Участник:Is there only one concern?

The two players played as Kia's one-two punch in the 2009 ⅓. At the time, Lopez had 14 wins and five losses in 190 ⅔, an earned run average of 3.12 and Gootomson had 13 wins and four losses in 161 ⅔, and an earned run average of 3.24. Lopez led Kia as the No. 1 pitcher in the most innings of the year, and Gootomson ranked second with the WHIP (per-inning on-base percentage) of 1.21. KIA went straight to the Korean Series as No. 1 in the same year's regular season, and achieved V10 by beating the SK Wyverns. However, Gootomson left the KBO league after a single season, and Lopez had to play the role of ace alone, though he remained active until 2011.

Since then, several foreign pitchers, including Henry Sosa, Hector Noesi and Aaron Brooks, have gone through, but they have not shown perfection like the Lopez-Gutomson combination.

This KIA finally seems to be rebuilding its foreign one-two punch comparable to the Lopez-Gutomson combination. The newly joined Will Crow-James nail combination is unusual.

Crow displayed shocking pitching in his first appearance at an exhibition game. He started the game against Hanwha in Daejeon on Sunday and had no hits, no four outs, and no run in four innings with 40 pitches. What was more remarkable than the results was that Crow's maximum fastball speed was 154 kilometers and his average speed was 152 kilometers, according to Sports2I, an official KBO League record-keeping company. The pitching depth also reached a maximum of 152 kilometers and an average of 151 kilometers. In addition, he displayed a variety of breaking balls, including curves, changeups, sliders and cutters. Eight out of 12 Hanwha batters against Crow made in-play hits, but no fly balls were found, and not all of them were static hits. His bat broke three to four times.

Nail made her debut at a practice match in Okinawa, Japan. At a practice match against Lotte on April 28, she pitched two innings without allowing any hits. She blocked two innings with 29 balls, with up to 149 kilometers of pitching depth, plus a sweeper and a change-up. Officials who watched Nail's pitching at the scene noted that she had a ball as good as a croaker.

Crow and Nail have drawn attention since the time they were wearing KIA uniforms. Crow has six wins, 10 losses, 16 holds, and an earned run average of 4.38 for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 2022 season. A pitcher who played full-time in the big league both as starters and bull pen players in the same year, Nail was on the 40-man roster of St. Louis Cardinals ahead of this season. These pitchers have drawn attention from not only KIA but also other Korean teams and Japanese professional baseball teams. Since their advance to the KBO League, both of them had 20 wins and 200 strikeouts at NC last year, and are expected to display stellar performance that can match that of KBO league MVP Eric Peddy (currently Chicago White Sox), who swept the Golden Glove. The two players seem to be making such a prospect a reality even before the opening of the season.

However, it is not that there is no concern at all.

Crowe ended this season after injuring his shoulder in five games last year. This is the first full-time season after recovering from injury. Usually, the team undergoes build-up through controlling the number of innings and pitches after injury, but it is uncertain whether Crowe will be able to complete the entire season by proving his durability given that he has to play full-time as a foreign player in the KBO League. Given that Nail has spent most of his career in the bullpen, there are still question marks over whether Kia will display the performance of innings that it expects. The key to this is to show how the two players overcome such uncertainties. 스포츠토토