Of course, Kia is managed by Matt Williams so maybe he's introducing something new.

It took a little looking to find a clip of Hwang's performance that wasn't blocked in the US (thanks ESPN!).  Here's a link to SPOT TV's game highlights (SPOT TV won't let me embed the clip) - Hwang's appearance is at the 9 minute, 12 second mark.

Here's a card of Hwang from the 2018 SCC KBO Collection set (#SCCR-01/016):

H/T to MyKBO on Twitter