LG captain Oh Ji-hwan won the Rolex watch. The captain, who led LG for a season, was named series MVP as the team won its first Korean Series title in 29 years.
LG defeated KT in Game 5 of the best-of-seven Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) League 2023 Korean Series at Jamsil Stadium in Seoul on Wednesday. After losing Game 1, LG won four straight games to win the Korean Series for the first time in 29 years since 1994.
Oh Ji-hwan, who hit the game-winning three-run homer with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 3, was named the Series MVP. In the Korean Series, Oh went 6-for-19 with six doubles, three home runs, eight RBIs and six runs scored in five games.
In the MVP voting, Oh received 80 of the 93 total votes cast. Park Dong-won received seven votes, Park Hae-min four, Yoo Young-chan one, and Moon Bo-kyung one.
The late Koo Bon-moo, the first chairman of LG, bought an expensive Rolex watch for the Most Valuable Player (MVP) if LG won the 1998 Korean Series. 먹튀검증토토사이트 When Oh won the MVP award, the Rolex watch was injured.
At the Korean Series media day, Oh said, “I want to win the Rolex watch,” and he made it happen.
Captain Oh played a key role in the Korean Series victory.
He hit a game-winning solo home run in the sixth inning of Game 2. In Game 3, he hit a game-winning three-run homer off KT closer Kim Jae-yoon with two outs and runners on first and second in the ninth inning, trailing 5-7. After the first pitch (a fork), he saw Kim Jae-yoon and Jang Sung-woo talking on the mound, so he predicted that the next pitch would be a fastball, and he was eerily right. He hit the fastball for the game-winning home run.
In the fourth game, with the score 6-1 and runners on first and third in the seventh inning, he pulled a fastball changeup off KT bullpen reliever Joo Woo-kwon and launched a wedge three-run home run. “I was expecting Joo to throw a changeup, which is his main weapon,” Oh said after the game, referring to the surprising move.
Oh also set a Korean Series record by homering in three consecutive games in Games 2-4. He is the first player in history to homer in three consecutive games in a single Korean Series.
In four games of the Korean Series,
Oh is batting 4-for-15 with three home runs, eight RBIs, six runs scored, three doubles, one triple, a 1.067 slugging percentage and a 1.567 OPS. On his peak hitting, he said, “I think it’s aggression. First of all, when I saw KT pitchers, the key (point) was mostly fastballs. The middle relievers Son Dong-hyun, Park Young-hyun, Kim Jae-yoon, and Lee Sang-dong are all fastball-oriented players, so I thought, ‘Let’s get ready a little faster and don’t be late with the fastball,’ and I think it worked out.”
Oh said, “I’m going to finish it (Game 5) no matter what. We have the advantage in terms of momentum, atmosphere, and batting,” he said. It wasn’t arrogance, it was confidence with skill, and in Game 5, LG won the game with evenly matched performances from its players and won its first Korean Series title in 29 years. At the center of it all was captain Oh Ji-hwan.
