“He’ll be a really good coach.”
Doosan recently submitted a request to the KBO to register pitcher Kim Ji-yong (35-Dusan Bears) as a player-coach. The idea was to have him spend the rest of the season as a “playing coach.
You may recognize the term “playing coach” from soccer or basketball. However, in baseball, “playing coach” is not a common position.
Doosan’s request to register as a player-coach during the season was approved by the KBO as a “coach-player” after a week-long voting period. Doosan was assigned the role of bullpen coach for the Futures.
There have been cases of nominal “playing coaches” in the past, but they were usually registered as players and entrusted with coaching duties, not as “coach/player” with a definite playing coach position. It was even rarer to register mid-season. Jung Min-cheol (Hanwha), Kim Tae-hyung (Doosan), and Ryu Taek-hyun (LG) have all worked as playing coaches. In the case of Lotte’s Jeong Tae-seung, who is said to have recently worked as a “playing coach,” he was registered as a player and then asked to work as a coach.
A KBO official said, “In order to play in a game, you usually register as a player, and it’s not easy to find all the cases where the position of playing coach is clear.” “It’s not that there aren’t previous cases, but it’s very rare,” another KBO official explained.
Kim Ji-yong’s baseball career has taken many twists and turns.
After graduating from Chung-Ang University, Kim began his professional career by joining the LG Twins in the ninth round (65th overall) of the 2010 KBO Draft.
A professional uniform was hard earned. This time, he had to battle injuries. After appearing in five games in his rookie year, a series of shoulder injuries kept him out of the lineup, and it wasn’t until 2015 that he was able to make an appearance with the first team again.
In 2016, he started 51 games and threw 63 innings, finishing with a 3-4 record, 17 saves, and a 3.57 ERA.
He became a key member of the bullpen, recording eight saves in 2017 and 13 in 2018.
This time, his elbow was the problem. He underwent elbow surgery in late 2018 and ended up taking 2019 off.
He came back in 2020, but was unable to make the opening roster, and as younger players came up through the ranks, his spot became smaller and smaller. Eventually, he requested a release from the club and left LG, where he had played for more than a decade.
It was Doosan, the “Hanji Bung” family, that reached out to Kim Ji-yong. They were impressed with Kim Ji-yong’s sincerity. 먹튀검증
Kim appeared in 18 games in 2022, adding one victory to his career record of 14 wins and 14 losses, giving him a “5 percent win rate.
It was an unremarkable performance, but Kim was re-signed. His spring training wasn’t bad enough to warrant a second contract. At the same time, Doosan thought he could serve as an example for the younger players through his training, but his pitching didn’t improve as expected.
The club decided that Kim Ji-yong could be successful as a coach. Coach Kwon Myung-cheol, who worked with Kim in 2011 at LG, said, “He went through everything a player can go through. He had surgeries, setbacks, and peaks.