LG Twins, facing elimination, named Major League Baseball veteran Carlos Carrasco as their starting pitcher, staking everything on a turnaround. The team aims to win Game 3 at home and build a platform for a comeback.
According to the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) on the 19th, LG and the KIA Tigers announced Carrasco and Keisho Shirakawa, respectively, as starting pitchers for Game 3 of the best-of-five semi-playoff series at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul on the 20th.
Carrasco went 6-3 with a 4.05 earned run average over 60 innings in 11 regular-season games and has served as LG's de facto ace in the postseason. He struggled against KIA, allowing four runs in 4 1/3 innings, but pitched well in Game 1 of the wild-card series against Doosan on the 14th, giving up one run over six innings to carry the team into the semi-playoffs.
Shirakawa, a fifth starter, posted a 4-5 record with a 4.75 ERA over 83 1/3 innings in 18 regular-season games. He has fared poorly against LG, going 0-1 with a 7.71 ERA in two games. Austin Dean has been especially effective against him, batting .750 with three hits in four at-bats and two home runs, while Lee Jae-won and Park Dong-won have also homered off him.
The series has tilted toward KIA, which has won two straight. KIA took both Games 1 and 2 at home. In Game 1, star player Kim Do-young hit two home runs in a 5-1 victory, and in Game 2 the team scored five runs off LG starter Im Chan-kyu in the first inning on the way to a 6-3 win.
In 17 previous best-of-five semi-playoff series, teams that took a 2-0 lead advanced to the playoffs in seven of nine cases, or 77.8%. There have also been two reverse sweeps, in which a team dropped the first two games and then won three in a row. Doosan pulled off the first against Lotte in 2010 and repeated the feat against Nexen, now Kiwoom, in 2013.
Should LG lose Game 3, it will be the final professional baseball game played at Jamsil Baseball Stadium.