The national baseball team will start Moon Dong-ju in the first round of the preliminary round of the Asian Professional Baseball Championship against Australia at the Tokyo Dome in Japan on the 16th. Ryu Joong-il, head coach of the national team, explained the background of the selection at a press conference held at the Tokyo Dome on the 15th, saying, “Moon Dong-ju was the first to start because he was in the best condition.”
Moon Dong-ju, who is in his second year as a professional, is a strong candidate for the Rookie of the Year award this year, with eight wins, eight losses and a 3.72 ERA in 23 regular league games. He is the type of pitcher who presses the opponent with a fastball that exceeds 155 kilometers per hour and a big drop curve, contributing to his fourth consecutive victory by pitching six scoreless innings against Taiwan in the final of the Hangzhou Asian Games in October. Coach Ryu, who achieved a successful generational change through the Asian Games, also selected a number of leading players in Hangzhou in this tournament.
Moon Dong-ju expressed his ambition at an official press conference that day, saying, “I have good memories at the Asian Games, so I will play with good energy.” “Of course, the goal is to win. If we all gather the belief that we can make it, we can definitely do it one more time,” he said.
Australia, the opponent of the first game, has been evaluated one step below, but it beat the national team 7-8 at the World Baseball Classic (WBC) held in March this year. The starting pitcher was Cooper Vasalakis (22, Brisbane Bandits), a right-handed pitcher in the Australian Baseball Organization (ABL), who won one game and lost three games and had a 3.95 ERA in the 2023 NCAA League.
The Asian Professional Baseball Championship, the second of its kind this year, is an international competition held by players under the age of 24 (born after January 1, 1999) or under the third year of professional baseball (joining after 2021) in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia. In the first tournament in 2017, Korea lost to Japan in the final and finished second.토토사이트